Fetishes
When a director like Alfred Hitchcock makes a cameo appearance in his own film, it’s as a joke, a garnish. Even when Martin Scorsese plays a minor but symbolic character–aiming a spotlight (After Hours), a camera (The Age of Innocence), or a gun (Mean Streets)–it’s still a pretty insignificant part of the film. But when directors of documentaries appear in their own films–typically as narrators, interviewers, or diarists–they assume a meatier role. First-person nonfiction directors usually employ their sensibilities as instruments of illumination, in concert with the paraphernalia of lenses, lights, and microphones.
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Director Nick Broomfield is unfortunately a blunt instrument whose icky charm infuses his documentaries: under the guise of tell-all cinema verite, he includes the tackiest transactions and negotiations over the making of his films. In the 1995 Heidi Fleiss, Hollywood Madam he often includes scenes in which subjects tell him how obnoxious, untrustworthy, and dumb he is. And of all the evidence that ends up onscreen–much of it offered by obnoxious, untrustworthy, and dumb subjects–the least equivocal supports the worst claims made about his character as a director. In that film, the 1988 Driving Me Crazy, and his latest documentary, Fetishes, his subjects also claim–though less often–that he’s cute and charming. In Heidi Fleiss, Hollywood Madam, he films himself paying former LA police chief Daryl Gates $2,500 for an interview in a hotel room.
Nor has Broomfield cultivated any knack for more subtly insinuating himself into his films. Driving Me Crazy, a documentary about the making of the Broadway musical revue Body and Soul, begins with the show’s backers negotiating with him over the scope of his assignment. “At this point I have severe reservations about the entire project,” states Broomfield in a voice-over. “The only way I agree to stay on is if I can film everything, including our discussions about the kind of film we are making.” He then films his meeting with a writer who proposes scripting a fictive writer within the Fame-like film as “a bridge between documentary and fiction.” Broomfield laughs out loud and says on camera: “I didn’t understand a word he said.” Broomfield further embarrasses himself by filming his later talk on the phone with his producer, who’s heard disturbing news from the cast: “They look at you with great suspicion,” he says. Flashing an impish smirk at the camera, Broomfield replies: “Why’s that?” And when a choreographer gripes that Broomfield’s camera smacked her on the head during rehearsal, astonishingly he includes his childish defense: “Of course, she ran into the camera as much as the camera ran into her.”
Fetishes devolves into a narcissistic exercise in humiliation for Broomfield, the impotent professional observer who may be fetishizing his camera and microphone instead of whips and stiletto heels. And it’s tantalizing to imagine Broomfield’s camera as a conscious accomplice in some of the psychosexually charged transactions he records in Fetishes. “I want you to lick the sweat out of my jacket while I talk to these gentlemen,” a dominatrix instructs her naked, masked client as he crawls on all fours to his task. On another occasion Broomfield wraps up an interview when a dominatrix extinguishes her cigarette on her customer’s tongue.
