Viewing List Response 3: This American Life

This week’s episode of the podcast This American Life—hosted by the mellifluous Ira Glass, as usual—featured stories about situations or things that seemed perfect, except one tiny little detail. For example, there was the young grad couple who purchased a beautiful walnut table and dining set off Ebay in the site’s infancy, only to discover it was made for a doll’s house. Or the man who was incarcerated for 13 years for the armed robbery of a Burger King, except he was living a reformed life outside the prison walls due to a clerical error.

These I felt were clever iterations on the show’s theme. As the podcast progressed, however, the pleasant diversions became almost unconnected to the story at all. I listened to the podcast only recently and already I am having trouble remembering what the other stories were because they seemed irrelevant to the week’s theme. Perhaps it was just because I am unfamiliar with the format of podcasts, but it felt like the remainder of the episode made almost a clean break from the professed theme. These additional stories were still entertaining and enjoyable, but they were just… less cohesive than they ought to have been.

If I were to change something about this podcast, I would take a little more time when introducing these latter stories to help connect them to the rest of the podcast.  I might have also chosen to cut a story or so to help the episode maintain its narrative momentum.

Viewing List Response 2: POV Podcast: “Girl Model”

P.O.V. is a PBS podcast that interviews documentary filmmakers about their creations. This particular episode interviewed the creators of Girl Model, a doc that follows a young Russian girl into the world of international fashion modeling. Instead of a world full of promised glamour and riches, she finds herself trying to negotiate dangerously worded contracts and situations where she can’t even understand what is being said. Her story is just one aspect of a larger narrative that explores the danger of an unregulated and often exploitative industry.                

The podcast itself was pretty useful. I felt like I got a good idea of what Girl Model was about without actually having watched it. The podcast did not tell everything about the film, however, but instead  encouraged me to watch the feature when it aired on PBS sometime after the podcast.

Most interesting were the filmmaker’s comments about when to intervene in their subject’s lives and when to sit back and watch. It sounds like a relationship of trust was most important to gaining access to particular scenes,  and an open discussion of what things and even days should or should not be filmed out of respect for the subject. They also discussed that how in trying to avoid conclusions or easy solutions in the end of their film they hoped viewers would question how they themselves were responsible for the exploitation of these young girls, and what they might do about it in response.  I found the podcast useful and think I am interested in watching the documentary as a result.

Viewing List Response 1: The Queen of Versailles

The Queen ofVersailles was an intriguing film. Director Lauren Greenfield’s approach to the film was effective. It didn’t feel like she was manipulating or exploiting her subjects, rather it felt like she was spending enough time with them to the point where they just ended up revealing them for who they actually were. David Siegel—one of the film’s protagonists—clearly felt otherwise, because he sued Lauren Greenfield for defamatory content (the courts ultimately ruled in her favor). I felt like most of the people in the film had a voice: the Siegels, their children, their nannies, their childhood friends.

One of the most effective scenes of the film in my opinion was a scene that took place after the financial recession hit. At this time, Jaclyn Siegel (David’s wife) was going through the house getting rid of things. She finds a lizard cage and interrogates her adopted daughter as to whether or not she has fed her pet. The piece of wood hiding the animal is pulled aside and as Jaclyn pokes it the blackened, shriveled chuckawalla flops limply. She exclaims, telling her son “Look, the lizard is dead!” to which her bewildered queries “We have a lizard?!?”

Footage used in the film included not only footage shot by Greenfield’s team but archival footage from news sources, old news clippings, and especially old photographs of Jaclyn and David from their newlywed glamour days.

Despite their exorbitant spending and occasional egregious obliviousness to their financial realities, it is hard not to feel sympathy for the Siegels. Like many other people, they were caught in a trap biting off more financially than they could chew, only their bite was $100 million more than most, their meal the memory of Versailles.