Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010)

Banksy is a divisive figure; dismissed as a huckster pedalling hipster totems to poseurs and pseuds by some, hailed as a renegade genius democratising the art world by others. Whatever your take, it is undeniable that Banksy holds a unique place in our information-saturated age. By withholding his identity he has become the world’s most fascinating and speculated-over artist, taking the consumer back to a time when every facet of a public figure’s life was not freely available at a single click, paradoxically earning greater fame and attention by stepping away from it. In cultivating this mystique, he has elevated himself above his peers and progenitors - such as the French graffiti artist Blek Le Rat, who was decades ahead of Banksy but could not break beyond the rarefied confines of the Paris cognoscenti.

Typically, Banksy is not the central figure of his own film; he hovers over proceedings, passing comment on its central figure - Thierry Guetta, a French fashion store owner living in LA who obsessively films the events of his life. On a family trip to France in 1999, Guetta discovers that his cousin has become a leading figure in the nascent ‘street art’ movement, going under the name Invader. In following Invader, Guetta meets a number of other street artists, including Shepard Fairey, renowned for his Andre the Giant ‘obey’ artwork and credited with creating 'that' image of Barack Obama. Guetta becomes the unofficial documentarian of the movement and resolves to make the definitive documentary. But in order to do so he must track down Banksy, street art's leading light and a global celebrity following his controversial paintings on the West Bank. Happenstance intervenes and Guetta makes contact with Banksy in LA. He is given unprecedented access to Banksy's London studio as he prepares for his first US exhibition, but it soon becomes apparent to Banksy and his inner circle that Guetta doesn’t know what he’s doing.

‘Exit Through the Gift Shop’ is a paean to process, an intriguing meta-doc that both delineates the growth and co-option of a subculture and charts the passage of a guileless enthusiast swept up in its midst. It is as much a cautionary tale about the dangers of overexposure as a celebration of a bold new stylistic development. Without giving too much away, Guetta is transformed from the Pupkin-esque hero of the piece to its ultimate villain, beginning as a confidante of the burgeoning scene and ending as its betrayer, subverting the very thing he helped to nurture. The over 10,000 hours of footage shot by Guetta is assembled into a coherent arc that details street art’s transition from social menace to viable commodity. Those who indulged Guetta recount their version of events in bemused, rueful tones, no doubt aware that what began as a necessarily transient means of expression has been formalized, becoming a set of conventions to which its slew of new followers slavishly adhere. 

Though ‘Exit Through the Gift Shop’ is a knowing attempt to mythologize the Banksy phenomenon, it has the opposite effect, exposing the ‘magpie’ aesthetic and the paucity of ideas at its heart. By transporting their work from the streets to the gallery, the clumsy metaphor, simplistic social commentary and political grandstanding are exposed as the T-shirt sentiments they are. The ideas are too slight to survive outside their original context, where they enlivened the drab homogeneity of the modern cityscape. Ensconced in the homes of wealthy collectors and reproduced for mass consumption, they have become part of the industry hype machine, their value assessed in market terms, third-hand cultural signifiers peddled to a credulous audience seeking instant credibility.

There is a distinct possibility that, like ‘I’m Still Here’ (2010), this is all just an elaborate ruse, the next stage in Banksy’s evolution as a self-styled ‘media terrorist’. Documentary is currently at a strange juncture where the line between fact and fiction has been blurred to such an extent that audiences no longer know what to believe; an uncertainty which ‘Exit Through the Gift Shop’ exploits with relish. If ‘Exit Through the Gift Shop’ is indeed a ‘prankumentary’ then, like Affleck and Phoenix’s feature-length in-joke, it has backfired spectacularly, betraying more than any factual analysis ever could. As Banksy's former spokesman Steve Lazarides tellingly opines, "I think the joke is on... I don’t know who the joke is on, really. I don’t even know if there is a joke."

Unthinkable (2010)

...Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Torture.

Hollywood’s attempts to address its nation’s quixotic ‘war on terror’ have met with lopsided results - for every ‘The Hurt Locker’ there is a rash of ‘Renditions ’, ‘Brothers’ or ‘Lions for Lambs’. In an industry that seems congenitally incapable of sincerity at times, its forays into a real world with real consequences have often been spectacularly crass. A good case in point is this straight-to-DVD offering, which fancies itself a ‘psychological thriller’ addressing ‘contemporary concerns’.

H (Samuel L. Jackson) is a black-ops interrogator indentured to the shadier elements of the intelligence community - possibly because he has committed war crimes. He gruesomely tortures a home-grown terror suspect (Michael Sheen) who claims to have planted nuclear bombs in three American cities. By-the-book FBI agent Brody (Carrie-Anne Moss) is appalled by what she sees and indulges in a protracted bout of hand-wringing over this flagrant breach of international law. Brody and H argue over the efficacy of using torture, with Brody maintaining that any information gained under such conditions is inherently unreliable and H insisting that it is a necessary evil to protect American citizens.

This ‘brave, uncompromising’ look at the murky world of national security is in reality a TV movie with pretensions, a plodding ‘race against time’ thriller dressed up in esoteric terminology and cutting-edge finery. Jackson’s character is a mixture of Jack Bauer and Axel Foley, a wise-cracking psychopath we’re encouraged to sympathize with and root for. The contrast with Moss’s character couldn’t be starker. While H is a family man, Brody is a childless, unmarried career woman with a chilly demeanour - although we’re told that, like every career woman, her biological imperatives will win out in the end. Brody is portrayed as an uptight obstruction for her insistence on invoking the Geneva Convention at every turn while the maverick H is taking care of business. This dynamic essentially plays like a mismatched pairing in a cop movie, which would be fine if it wasn’t being used in such a grave context. It seriously undermines the film’s already shaky credibility that the characters fall into this archetypal ‘good cop, bad cop’ double act. Sheen bleeds and screams his way through the film as the ‘all-American’ Jihadist, but no attempt is made to provide any dimension to his character, to explain his motivation beyond the usual ideological bluster. This would have been a more interesting film than the one presented, a character study to which the gifted Sheen would have been better suited.

A noteworthy feature of ‘Unthinkable’ is the relative absence of middle-eastern characters. It shies away from making the connection between Islamic fundamentalism and young, disenchanted Muslim men. If they really had been committed to dealing with the issue in a frank, realistic way, the filmmakers surely wouldn’t have baulked at the idea of featuring such a character. Their bravery obviously only extended so far. ‘Unthinkable’ may believe it is a dispassionate attempt to encourage debate and address the issues in an even-handed manner, but it is nothing of the sort; the narrative arc leaves little doubt as to where its sympathies lie. Brody is there to present the illusion of balance, but its opinions are so firmly fixed and the dialogue so perfunctory that it feels like a 1950s propaganda piece. I kept waiting for it to pull back and reveal some deeper insight, but no such revelation occurred.

‘Unthinkable’ is blind to the intricacies of its subject matter, peddling easy answers and presenting a worldview as hopelessly atavistic as the zealots it sets out to decry, plumbing new depths of apologia and chauvinism. Its ultimate message is that torture works, that the ends justify the means, long-term consequences be damned. H is depicted as a man of action hamstrung by politically correct Quislings, a true patriot desperate to save his countrymen by any means. This is a shameful glorification of American Exceptionalism; a concession to those who believe that global treaties are an obstacle to domestic security, that the checks and balances preventing the abuse of executive power can be overridden on a whim. It’s sad when issues as pressing and complex as this are reduced to fodder for formulaic, ham-fisted thrillers. I have no doubt that Donald Rumsfeld would heartily approve.