Film Begets Film and Real Begets Fake: Woody Allen’s Zelig Though predating the official “Mockumentary Era,” Woody Allen’s Zelig remains a class example of the mockumentary at its finest. Zelig fulfills the mockumentary’s potentialities of clever parody that: shows the fallibility of “historical” archival footage; bares and mocks human nature and its striving for assimilation and acceptance; American culture’s gullible, easily manipulated public, who are drawn to phony celebrity culture; and the oddly simultaneous soothing nature of the mockumentary. Zelig also shares the mockumentary’s limitations, as parasite and slave to the documentary and the film format, as well as repeated imitation to the point of far less effective staleness.
Film Begets Film And Real Begets Fake: Woody Allen's Zelig
Woody Allen's Zelig represents many classic potentialities and limitations of the mockumentary. Predating the "mockumentary" designation by a full year, Zelig helped pioneer the mockumentary's use of clever parody to entertain, expose the fallibility of "historical" archival footage, prick the conscience and soothe. Simultaneously, Zelig suffered and suffers from the limitations of the mockumentary, as parasite and slave to the documentary, inherent filmed format and key components imitated to the point of triteness. Despite Zelig's relatively early techniques and presentation, it remains squarely within the mockumentary mode.
Body: Film Begets Film and Real Begets Fake: Woody Allen's Zelig
The term "mockumentary" is a synthetic word stemming from a comment in 1984's This is Spinal Tap. In that film, documentarian Marty DiBergi referred to his work as a "rockumentary, if you will" (Doherty 24). In a small leap from that term, "mockumentary" was born. Woody Allen's Zelig (Allen), released in 1983 and now deemed a classic mockumentary, pre-dated the official name its own genre. Zelig achieved well-deserved classic status, as it helped define the form and fully shows the potentialities and limitation of a mockumentary.
Briefly, Zelig is a parody of several aspects of modern life: our reliance on archival footage as reliable, complete history; human nature and particularly modern man's wish to conform, belong and assimilate; and American culture and celebrity. The film uses a 1970's black-and-white newsreel format, successfully mimicking and mocking the seriousness of a documentary to recount the life of a famous-then-infamous-then-famous-then obscure main character. The main character, Zelig, is a 1920's American man who is so eager to conform and belong that he mutates to the characteristics of any person -- regardless of race, size or any other characteristic -- near him. Eventually, according to the mockumentary, this quality makes Zelig a celebrity, complete with a marketing bonanza of songs, a chameleon dance and even a Hollywood film about him. Unfortunately, Zelig also suffers the downside of celebrity, being blamed by the Communist Party for monopolizing 5 jobs at once and by the Ku Klux Klan for being a triple-threat Jew, Negro or Native American, depending on whoever happens to be near him. Disillusioned by the nether belly of celebrity, Zelig vanishes but reappears on a Vatican balcony with the Pope. Discovered, Zelig is deported to America.
During Zelig's first wave of celebrity, medical experts -- including psychiatrist Dr. Eudora Nesbitt Fletcher -- unsuccessfully analyze him. Then, upon his return from Italy, Dr. Fletcher takes Zelig to the isolation of the countryside and so successfully "cures" his malady that Zelig attacks an expert because Zelig disagrees with the expert's correct statement that it's a nice day. A "cured" Zelig now travels the U.S. with renewed celebrity status, giving motivational speeches about "being yourself." In addition, Zelig and Dr. Fletcher -- who is also famous due to Zelig's cure -- announce their engagement, at which point multiple women come forward to claim that Zelig married them while he was in one of his chameleon forms. Now that Zelig is accused of bigamy and adultery, the easily manipulated public turns against him, pressuring him to return to his chameleon disease and disappear. Dr. Fletcher searches for Zelig and finds him in a newsreel of Hitler; consequently, she travels to German and sees that Zelig is in Hitler's inner circle. Seeing Fletcher, Zelig comes out of his chameleon existence once again and they both return to America. The gullible and manipulated public now celebrates Zelig with a ticker tape parade in New York City. Zelig and Fletcher then marry and fade into obscurity.
Ideally, the mockumentary has several powerful potentialities. Typically, it is a clever, provocative parody of the documentary genre (Grossman 271-2). Zelig, for example beautifully imitates the black-and-white documentaries of the 1970's which purported to give an accurate and complete history. Without the benefit of digital film or CGI, Allen inserts himself as Zelig in numerous historically important scenarios. Zelig's revisionist history, just this side of reality in that Zelig poses with real historical characters (Doherty 24), "incinerated" the naive reliance on archival film as an accurate conveyor of history. Furthermore, to buttress the supposed historical reliability of his mockumentary, Allen used a then-key innovation that has been used ad nauseum: real experts such as Susan Sontag and Saul Bellow, to lend superficial credence to the truthfulness of his mocking historical account (Doherty 23). By almost seamlessly inserting Zelig into archival footage, the film shows the fallibility of film as genuine history.
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