Seeking the Holy Sh*t
If you’ve ever been mesmerised by a film and felt a sensation I can only describe as the ‘holy sh*t!’, you were likely witnessing the culmination of years of research, deep thought, and experimentation. One ‘tell’ that a film stands atop a subterranean Everest of this deep work is that it stays with you after the credits roll. If your mind wanders back to the film for days or even years after watching it, you’ve been hit with The Holy Sh*t.
No matter how alien, the fictional worlds we watch in films demand meticulous adherence to a set of laws that filmmakers invent. Fictional characters must also adhere to plot constraints and be recognisably human for an audience to sustain interest. All the deep work involved in creating fictional harmony isn’t obvious until it goes awry, creating a sense of discord akin to a sour note in a melody or a Vogelkop faltering its footwork.
For documentaries, characters aren’t invented but observed, and the environments they’re embedded in contain all the complexity and contradictions of the real world. A documentarian is less tasked with what to invent than what to ignore as they capture the salient details of a story and arrange them to illuminate something interesting about our humanity.
The ability to perceive that which is important is the genius of documentarians who need to be storytellers, psychologists, sociologists, historians, and preachers in their pursuit of the most meaningful stories of our time. Our deep work is embedded in understanding the people we film and the world they strive within, which happens to be the same world we all strive within.
At their best, documentarians can transcend the category of filmmaker into the realm of sage with work that will long outlast their life and sometimes even align their audiences with the swell of an oncoming cultural wave.
I believe sage status was reached by Joshua Oppenheimer, with his films The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look Of Silence (2014). Oppenheimer used the medium of film to confront mass murderers with their sins in a presentation that comes together more like a set of Nuremberg trials than documentaries.
Adam Curtis too, created something important in his distinctive archival style with The Living Dead (1995). The three-part series examines the tendency of political movements to manipulate a people’s history.
With the Woke movement successfully establishing entire university departments dedicated to reframing Western historical understandings, these instalments have never been more relevant.
By exploring the complex environment of American race relations through the life of OJ Simpson, Ezra Edelman created a preamble to the BLM riots that exploded five years after his series release.
O.J.: Made in America (2016) is a feat of excellence that I implore you all to seek out.
‘Entertainment’ isn't a word you would associate with these films. They’re not for enjoyable consumption. The filmmakers don’t offer simple answers or neat conclusions; they share the burden of the truth they uncover. For me, that’s The Holy Shit. I don’t feel preached at or manipulated when I watch these works; I feel challenged and honoured to be the beneficiary of their deepest of deep work.
The Process grew from a longing to see more of this work in the world, a sense that others felt the same, and an unrelenting compulsion to try to create it. By sharing my deep work in its many unpolished forms, I thought I could benefit from the way the internet rewards more frequent output and channel a like-minded audience's support into momentum for the kind of work I believe is important.
We’re off to a strong start. This platform has steadily grown since its launch, and my paid subscribers have helped me establish the foundations of my next major project(s). Early subscribers enabled me to travel to a small market town in the English countryside to meet Mary Harrington, a rising star of the postliberal literary underground.
I created a two-part series from our first in-person conversation, in which we tried to unpack her then-work-in-progress construct, The Cyborg Theocracy. Be warned, part two is graphic. I’ve had a lot of positive feedback about it, but several people report feeling disturbed after watching it.
Mary Harrington in The Cyborg Theocracy | Part Two
After years of studying the Woke left, Mary’s perspective helped me to zoom out and ground my research in a much broader political context. Ever since our discussion, I’ve been interested in postliberal perspectives like Mary’s and the many non-Woke political movements growing outside of the dominant ideology.
The Process has afforded me time to read many foundational texts of the postliberal right, track its key players and their audience growth, and collaborate with knowledgeable people like Professor Eric Kaufmann to detail the emergent school of thought.
I’m convinced that any filmmaker wanting to be on the cutting edge will need to understand the postliberals on their own terms and develop a sense of what motivates them.
The Process has also become a forum for experimentation, and while I’m still haunted by the textual stink bombs I’ve published, being able to take risks before a forgiving audience has been invaluable. My World III War piece started as an experiment to see if I could find historical context for my longstanding fascination with media technology’s role in social organisation.
It stirred up readers more than any other piece on this platform, I received several excited emails from subscribers and attracted a brilliant new collaborator. I had no idea that people would be as interested as I am in such an esoteric subject and I now have a fertile framework for a major film project. Expect more from this, as I develop the ideas, seek out others doing deep work in the area, and hunt for human stories to illuminate it all.
When the Claudine Gay scandal reached Current Thing status earlier this year, The Process allowed me to take the required time to explore and break down aspects of the story that lay below surface-level reporting.
I converted points from these pieces into Xwitter threads (here and here) and they gained viral traction. This became a pivotal moment for The Process because it put my Reformers series back into the spotlight and a flood of new subscribers washed into our digital enclave. Welcome.
The Reformers series remains a major draw for this platform and ongoing interest inspired me to rescue scenes that speak to readers’ desire for me to dig deeper into the story.
I’m considering dusting off the series hard drives once more to create an epilogue that charts the trajectories of the trio after the final scene. If this is something you would like me to devote time to, please let me know in the comments.
I’ve drawn your attention to the work I’ve found most fruitful but you can view the entire platform archive here. The next phase of the process is to track story leads to explore my research themes through people and events - The real magic of filmmaking.
Thank you all for your interest and feedback so far, especially to my paid subscribers, without which none of this would be possible.
I'd love to see an epilogue to The Reformers. Please also include any more clips of the trio describing their "research." I could use a laugh.
Glad to see you talking with Mary Harrington. I really appreciate her appreciation of the currently under-appreciated role of women/mothers. We should value the roles of men and women for the dignity they represent. I feel Confucius has the deepest understanding of role-ethics. Maybe you could interview a practitioner of Confucianism sometime, but be careful if you do because progressive academics are revising Confucian philosophy into something unrecognizable from its past.