waiting for guffman

This film was definitely a refreshing watch in this class, it was nice to see a straight up comedy. I've seen this film before, as I'm sure most of us have - but in the context of a documentary fictions class, I thought about it differently. Previously, I had no experience wtih the larger scholarship or study of mockumentary, semi-documentary, or the fictitious nature of the documentary. I had, like much of our reading makes mention of, really taken documentary as "truth" or an attempt at the "most truth" and anything else as fiction and therefore fabricated or "not truth". So, looking at this comedy now, I see it differently. I'd never really noticed before how many conventions of documentary are present in this - the talking head interviews, the hand-held shots, etc., and found in prior views my suspension of disbelief and engagement with the film didn't allow me to see the moments when the film slips into a standard fiction film, those moments when the cameras are in places where they would not be - like Corky in the bathtub, or just outside his apartment, or fixed on a character in a crowd that will become the person we recognize as possibly guffman but isn't yet. The selectivity of the camera, the way the viewer counts on the camera to show us what is imporant and what we need to know is more a possiblity of fiction than a camera in the midst of an uncontrolled documentary would likely be. So, I really appreciated being able to notice more of these "lapses" between genres.
I think the thing that makes this film, and other Christopher Guest films so funny - is his attention to detail. Even though these characters are completely ridiculous, the amount of care, detail, and even subtlety applied to establishing their attributes gives the characters a realness that moves them beyond stereotypes. Guest seems to distill a "type" (folk musician, theatre director, dog owner..) down to a few particular elements and then amplifies those elements so that you only read that person as "travel agent" and then fills in bizarre quirks into that caricature that build incredible and strange, but also real-seeming personality back into the character. Ultimately, I think he has a great deal of appreciation for the characters he builds, I think he can probably relate to them on some level - the small town politics, the disappointment of failed dreams, bizarre theatre ephemera, I feel he really gets the details and uniqueness of various communities (theatre scene, hair metal bands, competitive dog show scene) from within it, not from the outside - and that's what makes the humor so successful. It's almost like an in-joke rather than a pointed joke. I'm sure his research process is fascinating.