Kate Plays Christine

Mul­ti­plex cin­e­ma chains have come to a tac­it agree­ment that the pub­lic employ their ser­vices as a way to escape from the punch­clock drudgery of real life. Movies are a way to turn on, tune in and zone out, and noth­ing more than that. Kate Plays Chris­tine from direc­tor Robert Greene is a bril­liant spoil sport movie, a work whose sole inter­est is in the way that bliss­ful dis­con­nect from real­i­ty plays out.

It pon­ders the pos­si­bil­i­ty that whim­si­cal escapism comes with its eth­i­cal caveats, that mind­less enjoy­ment is often pow­ered by a star­tling, unavoid­able manip­u­la­tion of real­i­ty. Is it right to have actors step into the shoes of oth­er peo­ple when there is absolute­ly no way they can offer even any­thing even close to a valu­able recre­ation of some­one else’s life and expe­ri­ences? And fur­ther­more, should audi­ences be made aware that the cin­e­ma they’re con­sum­ing often gen­er­ates false emo­tions by exploit­ing the image (or, often, the ghost) of these real peo­ple? And what about death? Is it right to triv­i­alise this great exis­ten­tial taboo, to throw it up there on the screen and reframe it as chill­ing spectacle?

The test sub­ject here is the actor Kate Lyn Sheil who has agreed to be filmed in her attempts to ​‘get into char­ac­ter’. Her sub­ject is a toughie – the Florid­i­an news­read­er Chris­tine Chub­buck who, in 1974, brought a revolver with her on to the air and, fol­low­ing a short tirade against her station’s rep­re­hen­si­ble shift towards a more tabloid instinct, shot her­self in the head. From a mod­ern van­tage, Chubbuck’s life is char­ac­terised by the way it end­ed, and so the inevitable ques­tion that aris­es is: what drove her to this grim­ly spec­tac­u­lar dénouement?

Sheil realis­es that these issues are inher­ent to her occu­pa­tion as an actor, and for the pur­pos­es of this film, she pores over the dai­ly eth­i­cal con­cerns in her per­son­al search for some kind of truth. She realis­es and accepts the impos­si­bil­i­ty of her task, and the film mutates into a visu­al doc­u­ment of her research mis­sion. The dra­ma here derives less from Chubbuck’s trag­ic life, and more from Sheil’s jour­ney towards a melan­cholic abyss. The cam­era watch­es as, with every inter­view she does, every place she vis­its, ever piece of bio­graph­i­cal infor­ma­tion she filch­es, her task drifts clos­er toward the impossible.

Maybe it’s a lit­tle harsh to char­ac­terise Kate Plays Chris­tine as a spoil sport movie, as it’s not say­ing that all escapism requires the view­er to self-fla­gel­late as penance for their spec­ta­tor­ship sins. But it does offer a con­cerned cri­tique of movies that cheer­ful­ly leach off of real lives, real peo­ple and real history.

There’s the sug­ges­tion that doc­u­men­tary should be mak­ing gains on this ground, that as a sto­ry­telling appa­ra­tus, it can get mar­gin­al­ly clos­er to that unreach­able nir­vana known as objec­tive real­i­ty. Yet Greene’s humane form of inside-out doc­u­men­tary isn’t just inter­est­ed in tech­ni­cal ques­tions about the medi­um – it offers a whis­pered reminder that we’re all out there on our own, and per­haps we should try and embrace that.