You’re Gonna Miss Me (2006) is a documentary of an obscure and talented rock singer from the last 1960s, Roky Erickson. If that is all the film was about, it would be in trouble because there is not much documentary footage available from forty years ago, and Roky in the early 2000s was brain-damaged and reclusive. You’re Gonna Miss Me manages to be about a lot of things at the same time: rock history, recreational drugs, family dynamics, mental illness, modern psychology versus religion, and a courtroom drama about who gets to look after Roky, his mother or his youngest brother.
Feature documentaries are newly popular, and people are still unsure what a documentary is or should be, and, thus, people judge such films on widely different criteria. At least, that is my impression, an impression that is easy to explain but difficult to substantiate. I think that documentaries are newly popular because I—and probably you—know lots of good documentaries produced in the last few years--along with the outstanding feature films. But if you go back even five years, you’ll find you know the big feature films but not the documentaries. Let’s try it with the Academy’s nominations. From last year, you remember The Departed, and the powerful documentary An Inconvenient Truth as well as the controversial Jesus Camp which is still showing. From the year before, you remember the feature film Crash, and the wonderful documentary March of the Penguins, the disturbing story of corporate corruption, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, the heated sports documentary Murderball, and maybe even the anti-globalization diatribe Darwin’s Nightmare. The first year I noticed a strong interest in documentaries was 2002, when people got excited about Winged Migration, Spellbound, Daughter from Danang, and, of course, Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine. Let’s look at the Oscar winners before that and see how many we recognize. For feature films, I’ll bet you recognize A Beautiful Mind, Gladiator, American Beauty, Shakespeare in Love, Titanic, and The English Patient, not to mention a host of nominations such as Traffic, Erin Brockovich, The Sixth Sense,, Saving Private Ryan, and L.A. Confidential. For Oscar-winning documentaries, I’ll bet you don’t know many of Murder on a Sunday Morning, Into the Arms of Strangers, One Day in September, The Last Days, The Long Way Home, or When We Were Kings. I only know the last one.
As we’d expect with a newly popular art form, people are not sure of what it should be and, thus, how they should judge it. Should documentaries follow the traditional definition and be “presenting facts objectively without editorializing or inserting fictional material, . . . presenting historical subject matter in a factual and informative manner” (American Heritage Dictionary)? Or, to ask a refined version of this, should documentaries try to be objective but acknowledge their subjectivity? Is it a documentary if you make an unabashedly subjective film about something, having no pretence of presenting the world as it “objectively” is? Is it a documentary if it is propaganda, presenting one side only and presenting that side in an unrealistically positive light? As one reviewer said favourably of Michael Moore’s new documentary Sicko, it is “a persuasive piece of propaganda.” Can a documentary include staged, “fictional” events? For example, Moore apparently stages a piece of absurdist street theatre by taking a bunch of ill 9/11 workers to Cuba for proper medical care. Is a film still a documentary if it is primarily what Marshall McLuhan called a “probe,” raising questions rather than portraying reality or arguing for solutions? Finally, as far as quality goes, can a documentary be a good documentary if it does not agree with my political, economic, and religious values?
You’re Gonna Miss Me is an old-fashioned documentary, presenting the facts as objectively as possible without editorializing. The strength of the documentary is the great access director Keven McAlester got to the Erickson family. We see Roky in his run-down house cluttered with a plethora of electronic equipment all turned on to create an ungodly buzz and roar while Roky falls asleep watching cartoons on television. We see his mother and guardian surrounded by huge sheets of cardboard on which she has pasted pictures and printed her story so that the world will understand that she is not to blame. She freely explains that Jesus and yoga are far more effective than doctors and medication when it comes to treating schizophrenia. We meet briefly brother Don who was a drug addict and tried to kill himself, and two other brothers who present as ordinary guys, but most of all we meet Sumner, the youngest, who fled the house at 18, became a classical musician in a symphony orchestra, and wants “custody” of Roky. Sumner says something like “They say you can’t buy happiness, but I’ve paid for 10 years of therapy, and I know you can.”
The weakness of the documentary is that it doesn’t investigate. Ironically, this is also a strength, for it recreates realistically the immense complexity of behind a simple question of whether a man should live with his mother or his brother. Yet I was frustrated that the film did not investigate further the question that runs like a subtext beneath the entire documentary: Why is Roky the way he is? Was it hereditary mental illness? We see plenty of the eccentric mother and can make up our own mind, I suppose, but the film could have tackled the question directly. His father’s brief, taciturn appearance is eerie. We hear a few things about a dysfunctional family, but the film doesn’t dig into this either. Was the villain too much LSD and heroin? We hear from one and only one band member that the band leader Tommy Hall gave the guys way too much acid one time, but, despite a terrible trip, Roky came back for more. We hear that Roky got electro-shock treatments at the Rusk State Mental Hospital/Prison but no more details. Of course, there is no one cause, but I would have liked more information so that I could have understood in a preliminary way the mix. When we see Roky around 2000, he is the focus of a family feud, which we understand well, but he is also clearly mentally ill and brain damaged, which we don’t understand as well as I’d like to.