Karina on SpoutBlog

Winnebago Man screens tonight at CineVegas, and next week at SilverDocs. In the interest of full disclosure: I was on the jury that awarded the film the grand prize at the Sarasota Film Festival in April.
Many documentary filmmakers have to at some point insert themselves into the lives of their subjects in order to get the story in front of the camera. Actually incorporating that blurring of boundaries between documenter and documented into the finished film is tricky business; at best, you’re David Maysles, capturing unforgettable material from Little Eddie Beale whilst engaging in shy flirtation with her from behind the microphone. At worst, you’re Michael Moore, piling the post-9/11 sick on to a boat, sailing through the seas of self-parody to Cuba, drowning your own good intentions further with each nautical mile.

Rarely is a filmmaker’s experience of becoming part of their story presented with as little artifice and self-service as in Winnebago Man, Ben Steinbauer’s document of his mission to first find Jack Rebney, the man who became a cult celebrity via a widely circulated video of his profanity-packed outtakes from a motorhome industrial video shoot, and then coax Rebney into coming to terms with his unlikely notoriety. The film works on a number of different levels: as detective story, as a no-frills work of historiography on the strange new phenomenon of accidental celebrity motivated by the rise of viral web video, and as insight into a filmmaker’s process of discovering what story he’s telling and how to tell it. Structured against a narration (spoken by Steinbauer, scripted by Steinbauer and Malcolm Pullinger, who also edited) of remarkable candor and clarity, on the whole Winnebago Man is an incredibly literate examination of YouTube culture (arguably the biggest threat to actual old-school literacy to be invented in decades), its discontents, and its half-hidden side effects.

After years of obsession with the Winnebago Man video (alternately known as “Angriest Man in the World”), Steinbauer attempted to track down its “star”, with few results. Early in the film, he wonders if Jack could be “living a normal life somewhere, unaware that he’d become a new kind of celebrity.” What Steinbauer soon learns is that this kind of celebrity is nearly impossible to escape, but that Jack Rebney has spent twenty years living in a secluded cabin trying to do just that. Jack does respond to a letter sent by Steinbauer to a PO box tracked down by a public detective, and, repping himself as an unassuming old man who doesn’t get what all the fuss is about, allows the filmmaker to come visit him. The man Steinbauer meets at first is nothing like the Angriest Man in the World, and Ben’s disappointed. “I thought there’d at least be a little swearing,” he complains. Be careful what you wish for: soon enough, Jack calls Ben and insists that he was putting on a front that day at his house. As the two men develop a relationship, the swearing comes back in abundance, but with it comes an understanding of what it feels like to feel misunderstood on a the epic scale afforded by viral video infamy. Soon Steinbauer is trying to convince Rebney to “use your notoriety”, to use the very tools that have hurt him to restore his identity.

One of Winnebago Man’s key moments comes when writer Douglas Rushkoff addresses the filmmaker, who is not on camera. “You’re paying the price of our collective cultural guilt at having humiliated this person. You’re going back and finding, ‘Well, what happened?’” This idea of excavating the truth behind the laugh or the stunt seems anathema to the very pleasures that anonymous online consumption would seem to offer. As one Winnebago Man fan puts it, “I don’t want the reality of it. I want the bafoon.” But Rushkoff sets up the idea that in the age of Internet culture, YouTube — an almost uniquely non-narrative phenomena — doesn’t replace filmmaking; in fact, it makes traditional filmmakers more important. Somebody needs to step outside the Roman coliseum-like panopticon of shame and create a record of it, to help us understand what it is we’re seeing by putting it in the context of storytelling. It becomes crucial, then, that this film include the anxiety that goes into shaping the real raw matter into a solid story, because that act of constructing a mirror becomes part of the story of always-on, always-watching culture.

It helps that Steinbauer has a natural curiosity and transparent delivery that is incredibly appealing. It takes a very specific kind of personality for a filmmaker to succesfully insert themselves in a not-inherently personal documentary and convince us that they need to be there, that their experience of discovering and telling the story is actually an indispensible part of the story itself. Smart but not a know-it-all, preppy-cute but self-effacing, Steinbauer not only has the charisma to pull it off in Winnebago Man, but you could easily see him applying this approach to other projects. The filmmaker never makes it about him — it’s clear throughout that he’s onscreen because that’s the most direct way to tell this story, and he wants nothing more than to serve as a conduit between what he sees and what he wants us to see. You don’t realize how sorely this kind of personal reportage is needed until you see it.