Typical newspaper articles follow a time-tested “inverted pyramid” structure. By starting broad and adding increasing detail with each subsequent paragraph, they simultaneously offer the most pertinent information upfront (for casual readers), and then flesh the story out (for those more curious). As works of journalism, obituaries chart a separate course. Hewing to a different inverted structure, they’re closer in form to an upside-down literary arc: one of end, middle, and beginning. And, notably, their subject is almost always a single human being.
As readers, we tend to focus on the end, the event that triggered the piece. “Benjamin Taylor,” let’s say, “died on Sunday in a bear attack outside of Anchorage, Alaska. He was 38.” Once a sentence or two dispenses with the grim details, an obit shifts focus and trains its eye on the middle and beginning portions of the narrative. Taylor, maybe, was a celebrated cellist late in life after abandoning a career in finance. Perhaps he was born to circus acrobats and ran away from home at age 13. A fascinating life, good or bad, is the story here, rather than the particulars of a death.
Vanessa Gould’s documentary Obit focuses on the daily workings of the New York Times’ obituary department, which houses some of the paper’s finest storytellers. They’re also some of its most inventive prose stylists. Margalit Fox, the best of the bunch, for example, opened a 2007 obit like so. “Fred W. McDarrah, a self-described square who as a longtime photographer for The Village Voice documented the unwashed exploits of the Beat generation, and as an enterprising freelance talent agent rented out members of that generation (washed or unwashed) to wide-eyed suburban society gatherings, died on Tuesday at his home in Greenwich Village.” Rarely will you encounter such playfulness and surprise in a hard-news lede that’s printed on the page of a respected newspaper. The Times’ obituaries are not only unique works within the paper itself. They pop with humor and flair most of all when compared to bone-dry examples of the form, the industry standard.
That’s why their authors are themselves compelling subjects for a documentary. Obit is a companion piece of sorts to Page One: Inside the New York Times and Bill Cunningham New York, two earlier documentaries by other filmmakers (Andrew Rossi and Richard Press, respectively) more or less set in the Grey Lady’s newsroom. Like those films Obit is about process, the day-to-day activities, mostly mundane and painstaking, that result in top-notch journalism. Gould as a filmmaker isn’t nearly as interested in the flourish or ingenuity of the NYT staff her camera follows. This is straight-ahead documentary filmmaking, a mix of behind-the-scenes footage and talking heads.
But the journalistic niche she examines, those who tell the final stories of towering figures destined for the history books as well as the average citizens who stumbled onto cultural consequence, is appealing apart from any cinematic razzle-dazzle. A human death may trigger a flurry of phone calls, archival research, and historical reassessment critical to creating an obituary. But life is the topic at hand, in Obit and on the page.
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