multi-storied #42: The journalist and the scam artist
The very first sentence of “The Journalist and the Murderer” is full-bore artillery, blowing apart the egos of the practitioners of the very profession that regards it as a central text. Janet Malcolm writes:
Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.
The exact comparison, later in the same paragraph, is to a confidence man, “preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.” Some journalists admit this is true, and try to rise above it. Others deny it with expectorations of the nobility and public spirit of their trade. Still others ignore it, lest they get too crippled by their conscience. But I don’t think I’ve ever met a journalist who leverages the confidence game as knowingly and remorselessly as the Danish documentarian Mads Brügger.
I wrote about Brügger for the Guardian Longread, a story that started with a two-sentence idea that my editor David Wolf ran by me. There was a TV documentary that had caused a big stir in Denmark, he told me, partly because it was so daring in its conception but also because of the unreal double bluff of its climax. (Many of my Longreads have begun with very pithy suggestions by David. Once it was just two words over text: “Japanese Knotweed?” All magazine writers should have at least one relationship with an editor like this.) All this was true. In “The Black Swan,” a crooked lawyer named Amira Smajic says she wants to go straight, and Brügger sets her up in a fake office, so that he can secretly film all the crimes that her clients plot with her. And in the final episode, Brügger reveals that the lawyer has been playing him all along. But what made this an especially delicious story, as I discovered, was Brügger’s own journalistic record of pretence and manipuation. The double crosser became the double crossed.
From the piece, about his twisty, sensational films:
As a documentarian, Brügger likes to make things happen. Not for him the Attenboroughian serenity of waiting for a lion to grow hungry and then track down its antelope; he’d rather starve the lion, hobble the antelope, and then introduce both beasts into a cage to film the carnage. In all his projects, Brügger has mounted elaborate, artificial setups just like Smajic’s office, and lured people into self-indictment, folly or sudden disclosures. Most of his films pivot on Brügger pretending to be someone he isn’t. In “The Red Chapel,” which won a Sundance award in 2010, he plays the manager of a pair of comedians touring North Korea. In “The Ambassador,” he impersonates a Liberian diplomat in Central African Republic. His cameras are, if not hidden, claiming to be present for benign purposes. In Pyongyang with his comedians, Brügger’s tapes were screened every night by a government agency; the film’s splenetic views of North Korea – “a sanctuary for crazy people” – emerge in the edits and in Brügger’s voiceovers. As in “The Black Swan,” the most burning question in these films is always: will someone tear the facade away and expose Brügger?
Usually, this kind of “sting” journalism has all sorts of unwritten rules baked into it. Can you get the same facts without resorting to these falsehoods? Is the material you’re seeking very crucial to the public interest? Danish law, someone told me, has strict regulations governing the use of hidden cameras—but they haven’t applied to Brügger because he has shot most of his movies overseas, in poorer countries such as the Central African Republic or Liberia. Brügger believes these places to be so deficient in rules and laws, you sense, that he casts aside the usual constraints of his profession. And what is he looking to show his audiences? Broadly, that these places are deficient in rules and laws. It’s all a pretty circular affair.
This objective doesn’t really satisfy those unwritten rules I mentioned. So where does that leave Brügger as a journalist? Does he transgress some boundary even by Janet Malcolm’s reckoning? Or does he merely extend her idea—that the practice of journalism is itself a deception—into utter dramaturgy and artifice? He doesn’t himself seem troubled by these questions at all. To him, the story is everything—which is something you’ll hear other journalists say as well, even if they aren’t play-acting as comedic managers or diplomats. And while I often have this out-of-body experience while doing interviews—standing outside myself, watching the conversation unfold—being in Copenhagen with Brügger made that even more vivid. Once, while talking to Smajic over the phone, I observed how I played up my sympathy at some points, laughed too politely at others, and never once said what I already knew to be true: that she was a liar.
Still, there’s something about Brügger’s films that is discomfiting to watch, and it has to do not with his marks—officials engaging in petty corruption, or the North Korean government—but with the peripheral players in his great japes: the Ugandan villagers who are told they will be relocated so that an arms factory can be built on their land; or the North Korean interpreter who weeps at the memorial to Kim Il-Sung, claiming she’s mourning him but possibly grieving for some other reason; or the Central African Republicans who take lessons in how to make matches in a factory that Brügger will never build. To his credit, Brügger acknowledges the odd pang of guilt in his voiceovers—but only in passing. Ulrich Larsen, a Dane whom Brügger handles in a film called “The Mole,” deploying him deep into North Korean influence networks, told me that he wonders about the repercussions that the North Koreans unwittingly cast in “The Mole” might have suffered. “The rough answer is: I’m not responsible for what the regime does,” Larsen said. He hoped that “Mr Kang”, his translator in Pyongyang, was all right, “but of course, nobody knows. I did what I could. I brought his daughter a Lego.” Like Brügger, Larsen seemed to write it off as the cost of making an engrossing film. As Brügger says in “The Red Chapel”: “For your sake and mine, I have to lie.”
This license to lie is something Brügger has arrogated, in the best manner of white American and European men through the ages, using a nebulous greater good as justification. And it goes with the career that Brügger has made for himself, as a filmmaker who tours Asia and Africa looking for conflict and dysfunction, in the implicit belief that his own continent is no longer troubled by the anarchic social disorder he seeks. In that light, it’s almost pleasing when we find that Amira Smajic has been lying to him. Such is the way of the world, though, that it is still Brügger who comes away with the win: a compulsively watchable documentary, a burnished reputation as a muckraker, and hell, even a profile in the Guardian. I’ll admit it: I can’t wait to see what he does next.