Leo Kim:

In 2016, director Dean Fleischer-Camp — known for his work on the viral hit, Marcel The Shell With Shoes On — released Fraud, a “meta-documentary” composed of a series of home videos. They follow a family with a mounting pile of debts participating in a crime spree to wipe the slate clean. Though the videos that make up the film are real, the story itself is entirely fabricated: Fleischer-Camp made the film after stumbling onto an account holding hundreds of hours of home videos. By methodically going through this vast archive, he was able to recombine these clips into a crime narrative. Suddenly, a clip of a woman spraying her carpet becomes a woman about to burn down a home.

In a Q&A following Fraud’s premiere at Toronto’s Hot Docs festival, Fleischer-Camp was called a “con artist” and “liar” by audience members who were disturbed by his working methods. These viewers took issue not with the film’s plot, but its construction. Unlike Loose Change, which purports to discover the truth in a lie, Fraud explicitly attempts the reverse, showing that one could convincingly tell any story with materials found on a site like YouTube. Ironically, it’s Fraud that, to its critics, defies the open, truth-leaning and “collaborative” ethos that people associate with the platform. 

Fleischer-Camp’s unforgivable sin is showing people who pride themselves on “doing their own research” that they don’t have the first idea what research is or how to do it, and that, as a direct consequence, they are easy marks for crooks who know how to play to their intellectual self-assessment. As Kim says in his concluding paragraph: 

YouTube is a space where the successors of Burroughs, Gysin, and Bachman meet, where author and viewer at least appear to collapse, and the possibilities of the webpage open up. The ability to engage as a viewer has never been so substantive. But this sense of engagement is double-edged: it can allow for new innovations in narrative, but also in persuasion and propaganda. The feeling of engagement is not the same thing as actually engaging. “Do your own research” is less an imperative than a strategy of flattering one’s audience: the implication is that you have done your own research simply by watching the film. Despite controlling the playback, the user is just as passive as ever.