Commodified Spirituality and Minimalism: A Documentary about the Important Things

 Reflections from a Young Movie-Goer

Documentaries, more so than other films, are perfect manipulators of reality. Their direct intersection with real life bears a resemblance to news reports or advertisements, all three have to convince their audience of this version of events, in the hopes they might act upon the given information. But unlike these other two forms of media, Documentaries have a filmic scale that gives one the opportunity to become more fully immersed in the worlds that they present. One expects some complexity from this, if not less bias, so that their worlds (and arguments) become more convincing. In most cases, Documentaries that do cherry-pick the features of their worlds are overtly political, think Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom  (2015) or the work of Michael Moore. In these instances, the films are excusable for all their flaws or tipexed-out bits because their rhetoric has a more direct urgency to our own world. But for Minimalism: A Documentary about the Important Things (2016), in the absence of complexity or political gravity, we have, instead, an overlong advertisement.

It opens by bombarding audience with wobbly Cloverfield-esque footage of black friday, people with PhDs telling us how consumerist we've become, and a timelapse of a gigantic Best Buy, punctuated by a neon-lit permanence, getting swarmed by a Malthusian mass of meaningless, existential people-blurs. Then, from this philistine, soulless world two trendy prophets arise with the answer. Like all good entrepreneurs they have a back story (which shows emotional involvement); they were living inauthentically and were unsatisfied with their corporate existences. But then they found the light, a cure which they could communicate to the masses; minimalism. The doctrine of minimalism is to renounce mass-consumerism, and live with only the things which add value to your life. They are the popes of this movement, giving themselves the snappy moniker of "the Minimalists", and they've happened to write a book about it which you can buy. They're nice guys who travel across America giving talks and don't care if there's only two in the audience because they've still been able to "spread the word". They're insistent that you know they prefer hugging over handshakes. And they want you to buy their book. But wait, you ask yourself, surely it can't work if you have a wife and kids. Think again, they say, this guy has a wife and kids and still does minimalism. But wait, it can't actually improve your mental and physical wellbeing, can it? Think again! This woman has a debilitating condition, but when she applied minimalism, it cleared it up instantly! But wait, these guys are just in it for the money, right? Wrong! This guy's mum died of cancer, and he's on his own sort of spiritual journey to appease her vengeful spirit. This is the extent of the documentary, it's an advert.

It surrenders any factual coherence in favour of a weak plot that follows "the Minimalists" on their tour, stuffed with little touches of characterisation that attempt to prove their humanity, that they care deeply about your wellbeing. They act like a checklist for the successful business types of the 21st century; laid back, casual but trendy clothes, inspiring talks, making friendliness a part of their brand, trying to instil their product with humanitarian purpose. It's almost laughable how many times they're shown telling people that they're "huggers" rather than hank-shakers, shoehorning it into their brand appeal. It's made worse by the fact that there's a lot to salvage from their message, perhaps a much more noble documentary which takes a journalistic approach to the topic. It plays into the whole phenomenon of commodified spirituality, alongside the likes of mindfulness and yoga, which present themselves as icky trends for Middle Class consumption that put off outsiders with their cultish, dogmatic presence. The same can be said for environmentalism and healthy eating, whilst their branding makes them easier to consume amongst those who can, they remain shallow, overbearing and unaffordable to those who can't. And rather than showing minimalism as a political, collective activity, it's sold directly to the individual under a guise of political effectiveness. This faux-politics becomes glaringly obvious at one of their talks, where a homeless-looking-black-man in the audience spouts some sort of anti-establishment people power wisdom, an ugly Hollywood stereotype laden with racism, and to this the two minimalists, with a businessman-like cunning, agree and swiftly assimilate it to their cause, without developing the point any further.

The problem is that this is an exploitative mode of Documentary-making, because it poses its anti-consumerist message in the form of a consumable. It highlights a tendency towards virtue signalling in America, something tied up with a perverted cross-breed of Capitalism and Religion, where badges-of-goodness are more important than rational thought. This is why we need complexity in Documentary making, so that it avoids dogmatising its subject matter. Even if the result is still largely one sided, the audience can be shown rather than told. Minimalism fails to reach any substantial layer of complexity or factual exploration which leaves it a shallow advertisement, too easy to step in and scatter into nothingness.