Exit Through The Gift Shop, The Way We Now Live

What to make of this world we live in, or this world we now live in? Possibly the proper question is what to make of this world we appear to be entering? If the dawn of the 20^th century saw the setting of the stage for titanic global clashes between competing economic and political systems (socialism, communism, capitalism, fascism, democracy, autocracies, etc…) the dawn of the 21^st century appears to be the second chapter of that book. Despite the lingering traces of a bygone world in various spots around the globe, capitalism is king come hell or high water. Even China has gotten on board. So as the lights flicker on in the early stages of the next millennium we humans are being forced to accept the consequences of the choice we've made to make the free market our God. The good and the bad. Thus what we make of this new truly global world we're entering is as fascinating a story as there has ever been, and humans through the millennia have expressed their stories through art, and the preferred artistic form of storytelling in our times is movies. What could be better than a global story about capitalism and art, turned into a movie? Nothing. There is no better phrase for our times, and few movies that capture the pure essence of them as well as Exit through the Gift Shop.

Before tremendous praise, I will state that Exit Through the Gift Shop is not the greatest movie I've ever seen, it didn't alter my worldview or any of the other cliché reactions that could probably be extracted from what is written below. It's just a really smart and subtle movie that masterfully approaches various important subjects with humor. First off, how many of us know anything about the world of graffiti or street artist? Though it might be hard to make a good one, a movie purely about graffiti artist would be fascinating in itself, which is the basis of Exit Through the Gift Shop. The movie is about a man (Thierry) who films everything in his life, and eventually gets hooked up with graffiti artists and begins filming them at night as they work over a period of years, primarily for his personal enjoyment—though he tells the artists he is making a documentary. Eventually he meets with world renown British street artist Banksy, films him, and follows him around. After some time Banksy ask Thierry how the documentary is coming along (the one Thierry never really planed on making) and Thierry is forced to make a failed attempt at producing a documentary. Banksy's response upon seeing Thierry's film is that he tells Thierry to become an artist himself and open his own gallery showing. Which Thierry does in the culmination of the film.

The brilliance of the film is that all of the street artist Thierry films (Shepard Fairley, Banksy ect…) clearly have skill, perspective, and a particular artistic vision. Their success and notoriety is rooted in actually being good at what they do, at having an artistic voice. When Thierry puts together his own art show, he clearly has none of these things, and is merely doing his best impersonation of the street artist he followed. Yet the critics and the public love his work and he sells $1 million worth of his art. How? By marketing schemes, namedropping, and what essentially amounts to sheer manipulation of the public imagination. The films ultimate commentary is leveled at both the fickle snobbery of the traditional and codified art world, as much as it is at capitalism and what the film maker would argue is the sheep like nature of society. Yet the movie is hilarious for these very reasons; it effectively captures the absurdity of it all and much of the best humor is rooted in absurdity.

However, the essence of the brilliant nature of the film lies in the fact that indeed it may not be a documentary, that it isn't documenting the actual events of real people, but rather a mockumentary in which the main character (Thierry) is fictional. Yes, Thierry did really hold an art show in L.A., yes he did actually sell his art for $1 million +, but he may have been playing a character. At the core of the world we now live in not only lies the ever stretching tentacles of capitalism, but the blurring between reality and fiction. Those two aspects of modern society, define modern society. The possibility (likelihood) that Exit Through the Gift Shop is itself exactly that, fiction veiled as reality to the world, adds to its many layers. All in all a very good movie, probably one of the best of last year. It will make you think, and that's never a bad thing.