"The undocumented life is not worth living."
  - Aristotle, updated for the '90s.
It doesn't exactly sound like a thrill a minute. In fact, on hearing that there was a film in progress about people who make homepages, one pictures a typical South Park office with dozens of overpaid young nose-rings sitting in chairs, staring at computer screens, and typing. Big drama occurs when the fridge runs out of caffeinated drinks. Hip night life is portrayed in full cliché when the websters don floppy hats and head off to the weekend rave. Really, wouldn't you rather just watch Speed again?
But what if your strategy for a documentary about Web pages was to follow popular Web diarist Justin Hall (Justin's Links to the Underground) around and document him while he documents everybody around him? The result might be an irreverent media funhouse of a film called Homepage.
Veteran filmmaker Doug Block didn't know that Hall was to be the star of his examination of personal Web pages. "I started by following my nose, talking with people whose sites I liked. So in that way, the film becomes quite personal, an outgrowth of mid-life restlessness meeting this newfangled thing called The Web."
He found Justin by word-of-mouth. "One of those mouths was my stepson Josh, who's a classmate of Justin's at Swarthmore and didn't like him one bit."
But for Block it was media love at first site. He found Hall to be a charismatic, smart, handsome, and idealistic 21-year-old. Still, it's no surprise that Justin made his share of enemies.
For those unfamiliar with this Web star, his daily posts (he recently stopped, partly due to a case of carpal tunnel syndrome) unflinchingly chronicled interactions that some would consider private, including intimate details of his quite active sex life. One girlfriend from his college days at Swarthmore admits on camera that she reads Justin's homepage to see how their relationship is going. (He apparently communicates more openly in print than in person.). As Howard Rheingold says, "I think someone's gonna punch him in the nose and then he'll realize where his right to reveal ends."
All will be revealed
In following his nose, Block has arrived at a really interesting place. Instead of another documentation of persons engaging in a media project (in this case, Web pages) we have a meditation into the changing nature of private and public lives in a media-saturated age.
Broadcast media represented a relatively small increase in the likelihood of being publicly exposed (or of intentionally self-exposing). Daytime talk, gossip columns, and other tabloid formats reveal a mutual hunger on the part of audience and subject for personal revelations that we used to consider secret.
So what happens when everybody and their kid sister becomes a public broadcaster? What happens when a Justin Hall can come out of nowhere and do what only someone like Anais Nin could do several generations back - do it without approval or funding or an editor ... and find a ready-and-waiting audience? What does it mean to live in the age of the Internet, the Web site, and the inexpensive video camera? If information wants to be free, does that include the intimate secrets that you whisper to your lover in bed and the phone number of your pot dealer? As aging rock star and technophile Roger McGuinn has noted, "We have met Big Brother and it is us."
Is Justin Hall a liberator, bravely bringing personal truths out into the open or a harbinger of a total mutual surveillance culture that will limit our freedom by limiting our privacy?
"This is the big question the film asks," says Block. "If I leave it unanswered or ambiguous it's because there is no answer other than ... time will tell. What interests me most is watching a big social question like this (with deep cultural ramifications) meet personal issues of ethics, psychology, and just plain growing up."
Block agrees that the evolution of technology plays the central role in raising concerns regarding private versus public lives. "You can blame technology for a cheap, affordable means of instant worldwide distribution via computer and modem, and you can blame it for broadcast-worthy camcorders that cost less than most computers. But complaining won't change the fact that the world's changing fast and most folks over 30 still don't quite get it. I worry a little for my 7-year-old daughter, but not much. She gets it.
Show-biz kids makin' movies of themselves
And Block's daughter talks about how she gets it in the film. In fact, this is not at all an overly serious "issues"-oriented documentary. Homepage is brimming over with playful, humorous, youthful energy that threatens to make it the real Gen-X film of the decade. The camera loves Hall, who has a loose, spontaneous way about him that puts viewers at ease. And Block puts himself in the mix as well as talking to various Web culture figures like Howard Rheingold (Electric Minds), Carl Steadman (Suck), and Rebecca Eisenberg, all of whom are vibrant, sharp, and eloquent on camera.
When Hall gets involved in the launch of Electric Minds, Block captures the tension behind that high-pressure attempt by Rheingold to launch a commercially successful Web-based community. In fact, Homepage is as intimate as a sexual relationship and the tensions are part of the fun. It documents the rapid rise and transition of Electric Minds as a corollary to the process of documenting Justin. And it examines the inevitable tension that came between Hall and Block as they surveiled one and other.
Block was surprised to find himself immediately discussed on Hall's Web site. Hall demonstrates a surprising will to control how he's presented (considering that he doesn't grant that control to his own subjects). Block ends up documenting this media hall-of-mirrors experience on his own homepage, D-Word, which Hall helps him build.
The Homepage homepage
And the homepage is where the action is for now. While the film is expected to be shown on Cinemax some time next summer, Block is taking a cue from Hall and documenting his process on D-Word. Aside from quotes from the film, revealing commentaries about Hall and continual updates on the film's progress, Block idealistically offers advice to other documentary filmmakers. "One reason I call my Web site the D-Word is that documentaries get a raw deal within the film industry."
A film about homepage designers turns into a full multimedia examination of truth-telling and privacy in the digital age. It would be hard to think of a more constructive use of the media involved.
