It becomes part of something else. It becomes a movie,” Pepe says to said camera—lines writ- ten, and to some degree sincerely felt, by McBride. “Your decisions stop being moral decisions and they become aesthetical decisions. And your whole life stops being your life and becomes a work of art. And a very bad work of art.” Of course this awareness, both within a fictional and documentary context, is what makes it a very great work of art. (Fascinatingly, McBride would go on to actively take on these prob- lems and paradoxes in a first-person documentary context, making a film of his own life in My Girlfriend’s Wedding, before veering off to Hollywood and fea- ture filmmaking.)
Yet the most important thing that David shoots is himself, seated at his desk or perched in the corner of his studio, a lavalier microphone around his neck attesting to the sync-sound nowness, surrounded by reels and canisters, movie posters and magazine clippings. It makes for a man-among-his-tools self- portrait worthy of Hockney. But instead of a mirror in the corner offering a glimpse of the artist at work, here the mirror reflects the camera through which we’re watching—the artist as separately propelled machine, as disembodied other. “You haven’t told me anything. You have. I have. This is ridiculous. Why am I sitting here talking to you, to two machines?” he says amid a mother-of-all meltdowns, losing all sense of where he begins and ends, what he’s made
happen versus what’s happened to him, what dif- ferentiates “you” from “I,” animate from inanimate. “What the fuck do you want? Why doesn’t this help me? Why doesn’t this help me?”
McBride’s film is a fiction, but his script anticipated the dialogue of our contemporary lives. Do film and other media bring us closer to, or further from, our- selves? Are we ever alone? Are we ever in control of the devices we’re meant to control? Are reflections of self ever anything but fictions? Are fictions ever anything but reflections of self? David Holzman’s Diary captures a moment when modern man was able to see better than he ever had before, yet his sense of self only got murkier. David lost the plot of his own diary, and 46 years later none of us are any closer to finding it. But unlike the simplistic satires and finger-wagging media critiques that would fol- low, McBride’s film doesn’t put the onus on media, but rather on the inherent sorrow and corrup- tions of existence, our human tendency to pervert everything we touch into monstrous projections of ourselves. David is David’s problem, not society’s, not media’s, not the camera’s; but simultaneously, despite his frustrations over what he’s wrought, his creation is also a solution—to loneliness, to inac- tion, to powerlessness. Personal cameras giveth and taketh away thusly to this day. In both form and con- tent, David Holzman’s Diary is a bent reflection of our mediated gaze, and it’s utterly uncanny.
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