All the same, we continue to build our national identity not atop hard-nosed studies of our past and present — but on stories of America’s exceptionalism, a pathology that affects both ends of the country’s political spectrum. Each side has its heroes and villains. Yet from a higher conceptual standpoint, these dueling narratives function almost identically. Absent a tragic frame, neither flag-waving exceptionalism, nor its identity-obsessed opposite, can admit that America is defined less by some abstract “idea”, whether the utopian pursuit of “liberty for all” for the Right or racial loathing for the Left, and more by the vagaries of its Anglo-Protestant origins.

Nowhere is this obsession with this mythos of America clearer than how the nation’s political elites view the Founding. One side, after all, insists that 1776 was near-divine — even consulting AI versions of George Washington for insight on the country’s contemporary malaise. The other condemns the founding as genocidal, built on the stolen land of indigenous peoples and the mass enslavement of Africans. Yet both center America’s birth as an epochal event, either as the root of all evil or “the most consequential revolution in history” reflecting “the noblest aspirations of humankind”.

Those last quotes come from the first five minutes of Ken Burns’s new PBS series The American Revolution — but don’t let the patriotic cheerleading fool you. For in the end, the show does a remarkable job of blending what political scientist James Ceaser called “exceptionalist” and “anti-exceptionalist” narratives together into a coherent whole, along the way pleasing patriotic Republicans and subversive Democrats alike. Indeed, that’s rather the point. By crafting a documentary where Left and Right can all feel “represented”, Burns deftly avoids dealing with the roots of America’s problems and how they manifest themselves today, good news for our plutocratic rulers, and bad for the rest of us.

Among the dwindling educated cohort that still watches public broadcasters like PBS, Ken Burns is a documentarian of unmatched achievement. And, to be fair, the reputation is well-earned. Starting with his show on the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, he has produced some of the best multimedia historical nonfiction of the last 40 years. He’s proved remarkably popular too. During his watershed 1990 series The Civil War, PBS averaged nearly 14 million viewers per episode, with an unheard-of 39 million tuning in to watch at least one night of the series. As we drift ever closer towards a post-literate society, Burns is now the closest thing the United States has to a national raconteur, pioneering a method of engaging historiographic visual storytelling that’s broadly accurate, frequently engrossing, and capable of bringing both scholars and general audiences to the table.

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Given his reputation, it’s unsurprising that nearly anything Burns produces now will fund the entire PBS operation for years. That’s especially true since the Reagan administration began slashing funding for public broadcasters in the Eighties — cuts that were accelerated during the Gingrich-led GOP Congress of the Nineties. Now, under Trump and Musk’s DOGE, US public broadcasting is effectively dead. In its place, PBS is funded largely by wealthy corporations and foundations. Yet if that’s meant Burns has had plenty of cash to make dozens of programs, on everything from the Vietnam War to jazz, his glittering career hasn’t been critic-free.

Especially to those working within the often-cloistered world of scholarly American history — a nitpicking discipline filled with poorly-paid but self-important individuals — he remains an unpopular figure, representing a dubious strain of “pop history”. The public is his intended audience, not scholars. The obvious corollary, in the university common room anyway, is that everything about his work is suspect, especially for Leftist academics already skeptical of his patriotic references to the revolution’s inherent nobility.

The Right, for its part, does something similar. Spurred on, perhaps, by a sense that his association with PBS represents progressivism manifest — hardly unreasonable given its patrician fans and complacently liberal funders — conservative critics flooded social media to accuse Burns of capitulating to “wokeness”. Much of their rancor focused on two rhetorical sleights of hand early in The American Revolution. The first comes near the six-minute mark of episode one, which describes the Iroquois Confederacy of Native American tribes as a “democracy”. It’s an odd claim to make without the caveat that the Iroquois system was not a liberal democracy as Americans understand the term. Rather, it was something else entirely, a society based on collective land ownership and indigenous values utterly rejected by the Founders.

Yet that pales compared to Burn’s second example of shallow inclusivity, when he implies that Benjamin Franklin’s first call for independence was somehow inspired by the Iroquois. It’s certainly a bizarre claim — Franklin’s politics were clearly far more shaped by philosophers like John Locke — even if it again speaks to the Right’s tendency to bristle at any suggestion that the United States didn’t emerge as a kind of secular miracle.

Ideological grumbles aside, of course, placing the Iroquois Confederacy front and center surely represents a shrewd career move on the part of Burns and his colleagues. In the liberal public broadcasting world, no one is above cancellation, not even Burns. With millions watching, the filmmaker and his colleagues knew they had to please identitarian obsessives, both inside his PBS team and across the airwaves.

More fundamentally, though, Burns’s focus on the Iroquois speaks again to that sense of exceptionalism: in a way that blends the Right-wing cheerleading with its more skeptical Leftist mirror. After all, foregrounding the Iroquois in this way promotes a multicolored pseudo-inclusive version of American exceptionalism, with Burns succumbing to the mythological deification of the country’s origin story: just now with added diversity. Certainly, turning the Iroquois into the true unrecognized Founders feels better than acknowledging that they — and, by proxy, all the indigenous tribes of what became the United States — were crushed, absorbed, or otherwise expunged en route to the stucco-framed dystopia we inhabit today.

What gets lost here, of course, is Unamuno’s sense of the tragic, the recognition that the Thirteen Colonies’ revolt, like every war and revolution, involved brutal violence and shameless cultural erasure. No less important — and contra the Burns contributor who reifies the standard trope of the US as a nation that coheres “not around ancient history, but ideas” — this glibly inclusive framing also ignores the genuine roots of American society and politics.

The fact is that all the ideas embedded in America’s founding governmental structure did not appear as miracles, but rather emerged from a deep and complex Anglo-liberal heritage. This encompasses everything from the Glorious Revolution to the Puritan exodus to frontier revivalism. Even those that arguably weren’t, notably small‑“r” republicanism, were filtered through the Anglo lens of limited government, free markets, and deep suspicion of taxation. Nearly every signatory to the Declaration of Independence was an Anglo-Protestant. Only one, Charles Carroll, was Catholic. Yes, Jefferson and Franklin were Deists, but even that was a genteel cousin of Anglicanism. No less striking, the new United States was profoundly English in its ethnic makeup: especially once you exclude enslaved Africans and indigenous peoples, neither of which were considered fully human by most Founders.

None of this history — ugly, contingent, grounded not in grand principles but in the gloomy depths of the past — is exactly inspiring: and it partly explains why Americans might prefer to wallow in exceptionalism instead. Yet if it’s explicable, it’s also a problem, and not just for the historical record. For in his inability to genuinely analyze our past, Burns is equally unable to reflect on the present, and how the republic founded in 1776 reached the ludicrously dysfunctional spot it now occupies. Forget petty arguments over income tax; this is especially pertinent given our current governing structure, with all its flaws, is basically the same one established way back at the tail end of the 18th century. But because, we are told, it appeared as a kind of immaculate conception, it can never, ever change.

And here, again, we must return to one of the fundamental problems in all American discourse — the one no foundation, documentary series, or identitarian gesture dares grasp. Left or Right, America has no true tragic sensibility. Tragedy requires acknowledging limits, accepting inescapable loss, and admitting that some conflicts cannot be reconciled through uplift or philanthropy. But America’s elite culture, from Burns’ refashioned Founder worship to the donor class’s racial‑and-gender therapeutics, refuses to sit with this truth.

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There are several ways of understanding this. Joseph Campbell, the eminent scholar of comparative mythology, argued that once a culture’s great myths unravel, its leadership soon collapses. With this in mind, it’s easy to see that a mythical founding is deeply valuable to America’s plutocratic elites — ensuring citizens remain loyal, whether loyalty is deserved or not. It follows, meanwhile, that more challenging reinterpretations, ones embracing historical nuance and the sense that one’s gain is another’s loss, are never rewarded by the country’s rich and powerful. That’s hardly surprising — America’s elite has thrived off precisely this status quo. Such connections are implied right at the start of all Burns’s shows. For this most recent one, the list of centimillionaire estates underwriting the project takes nearly two full minutes to recite.

That hints at another, less grandiose reason, why progressive donors might fund cozily exceptionalist documentaries like The American Revolution. At bottom, after all, they endanger nothing of the economic system that allows elites to extract their wealth and accrue their outsized civic influence. It’s an irony compounded by the fact that Burns’s progressivism, if cringeworthy to the Right, is actually not much of a threat to anything that concerns the economic interests of their donor class. The whole fight, like most of the culture war, is one safely contained with the unconscious limits of exceptionalism. One side laments that the Revolution didn’t include women and minorities; the other not so much. “Was the American Founding great — or only great for its time?” That’s the full scope of the debate allowed about our national origin.

There’s a cultural element here too. For one thing, and notwithstanding the sniffiness of progressive academics, shows like The American Revolution allow funders to pose as fighting for “social justice” and righting the wrongs of US history by teaching the viewing public not to be “racist”, “sexist”, or “heteronormative”. It is a posture that flatters them, insulates them, and publicly distances them from the social conservatism most common among the poor and working classes.

By leaning into this cultural distance, meanwhile, the wealthy donor class believe they are properly socializing the Great Unwashed. Funding public programs that foreground “minority” voices allows establishment types to cleanse the reputational sins of family estates. Consider, here, a man like Alfred P. Sloan: a major and consistent funder of PBS programs, and someone who, as the long‑time head of General Motors, tirelessly worked to kill public transit systems all across the United States. Sloan’s cold-blooded campaign to uproot trolley and train systems helped destroy any shot at walkable communities or sane urban planning across most of Middle America. But now that his descendants fund documentaries on the Native American roots of the Bill of Rights, they can believe that the ledger is somehow cleared.

Taken together, anyway, these varied justifications for exceptionalist storytelling all serve the same purpose — helping us avoid seeing the nation as it actually is. A tragic place, pretending to be hopeful. A wounded empire, forcing a smile, performing optimism. A people desperate for meaning in a sea of digital emptiness, which still insists nothing truly irreversible has ever happened. Until we reclaim some ability to face our past without immediately laundering it into a dopey lesson or a posture, America will remain what it is now. A society that cannot tell its own story honestly, because it cannot bear to confront the cost of being itself.

We are a long way from the stiff-lipped loftiness of political eras past — particularly if you happen to be a woman, in which case you must now try your darndest to impress on the electorate that you are a “human”. How better to sugar the pill of making difficult decisions than to give voters behind-the-scenes access to your hopes, dreams and struggles with breastfeeding? Without these essential insights, we might think you’re slashing public services just to be mean. A century after women entered Parliament, half the battle seems to be an interminable task of identifying with the electorate.

This has been the approach, since the beginning of her political career, of the former leader of New Zealand. A flattering new documentary about Jacinda Ardern, Prime Minister, out in UK cinemas on Friday, does this relating thing relentlessly for nearly two hours. It succeeded enough to scoop a Sundance award and earn plaudits from reviewers for its “tender” portrayal of Ardern’s time in office and beyond: the slings and arrows of the electoral battles, volcanic eruptions, terror attacks and the Covid pandemic — plus the small matter of having a baby. Much of the footage is shot by her now husband Clarke Gayford, who captures her looking exhausted in various locales — bed, a taxi, an office. When Ardern announces her pregnancy, she starts by derpily telling the snappers outside her front door: “Well, this is normal!” She brings said baby to the UN General Assembly, and she cries to Crowded House in the final scene.

In one early clip, Ardern snaps back at snarky reporters who asked, before her precipitous rise to the top of national politics, whether she could lead a government at the age of 37. “Would you like to tell me why you don’t think I can?” Girlboss alert! When she wins, the moment is set to the strains of New Zealand’s most authentic daughter, Lorde (who has also perfected the art of the public personal struggle). After resigning in 2023, Ardern becomes a fellow at Harvard and marauds Massachusetts armed with a coffee, dangly earrings swaying. As if to explain the existence of this film, she tells seminars “we have to rehumanize one another again”. She also tells the UN that politics must start on a foundation of “kindness”, whatever that means.

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Rarely, if ever, are Ardern’s political decisions critiqued. This is a film about and for her, nevertheless its claims about her tenure are not explained or tested, heard only out of her mouth or those of fuming protesters. We hear, for example, that she “lifted” children out of poverty; we hear that her election-winning strategy, cobbled together seven weeks before polls opened due to the sudden resignation of Labour leader Andrew Little, consisted only of being “myself”. The viewer is asked to accept sentimentality in place of rigor. It is almost impossible to imagine a man asking the same. “I am human. Politicians are human,” Ardern says. When’s the last time you heard a bloke make that appeal? Why, then, must women?

Of course, as the story unfolds there are moments of delicious irony. Gayford snaffles Ardern’s favorite “pregnancy biscuits”, which are fortified to help women prepare for breastfeeding; in the dim light of the family kitchen Ardern teases him “are you worried about your lactation?”. How ridiculous that a man could lactate, right? But beyond those four walls, where throwaway jokes speak to sanity and reality, Ardern promoted gender politics where male breastfeeding would not be ridiculous at all. Her government conscientiously promoted self-ID. She removed the cap on how many gender-affirming surgeries the public could be expected to pay for. She introduced a sweeping ban on conversion therapy, heedless of the chilling effect on clinical or therapeutic caution. She also backed Laurel Hubbard’s selection to represent New Zealand in women’s weightlifting at the Tokyo Olympics. Hubbard is over six foot tall and a man. So why is the idea of a man breastfeeding so funny? It’s his human right.

Trading off political coherence with tenderness, humanity or the like is not a good deal, for the viewer or the voter. The fact is that those in high office are not just like us: they have immense power and bulging portfolios, and face relentless pressure from a public poised to despise them. They have armies of advisors, drivers and aides. They don’t go to supermarkets. If they go to the pub, it is to a private room — or else in the presence of a bank of photographers yearning to snap foam on the leader’s lip. It is a politician’s privilege to be more important and more lucky than most of her constituents. The perks of power — chauffeurs, caterers, the rare ability to afford childcare — ensure a government has no excuse but to do a good job. These public-funded luxuries allow us to hold leaders to higher standards. I don’t want “one of us” to hold the nuclear codes: this person must be exceptional.

So why is “rehumanizing” such a high priority for the political class today? The Left is withstanding a positive epidemic of relatability. Everywhere we look, our elected officials are stooping to our level to pinch our cheeks; it’s grimly undignified for all involved. Britain’s Prime Minister, flanked by his dour Education Secretary, is flailing his hands in a mimed juggling motion in a Peterborough primary school: “Everybody, six-seven,” Starmer bleats in desperation, like a sheep wedged in a ditch. Our Chancellor, to fend off backlash before a Budget which snatches thin gruel from young Brits to further fatten plump pensioners, gives interviews to national newspapers in which she complains about “mansplaining” from her critics. Any appraisal of Rachel Reeves’s policy, the comment suggested, was personal, sexist and unjust.

In fairness, the Times interview which drew so much ire did include some professionalism: urged by the reporter to talk about “my recipe for Yorkshire puddings or what really made me cry” (at the dispatch box in July), Reeves counters that “people don’t want to read about [that]”. She wanted to show them, instead, “that they can trust me with their money”; “I’m not a public personality. I’m not in showbusiness. I’m the chancellor.” Quite right, Rachel! Reintroducing a frosty remoteness to public office would lend politics, and in particular this beleaguered Chancellor, some “headroom” to get on with the job — a little personal distance would go a long way. A shame, then, that in order to drive this point home Reeves continued: “I’m a mom with two kids. I’m a wife and a daughter. I wasn’t born into this and I’m just trying to do my best.”

Oh, as long as you’re trying your best! Whoever the public elects, man or woman, should be effective enough not to have to constantly appeal to their humanness and vulnerability. Situating the struggles of being a female politician in particular within the compensatory context of family life is a dire and regressive technique; were it Richard Reeves we were dealing with, we would never expect him to sweeten the pot of debilitating tax rises by reminding us that he is “a son”. The entire performance of relatability, endemic in contemporary politics, smacks of a hostage looking a gunman in the eye to stop him shooting: when women do it, what it reveals is not that these are exceptional operators who do it all and want us to bloody well know it, but that these are women scared of the public and insecure in their positions. In this, the vitriolic and often violent electorate is also to blame.

For schoolgirls following the tenure of the first female British chancellor, or the Millennial role model Jacinda Ardern, or indeed any number of Labour women — Jess Phillips, Stella Creasy, Angela Rayner — who constantly appeal to their inspirational stories of personal strife, the message is not that women can do anything. It’s that if you insist on doing it, you must also constantly roleplay apologetic femininity. How often do we hear these women speak about “imposter syndrome” — about how lucky they are to be there at all? The logic is that this framing excuses a shoddy job, or ideological lameness, or media mistakes. Male politicians, particularly white ones, almost never retreat to aspirational stories about their boyhood ambitions because they don’t have to explain why they’re there. Women do not either. To restore some of politics’ prestige and mystique, we must insist on a new contract with the public: seriousness, distance and inscrutability in exchange for a baseline of respect.

They might be wearing Hugo Boss and driving Volkswagens, but Nazis don’t really seem to live on the same planet as us; and that’s why, maybe, Nazi content is sort of like True Crime or UFO stories. And, of course, there’s the taboo part of it: most of the Holocaust freaks I’ve known are either Jewish or anti-Semitic, all of them fascinated by this primal bloodlust that it’s more polite to ignore.

But where does Albert Speer fit into this narrative? Hitler’s Minister of Armaments and lead architect, known for his grandiose designs for the “Thousand Year Reich”, was one of the lucky Nazis. He was sent to prison for 20 years, but afterwards he was able to profit from his actions: in 1970, the man who had commanded an estimated 12 million slave labourers, about 2.5 million of whom died, wrote a best-selling memoir, Inside the Third Reich. He was later approached by Kubrick-protégé Andrew Birkin about a film adaptation, and, in conversations that Birkin recorded as they workshopped their screenplay in 1972, downplayed his relationship with Hitler and his knowledge of wartime atrocities. Fortunately, Paramount Pictures did not pick up the script, and it was not produced.

I couldn’t help asking myself, while watching Vanessa Lapa’s Speer Goes to Hollywood, composed of dramatisations of those Birkin recordings and footage from the Nuremberg trials: what is the point of Nazi documentaries, and why am I watching one? I suppose the straightforward answer is Holocaust Remembrance, as with Yom HaShoah and public memorials and the Holocaust Studies lessons that are mandatory in sixteen US states.

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But if Holocaust remembrance is really the point of Holocaust documentaries, I’m not sure these films are up to the task. The most Holocaust-conscious people I know have tended to be, let’s say, “Holocaust-critical independent researchers”, like the shaved-head kid with an Iron Cross ring that sat in the front of my college Holocaust Studies class and “asked a lot of questions”. I think he may have thought it was a workshop.

I’ve never met someone who doesn’t know the phrase “six million”, but I’ve known a number that would say “six million sounds like a lot”, and I’m not sure Speer Goes to Hollywood is going to make much of a difference for them. If these films are simply preaching to the choir, that’s fine; but does that mean Nazi films are just True Crime for boys?

That said, I suppose Nazi documentaries may still serve some salutary function in American society. In an era of increasing groupthink and hyperpoliticisation, we might consider that Nazi eugenicists were, actually, “following the science”, with the eager collaboration of leading American scientists funded by the Rockefellers. And with today’s poorly educated often decried as “Nazis”, we might do well to reflect that the German profession that voted for the Nazi party in the highest numbers was physicians. Speer might fit in there: reminding us that Nazis can be charming, well-spoken, and professional.

Perhaps there’s some value in Hannah Arendt’s idea of “the banality of evil”: that evildoers aren’t scary, “perverted and sadistic” monsters, but instead thoughtless, “terrifyingly normal” joiners. Arendt’s thesis has since been criticised as more research shows that Adolf Eichmann did, actually, have some real ideological investment in the extermination of the Jews. However, as a general rule, there’s some truth there: people tend to think they’re doing the right thing, or at least not committing a crime against humanity — and they tend to do the easiest thing under the circumstances.

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But how do you show banality in film, a medium designed to hypnotise the masses with spectacle and splendour? The most obvious answer can be found in Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour-long Shoah (1985); a 355-minute torrent of interviews about the most revolting atrocities, described through minute, twist-of-the-knife probing, but with almost nothing to see. There aren’t photographs; there aren’t newsreels; there aren’t, God forbid, animations. There’s mostly absence: the empty field of stones and grass where there was Treblinka, the grey pond, wide and boring, where thousands of Jews’ ashes were dumped. And, sometimes, that absence extends to the interviews, showing how the Final Solution was executed by commonplace acts and with, even, commonplace feeling: in one chilling interview, a few residents of the village of Auschwitz calmly, undramatically, say they’re happy the Jews are gone.

Speer Goes to Hollywood doesn’t have the visual subtlety of Shoah; it’s more or less what you’d expect, built on familiar black-and-white archival images of rallies, camps and propaganda. But I suppose it, actually, implicitly denies the banality of an evil thesis. Speer mythologised himself in two ways: first, that he was a great architect, and second, that he wasn’t interested in genocide, just in making some really impressive buildings. As he says, “I was just 29 and I would have sold my soul to Mephisto”.

Yet his explanations, an exercise in cognitive dissonance, are sometimes inadvertently absurd in their coldness: for example, when talking about the Jews in Weimar Berlin, he says: “I can’t really say [I had] an anti-Semitic feeling. It was a feeling of disgust when I saw it.” He later claims that though he knew Hitler was planning to annihilate the Jews, he had “no direct knowledge” of the camps since a friend had told him never to go to Auschwitz because “terrible things [were] happening there”.

But however hard he was trying to whitewash himself, he still comes across as narcissistic and deluded. When he emerges from prison, he cheerily says to excited journalists: “You see that after 20 years I’m still relatively good looking”. And when Birkin tells him that “Paramount and the Jewish Brigade associated with them” (wow!) have rejected the script, since only two out of its one-hundred-ten pages address the extermination of the Jews (wow!), Speer states, “That is their problem” (wow!).

Paramount didn’t produce the film, but ‘the Speer myth’ — this poor handsome man; he had no idea what they were doing at those funny places out East — did make him millions in book royalties. Still, I’m not sure how many Holocaust-heads today truly believe that he didn’t know about the camps, given that correspondence released in 2007 made it clear he was lying.

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And yet he still commands a unique fascination. Perhaps Speer seemed less obscene; perhaps, 15 years after the end of the war, his “poor-me” memoirs made mankind seem kinder. I don’t know. Speer was a weird figure. And he was neither a politician nor a military man; he was an architect and urbanist, a fairly influential pioneer of sustainable building and planning. He was also a moving writer, who wrote of Hitler’s unhappiness and Eva Braun’s loneliness in ways that are genuinely absorbing. He was almost respectable.

Here’s the thing, though: he was still an official in the Nazi Party, who, as his own book makes clear, was intimate with Hitler, Goebbels, and the whole gang. It’s clear why Speer lied, and not all that surprising how he lied: the real question, which this latest film and countless before fail to ask, is why anyone believed him.

But this announcement barely made the news outside the state. What was once so shocking has become mundane. An independent commission in France released a report that 200,000 minors have been abused by clergy over the last 70 years; the New York Times piece about it showed up in my social media feeds maybe twice, before disappearing back into the vast sea of suffering that is the daily news.

What I get in my feed instead is advertisements. Ads for documentaries, limited series, and films about the church abuse scandal. For four years, Netflix has been trying to get me to watch The Keepers, a seven-part true crime series about the murder of a nun who may have been killed because she knew a priest was sexually abusing students at their high school. (Like most cold case true crime, the investigation doesn’t solve anything, and the whole thing ends with a shrug and an implied “somebody should do something about this.”) HBO will occasionally check to see if I want to watch Mea Maxima Culpa — about a priest sexually abusing students at a deaf school — or perhaps one of its many other shows about a religious institution ruining the lives of countless people who turned to it for care.

And now we have Robert Greene’s Procession, which has been making the rounds at the festivals and found itself a home on Netflix last week. Inspired by a Kansas City press conference at which men made public their accusations against clergy of the local diocese, Greene contacted the lawyer representing these survivors and asked if they’d be interested in a collaboration. The result is a two-hour hybrid film that mixes documentary footage of these men discussing their experiences with artistic renderings of their most traumatic moments, created with the help of a drama therapist.

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The men, unable to confront their tormentors directly, get another perspective on the incidents that haunt them; they get to control the action and how it’s represented. But each survivor finds himself stuck on a different moment in his suffering. It’s hard for the victims to step inside a cathedral, to smell the triggering aroma of incense, to touch the garments of priests. Still, they’re willing to do it to help another man deal with his trauma. It’s genuinely moving to watch them support one another, defending one another against the occasional insensitivity of the filmmakers, enduring difficult moments.

But as I watched one break down upon arrival at the lakehouse where he was taken by priests to be abused, I found myself wondering: why exactly am I watching this? The show was beautifully shot — and structured to hit the pleasure points of emotional catharsis, outrage at injustice, heartwarming empathy. Still, it shocks me to think how frequently I am being entertained by the stories of the worst and darkest moments of a person’s life.

Especially when these people have so often been utterly failed by the public institutions that ought to protect them. Around 40% of the homicides in the United States aren’t solved by the police, and tens of thousands of people remain missing after disappearing from their lives without a trace. Of course we have a glut of cold case true crime shows. Our justice system regularly imprisons the innocent, so activists turn to filmmakers to adjudicate the injustices in the public sphere. Political actors struggle to get their issues taken seriously — from environmental catastrophe to animal abuse to the disappearance of abortion rights — so commission dramatic documentaries in the hopes of “raising awareness” and forcing action.

For the most part, these shows don’t make anything happen. People have been crediting a Netflix documentary with exonerating two men imprisoned for the assassination of Malcolm X. The hit show Blackfish helped pressure SeaWorld to end its captive breeding program for orcas. But murders remain unsolved, disappearances remain unexplained, our political class refuses to pass meaningful legislation. As I was watching Dopesick on Hulu — about the opioid epidemic and the role the Sackler family played in creating and prolonging it — I got an alert on my phone that the Sacklers had won a deal granting them immunity from lawsuits. Adnan Syed has been the subject of both the blockbuster podcast Serial and an HBO documentary series, but he is still serving a life sentence for a murder there is real doubt he committed. Meanwhile the structural problems that allow these injustices to take place have not been reformed.

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The men featured in Procession don’t have many options in seeking resolution to their suffering. They’re shut out from the justice system — because of the statute of limitations — and estranged from the religious community. Perhaps the only way to get their voices heard is through the entertainment industry. If a man’s story is unique enough, if his suffering interesting enough, and he is charismatic enough, he can act as a representative for all the thousands of victims and survivors. And sometimes that will give him some relief, and maybe it will pressure the Church to push his case forward and offer him a financial settlement, but it doesn’t seem to do much for the collective.

And if you’re not interesting or charismatic or unique? If you didn’t suffer stoically and quietly, but instead self-medicated with opioids or alcohol? If you’re just angry all of the time now, or have found yourself hurting others in the same way you yourself were hurt — if, in short, you wouldn’t be a sympathetic character in a television show? We as an audience have decided you’re not really worthy of our attention, and therefore not worthy of being taken care of.

And so the show reminds me less of those occasional hard-hitting documentaries that do effect change, and more of that other hot Netflix program Queer Eye. Out of all of the people in the country suffering from loneliness, despair and confusion, a select few — who must, it goes without saying, be sympathetic — are chosen to receive aid. They get a makeover, social support, appliances. Their home is redecorated to look just like a (nice) AirBnB property. And all they have to do is tell their story — about how their lives got derailed — to the whole world.

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We have confused paying attention to injustice with actually doing something about it. The stories in Procession are not being told to goad me into action: I’m not called on to lobby my representative to ask them to reform the statute of limitations. The creators may have had the best of intentions: raise awareness, change hearts and minds, make the world a better place. But the sad truth is that we, the audience, are not being edified, we are simply being entertained. Procession is just meant to be something to watch, on my couch, while I shove a cheese sandwich in my mouth, and after it’s over Netflix will suggest that I follow it up with an episode of Seinfeld or perhaps a five part series about an unsolved murder in Spain.

Neal Gabler writes in Life: The Movie (How Entertainment Conquered Reality): “Abhorring dead air, compelled to keep us stimulated lest we switch channels or switch off the set altogether, television took everything on its screen and converted it into entertainment.” If that was true about television, the switch to streaming services is like chasing a Tylenol down with Fentanyl. We are meant never to turn away, and the services know that the more horrifying, the more heartbreaking, the more outrageous the content, the more we are likely to binge on it. And what if, as one show flows into another, as we become more and more informed about an issue, we become less and less likely to do anything about it? We are confident, after all, that the story is “out there”: surely someone, somewhere will do something about it?

If that intrigued you, you could sign up for one of its “Executive Success Programs” (ESPs for short), which promised to help you overcome your “limiting beliefs”, or the “Jness” scheme for “female empowerment”. The centres also don’t exist anymore and nor do the ESPs or Jness or any of Nxivm’s other vowel-light offerings; in fact, the entire organisation was wound up in 2018, because Nxivm was not after all a benign vendor of self-improvement snake oil.

Nxivm, as two new true crime documentaries explore, was a sex cult in which women were enslaved, trafficked, abused and branded. The brand was a design consisting of the letters “KR”, in tribute to Nxivm’s founder and leader Keith Raniere (or “Vanguard”, as Nxivm inductees called him). In 2019, Raniere was convicted on seven counts including sex trafficking and child pornography; he’s currently serving a life sentence.

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At what point in the Nxivm process might you have realised something wasn’t right? Perhaps in the very first session you went to, when you were made to relive some traumatic experience in front of the audience in order to achieve a supposed “breakthrough”. But maybe you would have been reassured by the celebrity endorsements (Allison Mack, the woman from the Superman show!) or the general sense of good intention.

Perhaps, it was as you were completing your first course — but then, these were very expensive and you’d wanted to get your money’s worth. (One ex-member says she spent $145,000 on classes over the years.) Or perhaps when you were invited to join the ultra-elite secret society DOS, which stood for “Dominus Obsequious Sororium” — a bastardised Latin phrase roughly meaning “master over the slave women”. The woman inviting you would be someone you looked up to in this organisation, someone you trusted, a friend.

In any case, once you were in, you would be too compromised to think of getting out, because DOS members were required to hand over “collateral”: naked pictures or exposing information. Anyway, who would you turn to? Nxivm taught its members that anyone who criticised it was a “suppressive”; if you were close to friends or family, you would be commanded to separate from them in order to resolve your “dependency issues”.

When you were set a target weight that meant only eating 500 calories a day, or punished with cold showers, or given the task of “seducing Vanguard” in order to overcome your “limiting beliefs”, it would be too late to even think about saying no. By the time you were subjected to the brand, nothing beyond this would make sense to you. The next time, you’d be the one holding it.

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The point is, Nxivm worked like a ratchet. To progress up each level of the organisation, you had to swallow more than your dignity would easily allow you to take back. And this is how every cult and every scam works (before Raniere got into the self-improvement racket, he was plying regular pyramid schemes) – by pulling on that thread in your chest where all the shame is. You obey your “master” and pay tribute to “Vanguard” (Vanguard!) because if you stop believing in it, all the humiliation and the crotch shots and the pain will be for nothing.

It’s not really possible to brainwash someone, if by brainwashing you mean to take control of their psyche wholesale and force them into actions against their will. But you can, by a process of habituating shocks, force someone to surrender their sense of self over time; to give up any relationships that would challenge the values you want them to hold; to do things, not against their will, but because they know in advance what they have to do to win approval.

Nxivm’s real genius was to use the jargon of female empowerment to guide this process. After all, what kind of woman is most likely to be attracted to the idea of being “empowered”? Ones who, by definition, don’t feel very powerful. Ones who, for whatever reason, are going to be particularly vulnerable. The cult taught a gospel of “self-victimisation” — if you felt like a victim, you could liberate yourself simply by deciding whatever had happened to you wasn’t that bad. It sounded like a way to shrug off trauma; it was, of course, a way to make women feel wholly responsible for whatever was done to them.

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If you participated in the Jness course, you would learn that the way to thrive as a woman was to accept that men are “linear and logical” while women “lack structure” and need to submit. If you went one stage further and took the “Society of Protectors” relationship training in the belief that this could help you understand men better, you’d actually be subjected to a schedule of physical and psychological humiliation: the aim, the women were told, was to show them what a male upbringing was like and teach them that they couldn’t “get away with things” because they were female. The effect, of course, was to drill women into accepting the deeply sexist belief that women are inferior and exist to serve men.

But the complicating point here is that the people who did many of the worst things in Nxivm were not men. Raniere’s second-in-command was a woman, Nancy Salzman. She pleaded guilty to offences, as did her daughter; so did Mack, the Smallville actress, who was in the layer directly below Raniere in the DOS structure. Mack recruited several female slaves of her own, including India Oxenberg, daughter of Dynasty star Catherine Oxenberg. India (whose documentary Seduced: Inside the Nxivm Cult attempts to make sense of her own experience) had another three slave women under her. The roles of victim and accomplice overlap and blur, though the power all draws up towards Raniere, whose sexual desires were paramount.

Clearly, fear is the reason most of these women collaborated, but for some of them that fear was surely mixed with a less creditable motivation: because, if you want to talk about “empowerment”, the moment you hold a cauterising iron over another woman’s skin is pretty undeniably a moment of power. Sometimes, knowing how it feels to be a victim is no guarantee of compassion for the next person to take your place — it just means you know that you really don’t want to go back there. Subjects of social media pile-ons can become fervent participants in attacks on other people. Trafficked women sometimes make highly efficient brothel madams. Being bullied is a wonderful education in how to bully.

It doesn’t take a cult to make women hurt other women, degrade other women, believe insulting things about women as a whole, take the side of men over women. Women do this kind of thing to themselves and each other all the time — in the name of religion, or politics, or sexual liberation. Give up any claim to power in your own right, and grasp at the next best thing while stamping on your sisters’ fingers. The weirdest thing about Nxivm, when you strip out all the lurid horrors, is how not-weird it looks.

Once the two minutes were up, little Sara looked at me and asked: “You know that man with the beard? Is he good or is he bad?”

I love the honesty of children. Throughout the past three years of documenting Jordan Peterson’s phenomenal, controversial, influential catapult onto the world stage following his public criticism of Canadian human rights legislation, political correctness, identity politics and the release of his overwhelmingly successful self-help book 12 Rules for Life, I’ve been asked the same question Sara asked me in different forms by journalists, strangers, friends and colleagues. Whose side are you on? Do you think he’s right or wrong? Is he having a positive impact or is he dangerous?

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I intentionally mirrored the essence of this question in the trailer as a starting place for the film. Not only does Peterson’s name divide a room, but any two media sources will paint starkly divergent pictures of him and his ideas. Of course this is not unique to Peterson, but it is striking.

It seems that being objective or unbiased is no longer viewed as a high value in journalism or documentary film-making. The keynote address at the last Hot Docs, North America’s largest documentary film festival, focused on the question: whose stories are being told by whom? The popular and applauded ethos in documentary film-making now is identity-driven stories made by people of those identities.

Part of the rationale for this is the fact that there’s a history of insensitive and ignorant film-making that caricatured indigenous peoples and members of minority groups, which has led to this approach to documentary film culture. We also know there’s no such thing as being unbiased and we know that people who are not from particular identity groups are less likely to understand the experience of people within those groups. But we’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater if the new moral imperative is to be solely one with your tribe and to tell positive stories to advance the goals of that tribe, especially at the expense of truth. One can argue that all art is propaganda, but there are certainly degrees of difference.

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While following this story, the undercurrent of the culture wars was very salient to me. I was struck by the way Peterson rose to stardom as a polarising figure, embodying both the hero and the villain. So much so that even my documentary about him has become controversial. Complaints by cinema staff led to three screening cancellations — one for a week-long run in Toronto that was scheduled to follow our premiere in September.

And all of this came after many mainstream and arthouse cinemas declined to show the film because of fear of controversy, fear of social reprimand, or ethical and safety concerns related to drawing in Jordan Peterson fans. The film isn’t a celebratory fluff piece, however, nor is it a hit piece, but even when this was acknowledged, the nuance of the film was also seen as a setback. People will pay money to watch feel-good films about their heroes, not to see complexity, I was told.

I began this film in 2015 with interest in a human story. But when Peterson published the controversial Professor Against Political Correctness videos in 2016, he drew a line at what he believed he should be forced to say, and many people drew a line at him — it was no longer ethical to humanise him. It forced me to consider the question: as a film-maker, when does it become unethical to explore a person or topic in a film? I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this and I continue to land in the same place: I think any person or topic is fair game, but it’s the approach and treatment that matters.

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Interestingly, I’ve also faced resistance to the film’s human approach from a completely different angle. Some people want to engage with the myth of Jordan Peterson only in the realm of ideas, not as a human being. They don’t want to hear from his wife and close friends (and enemies); they want to hear him talk about philosophy and religion and the meaning of life.

On one hand, I understand the desire to find the discussion of ideas in the film, if that’s what drew you to Peterson. After all, that’s what caught my attention 15 years ago, but those ideas are already all over the internet. I wasn’t interested in a talking-head film about ideas; I wanted to explore how living out those ideas manifests in real life. And it’s messy. I can’t help wonder if deep down this reaction is a rejection of the discomfort that comes with the unknown and seeing vulnerable human beings in a messy world where theories become imperfect. 

Similarly, the cancellations of our film screenings came from staff complaints of discomfort with the film content. To see Peterson as a human being — captivating, flawed, vulnerable — is to come out of the ideological zone of right and wrong, of the identity-based ethos of privileged white man versus vulnerable trans people, of black and white. Such social analysis based on identity does have its value, but it’s limiting and, taken strictly, it can be dangerous.

Working on this film forced me to endure uncomfortable ethical questioning. And it seemed to me that if there’s one thing I could contribute to the culture wars, I hoped it could be a framing that is grounded in humanity.

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The trailer for The Rise of Jordan Peterson ends with an impromptu moment I captured while setting up an interview with Peterson. He unexpectedly said: “Are we ready? Then we can do this. This is what I actually look like” as he looked into the camera lens. Then he leaned down and pulled a mask over his face and said: “This is what people who don’t like me think I look like.” The green mask with devil horns, a Kwakwaka’wakw wild-man mask carved by his friend, the artist Charles Joseph, looks like a monster. 

There are many layers to this moment. Peterson believes that you can’t be a good person unless you’re also a monster. You need to meet and understand your dark side in order to avoid letting it take over you. You also need to have a spine so you don’t become a pushover, easily overtaken by someone else’s scheme. Another layer is the idea cited by the Russian author and critic of the Soviet Union, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, that the line between good and evil runs through the human heart. 

At that moment on camera, I asked Peterson: “Which one is real?”

“Good question,” he said as he placed the mask down. With serious intensity, he replied: “They’re both real.”

Every good film reveals both the specific and the universal. And yes, Peterson is both, and so are we all.

The Rise of Jordan Peterson is available for pre-order on Apple TV and will be available to watch on other digital platforms worldwide on 8 November

The bare outlines of this story go like this: once upon a time there was a Luton schoolgirl; a nice friendly girl but not apparently exceptional in any way. At 15 she leaves school without much in the way of qualifications and then does a series of local jobs. She works as a shop assistant at Luton Airport and in a hairdressers’ salon. So far so ordinary. And then (this is where the magic wand first does its stuff) she successfully applies to get involved in a BBC TV show that aims to take a group of fashion-obsessed young people to the sweatshops of Asia where the disposable fashion they so heedlessly consume is made.

One of the production team who made that programme – it was called Blood, Sweat and T-shirts – saw talent in Stacey and backing a hunch devised a series of investigations with her as the reporter. That was 10 years ago and Stacey has never looked back. She has clocked up more than 50 programmes. If you scroll through her credits the titles come out and hit you between the eyes: Kids for Sale, Sex-trafficking in Cambodia, Panorama: Stacey Meets the IS Brides, Sex, Stags and Prague, Young Sex for Sale in Japan. To be fair her oeuvre is not all about sex – most of it is not – but she is drawn to (or pointed in the direction of) subjects that have a tabloidy feel and are, supposedly, of particular interest to the young.

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Stacey’s story is never going to serve as a useful career guide to the thousands of bright, cheerful, poorly educated young people out there. The magic wand touches only one in a million and no one can predict where next its golden touch will land, but Stacey’s story is nevertheless uplifting. She deserves her luck because she holds her own in a tough business.

Stacey brings something to the screen that is both appealing and rare: the confidence to be herself. Many TV professionals lack this; they might be competent at getting information across but in the process many become de-personalised and end up as mere vectors. That is not Stacey’s way; she is always there, still in some ways the girl from the hairdressing salon but transported to a foreign location where, more often than not, human tragedy is in the air.

I read a survey once which claimed that of all occupational groups hairdressers were the happiest. This was ascribed to the fact that they spend their days talking to people while performing a simple, personal service; small-talk (or “phatic communication”, as the linguists would have it) is a human device to establish a mood of sociability and cooperation. And unlike so many heavyweight TV current-affairs performers, who come burdened with the weight of the world’s misery on their shoulders, Stacey seems happy even in the face of tragedy. This is not to say she doesn’t empathise – she definitely does – but her persona is that of the sunbeam.

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Dooley’s success has not made her universally popular. There was a flurry of criticism a few weeks ago when her Panorama film about western women who had become the wives of Islamic State fighters got a detail wrong. A gesture these deluded souls make with their index fingers was said by Dooley to be an “IS salute”. This clip from the programme was released as a trailer and immediately provoked a social media storm by those people ever-protective of Islam’s image; in fact, they said, the gesture was a symbol of ‘tawhid’ representing the oneness of Allah. Stacey and the BBC apologised but such spats seem unlikely to derail Dooley’s career.

She is much resented by some other journalists. With so many programmes now under her belt Dooley herself clearly is a journalist. But her credentials in this regard are still under challenge. One well-known female columnist and commentator loftily dismissed her Panorama offering with the phrase: “let’s not pretend we’re dealing with any kind of journalist”.

There has always been a tendency among journalists to regard themselves as a special caste uniquely endowed to interpret the world. In British current-affairs TV what are especially prized are those twin sacred cows, objectivity and impartiality; these are the supposed hallmark of the heavyweight reporter, who generally also comes straitjacketed into a rigid political correctness. In practice, ‘objectivity’ and ‘impartiality’ lead to awkwardly contrived standpoints at odds with the common sense of the viewing public.

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Had someone other than Dooley been sent off to meet the IS wives I have no doubt that western governments – our own in particular – would have been put in the dock for some perceived wickedness. You get none of that with Stacey. With her you get an authentic emotional reaction; she clearly didn’t much like the IS women and deplored their choices, and I’m with her on that. She’s not pretending to be objective about the plight of these foolish women and their children – she’s just looking on, horrified, and inviting us to share her feelings.

You wouldn’t want every presenter to do it the Dooley way; that would be too much of the good thing. She was always going to be a one-off rather than mainstream, and in being so she is a refreshing and necessary antidote to so much that is solemn, pompous and phoney about current affairs television.

Stacey’s apotheosis was when she won Strictly Come Dancing in 2018. I thought at the time that that might be the moment her journalistic career fell away beneath her like a spent booster rocket as she continued into the higher reaches of Celebristan. But that didn’t happen, and Stacey has remained true to her calling. Bravo then for Stacey and bravo too for the BBC which spotted, then nurtured and now supports her distinctive brand of citizen journalism.