Entertainment
‘American Nightmare’ Finds A ‘Gone Girl’ Spin On The Docuseries Formula Of Life Imitating Art
One of the favourite techniques of current docuseries and reality shows is to blur the borders between fact and fiction, telling storylines that play on the audience’s experience with Lifetime films and other types of drama. What distinguishes “American Nightmare,” Netflix’s latest twist on that template, is watching the cops succumb to the same mindset, believing that life purposefully mirrored art.
The summary of what happened in 2015 is almost too weird to believe: Aaron Quinn and Denise Huskins, a young couple, had their home broken into, and someone drugged and bound him before kidnapping her. Huskins was eventually found hundreds of miles away, claiming her unseen captor had raped her before he let her go.
Like many productions in this genre, “American Nightmare” draws on videos of interviews filmed inside the police station, TV news stories, current interviews with persons involved, and authorities’ growing scepticism of Quinn’s story. Even the episode endings are cliffhanger-style.
What truly made the case resonate with the media was the allegation that Huskins had orchestrated a hoax reminiscent of the film “Gone Girl,” in which a woman fakes her disappearance. The film, starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, was released the previous year and was based on a well-known book.
‘American Nightmare’ Finds A ‘Gone Girl’ Spin On The Docuseries Formula Of Life Imitating Art
The overt resemblance to “Gone Girl” makes “American Nightmare” stand out, but stylistically it is far from original. Indeed, there has been a strong temptation to create reality shows based on movie concepts – see Netflix’s “Squid Game: The Challenge” for a recent example – as well as docuseries that unfold like the kind of murder mysteries found on NBC’s “Dateline,” Oxygen, or Investigation Discovery.
In the current era of reality television, the tactic has resulted in some remarkable excesses. 2007, for example, CBS aired “Kid Nation,” a series based on the book-turned-movie “The Lord of the Flies,” which placed children in a remote New Mexico location to see if they could form a society. The contentious show was cancelled after one season.
‘American Nightmare’ Finds A ‘Gone Girl’ Spin On The Docuseries Formula Of Life Imitating Art
“American Nightmare” is notable for coming from the makers of “The Tinder Swindler,” which centred on a man who attracted women and then duped them out of their money, a premise included in another docuseries, “Love Fraud.” Both used dramatic reenactments in their interviews, with one victim, Cecilie Fjellhøy, stating, “What happened to me felt like a movie.” This further blurred the lines between the two.
Movies and television provide a useful form of shorthand for digesting uncommon experiences, which used to drive people to wonder (or inquire) if they were on ‘Candid Camera’, a show that staged elaborate pranks when something strange happened to them.
‘American Nightmare’ Finds A ‘Gone Girl’ Spin On The Docuseries Formula Of Life Imitating Art
Today, cameras are everywhere, including the palms of our hands, but how we digest information through dramatic storytelling remains mostly unchanged. What made “American Nightmare” so unnerving is that, rather than believing a lady who claimed to have been assaulted, the police appeared to rapidly shift to that mentality as well.
“American Nightmare” is currently streaming on Netflix.
SOURCE – (CNN)