Blogorium Review: Exit Through the Gift Shop

Stop me when this becomes unbelievable: a French expatriate living in Los Angeles with a compulsive need to film every moment of his life is related to a street artist nicknamed Space Invader, and so he begins following his cousin and other street artists around, documenting their work. He eventually meets all of the big names in street art, including Shepard Fairey (responsible for the Andre the Giant "OBEY" stencils) and finally hits the holy grail of renegade artists by entering the world of Banksy, the notoriously secretive UK graffiti and sculptor.

The entire time he's been filming these artists, our protagonist has been promising to make a documentary he has no plans of ever compiling, but when Banksy's LA show results in a series of misunderstandings about art and commerce, he's challenged to release the nonexistent film. Editing the footage together into Life Remote Control, he takes it to Banksy, who is mortified by the incomprehensible collage of images. Understanding the the documentarian has begun - in earnest - a series of graffiti projects himself, Banksy offers to take the footage and edit it himself, asking the Frenchman to go back to Los Angeles and put together a "little art show." Instead, the filmmaker-cum-artist pours all of his finances into creating as many pop art pieces as possible, rents the abandoned CBS studios, and throws an art show extravaganza - without knowing how to do any of this - titled "Life is Beautiful," becoming an art sensation almost overnight, and effectively hijacking his own film from Banksy.

It can't possibly be true, right? Pick any point in the two paragraphs above and call "shenanigans," and most people would agree with you on the spot. Yet, Banksy's documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop is just that story: it's "subject," Thierry Guetta, spent years documenting the street art movement, completely without a plan to do anything with the footage. He lied to all of the artists when they asked what he was going to do after filming them, and when Banksy finally appealed to Thierry to "set things straight," he was forced to make something. From the clips we see of Life Remote Control, it's clear that Guetta has no idea how to put together his footage in a coherent manner, and Banksy takes over. Thierry decides to take Banksy's suggestion to continue his burgeoning art past time, becomes Mr. Brainwash (MBW) and uses quote from Fairey (also responsible for the iconic Obama painting) and Banksy to score a cover story in LA Weekly, catapulting him to "star" status while relying on a small army of assistants to create his art, put together the installation, and organize his paintings the day of the show.

It still sounds too unreal to be true, but here's the LA Weekly article. Here are links to the Banksy visit to Disneyland documented in the film, where the artist placed an inflated Guantanamo Bay prisoner in the middle of a ride. All of the totally out there, "no way that really happened" footage can be tracked somewhere. Mr. Brainwash did, in fact, design the cover art for Madonna's Celebration "greatest hits" cd. There is speculation that Mr. Brainwash may not actually exist (google "Mr. Brainwash hoax"), suggesting that Banksy and Shepard Fairey conspired to create Exit Through the Gift Shop as a prank, which would, if ever confirmed, place the documentary in a similar category as Joaquin Phoenix and Casey Affleck's I'm Still Here. However, without any certainty, there is something else that goes widely unnoticed while watching the film, something so sneaky that whether Exit Through the Gift Shop is true or false, it merits discussion.

Banksy does such a fine job of telling Thierry's story that one tends to forget his role in the film: the second half of the movie - the part dealing with Mr. Brainwash's rise - happens because Banksy is allegedly putting together Guetta's street art footage together into a coherent documentary - presumably the first half of the film. However - and this is the clever bit you don't notice until you think about it - who is filming the footage of Thierry's transformation into Mr. Brainwash? If the case is that Thierry is continuing to film himself, which is the most likely, then the second half of the film is Guetta's and not Banksy's. Banksy allows the audience to believe that, even chiming via interviews talking about the Mr. Brain Wash phenomenon as an observer.

But we know that Thierry is incapable of making a coherent film, so even if he shot the footage leading into Mr. Brainwash's show, Banksy is the likely editor of the footage; otherwise, why would it be a part of the documentary at all? Exit Through the Gift Shop is so cleverly constructed that audiences don't notice the sleight of hand on Banksy's part, tricking us into thinking his documentary was hijacked midway when he sent Thierry Guetta home in order to be able to turn Life Remote Control into Exit Through the Gift Shop.

Additionally, Rhys Ifans, who narrates the film, also appears to be the heavily distorted voice attributed to "Banksy," who appears digitally blurred throughout Exit Through the Gift Shop. If you listen to the narration and the interviews with Banksy, if Ifans is not "portraying" Banksy or, as some have argued, "is" Banksy in the film, then he's certainly part of the artifice at work in misdirecting our attention from the reclusive artist towards the contrived - and often inconceivable - story of Thierry Guetta / Mr. Brainwash. The turn of Guetta from a sympathetic - if unreliable - filmmaker to the egotistical Mr. Brainwash overshadows the film, and Banksy allows his hand in crafting Exit Through the Gift Shop to vanish behind louder voices - at least until one reflects on the film.

True or false, document or experiment, Exit Through the Gift Shop is essential viewing, if for nothing else the fact that it raises more questions after completion that one could hope to answer, which is the job of any great work. Besides that, it's hard to turn away from the story presented, however impossible it may seem.