Miscellaneous

No Impact Man: The Book

By jeremyblachman

Six weeks ago, I saw No Impact Man: The Documentary.  (The link is to my blog post about the movie.)  Mostly the film made me wonder why the man and woman were married to each other, and whether the whole thing was just a gimmick to make a movie.

The book is far more interesting than the movie. 

Mostly because the guy seems a lot more human, and honest.  And there's space to talk more about why he was doing what he was doing.

That said, the book also makes the movie feel extremely false.  In the movie, you're sort of led to believe that everything happened pretty much at once.  They're going to live for a year without electricity, with local food, etc.  But in the book you realize it was gradual, and it wasn't until six months in that they turned off the electricity, and they still used the washing machine, and they still went out to restaurants if friends invited them, and they didn't actually give up coffee (the movie makes a huge deal out of the coffee).

I don't blame them for making exceptions, and not being completely insane for a year-- but after reading the book it seems like the movie pretends things were different from how they really were.

Part of that is perhaps explained in the introduction, where he mentions that the filmmakers got involved partway through the experiment.  Which I think must mean that at least some of the scenes in the film were staged or re-created.  Maybe not, but it seems like they must have been, just to cover things like the beginning of the experiment, or maybe that's just why it seemed like they did everything at once-- because by the time they were being filmed, they were months into it.

Read the book instead of seeing the movie.  It's quite a bit more worthwhile.

Full post as published by Jeremy Blachman's Brand New Weblog on November 01, 2009 (boomark / email).