Doctor Who Am I (2022)

Not rated, but Mr. Jacobs makes a handful of sex jokes, often at the discomfort of a handful of fans.  The movie does talk about elements of mental illness, including a history of suicide.  I think that there's some mild language in it, but often that's simply because it's a documentary and people are just chatting.  I couldn't point out an example of language, actually.  But just be ready for it if it exists.  Not rated.

DIRECTORS: Matthew Jacobs and Vanessa Yuille

​I keep telling me that I'm going to stop watching fandom documentaries.  They aren't very good.  This one hit in an especially rough way.  But this is a movie about how the very nature of making a documentary may skew the reality of what is supposed to be coming out of the documentary.  It's weird.  For as much as I want to complain that this documentary is borderline a special feature on an potential Doctor Who: The Movie 4K re-release, I need to know how this movie was made when it comes to writing about it.  The reason is: the subject of the movie is also the director.  When it comes to a movie like this, that might have a bit too much influence.

Here's the possible reality:  the movie was actually directed by Vanessa Yuille.  Matthew Jacobs probably said that he wanted to have say in the final edit of the film and probably contributed quite a bit to the final edit of the film.  As such, he probably got director credit.  That's bad, but it's also kind of understandable.  What I'm worried is that this might have been a documentary where the director / subject of the film wanted to have a certain spin on the movie and thus gave us what we wanted to hear.  This movie is incredibly sad in some ways.  I don't want to dismiss the sadness that is in the film, especially when it came to Jacobs's childhood.  But there are paradoxical moments in the film.  Are emotions fundamentally paradoxical?  Sure.  But Jacobs, in some scenes, states clearly that he wasn't affected by his time at these conventions.  But then, he'll say to an audience about healing this entire experience was.  I don't know.  I really get the feeling that there's some manipulation happening in the movie that disingenuous.

I'm a guy who really likes the Doctor Who movie that Matthew Jacobs wrote.  It's wildly imperfect, but it is also a movie that reflects American genre television of the mid-90s.  But as a guy who has seen all of Doctor Who, I know that the movie is this major step forward for the character that was desperately needed to make the show what it is today.  It's not shocking that I watched this doc.  I'm a huge Whovian.  There was something masochistic and insular having someone like me watch a movie about a very specific fandom.  It's not even a documentary about Whovians and Who culture in itself.  It's specifically focused on this one movie and one serial that have ties to Jacobs.  The fact that I understood every element of this doc just reflects how much of a savant I've gotten about my specific fandom. Is it about Who culture at all?  Kind of.  This is a movie that suffers from scope.  Again, here's me putting a lot of guesswork into how this movie project came about. I imagine that Matthew Jacobs, who admits to having dug his heels in about going to conventions, tells a peer that he's going to do this.  On the fly, they come up with this plan to film the entire event.  After all, it would be interesting to see how Jacobs reacts to this. 

But what the movie aspired to is what (and here's my compulsory reference to this movie) Trekkies did for fandom.  Trekkies was this deep dive into a fandom that had long been lambasted for being huge nerds.  Through some hip checks and tongue-in-cheek, it becomes a love letter to a show that affected a lot of people.  Doctor Who Am I tries to do the same thing without the legwork.  Because this documentary only covers Matthew Jacobs and his attendance of two conventions: LI Who and Gallifrey One, we can only get a representation of the people who are there.  Everything that is mundane is somehow given a sense of grandeur that really isn't present in reality.  The winners of a local costume contest are treated like celebrities.  Some people who were willing to spend money to interview Jacobs somehow become the starts of this movie.  It's really forced.  (Again, I hate myself for constantly using Trekkies as the pace car.) When Trekkies did it, Denise Crosby went across the country, into people's homes and offices, and got to really know these people.  She found the most intense fans and asked the tough questions.  Jacobs goes to homes, sure.  But these are snapshots, not exposes.  

I have a card on my bulletin board that students were asking about today.  I used to have students leave Cards Against Humanity cards on my desk.  I had one that just said "Daddy issues" and I pinned it to my wall because it nailed it.  I have daddy issues.  Jacobs lost his mom to suicide when he was very young.  His father was bipolar and never really dealt well with that.  But considering that Matthew Jacobs was the guy who wrote the Doctor Who movie, it's amazing that his dad was a guest actor on the Doctor Who serial, "The Gunfighters".  I think that the most valid thing on this movie was the fact that Jacobs probably hasn't processed a lot of what happened in his childhood.  I have no real right to say this. I'm not a therapist and I'm watching a heavily edited video made by the guy who wanted me to see what I saw.  It's full of stuff.  That is the most important stuff in the movie.  But I don't know if this is the same venue that Doctor Who Am I is supposed to cover.  There's this tenuous relationship between the notion of zealot fandom that we are exposed to in the movie and the idea of trauma.  Am I grateful to my fandoms for the better moments they brought me?  Absolutely. But I think, as I just pointed out, that fandom can be a balm.  

While the notion of The Doctor is someone who does the morally good thing in his stories, I have to draw a line between him and reality.  To make a 1.5 hour movie doesn't really lend itself to nuance between mental health and embracing something fiction.  Art is good for the soul.  I think that is one thing that the movie doesn't make clear as it should.  By having a community come together and bond over shared interest is good, but I don't know if that means that Matthew Jacobs found a family among these nerds.  If anything, there's this hint of disdain for them.  I get that Paul McGann might really like the fans.  (I met him in one of these artificial environments once. He seemed really nice.  That's reflected in the documentary.)  But there's almost something forced about the entire takeaway about art.  Part of that comes from the fact that Jacobs almost steers the conversation to his father.  It makes sense and this might not be on the part of Jacobs. Because he's on this panel talking about "The Gunfighters", he's constantly asked to give memories about his dad on set.

But Jacobs seems deeply sad.  He is allowed to be, but he shouldn't be.  After all, he wrote The Emperor's New Groove.  He looks down on the convention circuit.  I can kind of see why.  There's the personality in these fan docs that I empathize with and there's the ones I can't stand. The ones I empathize with are the honest-to-goodness socially awkward folks.  These are people who find a sense of community at these events.  After all, the testimonials tend to lean towards a sense of solitude.  They may be the only person in the real world that likes what they like. But then there's the guy who feigns confidence.  These people tend to be the toxic nerds.  There's this guy.  He's one of two guys in these scenes and I don't really care for them.  But I especially hate the one guy.  Hey, watch the movie and figure out which one I'm talking about.  Anyway, he's the guy who says kind of rude things to Jacobs in the forms of jokes.  He's the guy who hates that the Doctor kissed Grace.  He's also the guy who hates that the Doctor is half-human.  Do you know how I know this?  He tells Matthew Jacobs to his face.  It's so bruque.  I think that Jacobs things that conventions are all that guy.  Thankfully, it's only half-that guy.

There's a little bit of a disconnect in the middle of the movie.  I can't deny that there's something about the movie that is all about Jacobs confronting an audience that he's feared since the commercial failure of the Doctor Who movie.  But there is not as much about the Doctor Who movie than you would think, considering it is the mission statement of his return to the spotlight.  (He admits that this is all happening for money.) There's nothing really funny about the fandom with this movie. All of it kind of just hits a "sad" button.  I love conventions.  I just went to the Cincinnati Comic Expo with my mom and my kids and had a blast.  But something about this breakdown just ignored the fact that this was a movie about him confronting a piece of work that he wrote off a while ago and instead made it about how sad nerds were.  I like the mom and dad stuff.  I find that fascinating.  But I don't really get the direct understanding of how these Doctor Who conventions tie to that. When Jacobs emotes, I feel like it is the awkwardness of having a camera on him coupled with the fact that he's forced to confront demons from his past.

I need to stop watching these movies.  They're never going to be Trekkies ever again.  The issue is that they are coming out with frequent regularity.  Every fandom is starting to get the fandom doc and they're losing more and more substance the more you watch them.  They seem cheaper and more adulating than they used to be.  While I think that Jacobs makes for a fascinating subject, slow it down.  Make the movie breathe.  Let's see him slowly grow instead of over the course of a few weekends. Maybe that's a budget thing.  Maybe that's a patience thing.  But this movie felt like it was forcing stuff in there that felt a little disingenuine.