Salinger, the documentary

When a person is dead, then there is no stopping what the living will speak. This applies to everyone, regardless of power, status, respect nor dignity. 
- My key takeaway of the documentary.

My life on Netflix is pretty unexciting. Whenever I really want to spend time on it, it stops loading. Like #foreverPIXELATED!!!! [Insert all kinds of worldly profanity here]. I then proceed yelling at everyone in my family to turn off their phone wifi to maybe perhaps get less pixelation... But of course, to no avail. When it's working though, I'm usually shuffling through the documentaries.

As always, my reviews of stuff come way later than when I actually viewed them. This one, I viewed a long time ago. "SALINGER" came out in 2013 and has a lovely unimaginative poster that resembles a book cover. SO CLEVER!!!!..... Not.  Apparently this director guy (Shane Salerno) had spent about a decade working on this documentary. SO WORTH HIS TIME!!!!...... Not. I sound sour because the documentary leaves you feeling sad and sour to the extreme. I watched it to kill some time in between the two FIFA games of the day, and because I knew I'd learn something new. I was also never a big fan of The Catcher in the Rye and Holden Caulfield, so I was mildly intrigued in what ways would this documentary glorify the book even more than it already is. In fact, "Salinger" glorifies EVERYTHING even down to the unpublished characters of JD Salinger's work. Go figure. Making the documentary pretty "phony." LOL! Get it??? hahaha..... (insert awkward turtle hand gesture here..)

Source: chicagonow.com

Most of the interviews are quite generic (more and more extraordinary compliments of JD Salinger, his looks, his writing, his style, his perfection-obsessed personality, yaddayaddablahblah), except for Jean Miller's as she gets pretty deep, personal, and sentimental when revealing her side of the story. This is when I was shocked about how a person could keep silent for more than half a century and spill the beans on EVERYTHING when Saliger's gone off to the heavens. Same sentiments ensued when I watched the other interviews of the women Salinger had encountered (pretty much countless). Then I went onwards to assure myself to never fall for word-masters who are suave, brilliant, and veiled-in-secrecy-in-super-mysterious-sexy-ways. Hard. Very hard. I think I'll fall for a personality like Salinger's just for the sake of self-destructing my emotional self. Anyways, back to the documentary review... Not only is the privacy-invading content from these women pretty disturbing, but it is more about the documentary's existence itself. Salinger had spent his whole life with a mission to seclude himself from the outside world, truly pursuing the art of living in secrecy and in insane mental state. One can't blame him as his fame did not merely bring money and happiness, but also heavy burdens; there were three--not one--murders in America where the killers quoted Holden Caulfield in the court testimonies. The most famous incident would be the murder of John Lennon. This topic is also briefly covered in "Salinger." Despite all of Salinger's troubles and wishes to remain away from the world, this entire documentary is about divulging his life, tearing his secrecy apart, and publicizing almost everything he had wanted to keep silent about. It fucking starts with this guy stalking around to take paparazzi photos of JD Salinger walking out of the mail depot. RUDE. Just so rude! Poor JD Salinger... He will definitely not rest in peace now, would he? :( :( :(

Yet there are still good parts to this mediocre documentary. There is a somewhat ridiculous amount of time spent on Salinger serving the state in WWII. I never took the effort to read JD Salinger's wiki page, so I had no idea how long he had served, how hard he tried to get enlisted, what kind of position he undertook, how he came back, et cetera. This part and his survival through WWII is enriching and complements his subsequent life events well. Needless to say, this fact-driven history lesson in the middle shines out and stays with you after the documentary, because it clearly juxtaposes against all the emotional, sappy, and overtly pretentious interviews and viewpoints on JD Salinger.

Still interested?
Watch the trailer below. 

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