I made it to Canada for the 50th Toronto International Film Festival!! Stay tuned for more from the best fest in the biz, but in the meantime, on this week’s Your Weekly Watch, Sept. 5 edition, I’m watching “The Truth About Jussie Smollett” that has an annoying question mark at the end of the title, which I’ll just ignore because yes, duh, obviously, we been knew. And “Unknown Number: The High School Catfish” which is about something way worse than the documentarians seem to realize or care about.
The Truth About Jussie Smollett
I didn’t need a documentary to tell me Jussie Smollett was innocent—but here we are, anyway!
For those out of the loop, back in 2019, Jussie was assaulted by two men who put a rope around his neck and called him racial and homophobic slurs. He reported to the police that the man whose face he saw was a white man. The notorious Chicago Police Department turned Jussie from a victim into a perpetrator by accusing him of paying two Black Nigerian brothers to assault him in order to gain public sympathy and put pressure on his bosses at Fox, where he was starring in the TV musical drama Empire.
One problem: the Chicago PD are known for lying, criminal cover-ups, and harming Black people specifically. In fact, they were actively in the middle of the cover-up of the murder of Black teen Laquan McDonald when they made themselves the victim of Jussie’s “hoax” of being assaulted. The math has never added up and this documentary shows previously unreleased exculpatory evidence and key witnesses that were ignored and highlights that Jussie Smollett’s conviction was overturned on appeal. Smollett also participated in the documentary, telling the same story he’s been saying from the jump—along with the corrupt Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson who led the case against Jussie and was fired for lying later in 2019. You can’t make this stuff up.
Missing surveillance footage winds up like a Rorschach inkblot test for the audience, and still shows how Smollett could’ve been telling the truth the whole time before his promising career and mental health were destroyed by the CPD and a scandal-hungry media. Journalism is the real winner of this doc, and I hope we see more of it.
Unknown Number: The High School Catfish
This documentary about a small-town high school freshmen couple Owen and Lauryn, who receive harassing and obscene text messages from an anonymous, unblockable number for a year and a half has set the internet ablaze. It’s salacious and the culprit behind the unknown number is a gag. It quickly hit number one on Netflix’s most watched list. But what seems lost in these kinds of documentaries is that there are traumatized children involved, and perhaps this shouldn’t be entertainment. The Owen and Lauryn are still teenagers today, though the harassment led to the abrupt end of their love story. The crimes against them were so close to home and recent enough that healing is a long way off. There were no mental health professionals interviewed in the documentary to put the obvious yet downplayed pyscho-sexual issues that the culprit displayed into a medical context for the audience, let alone the culprit themselves. I hate to say spoiler-alert about real-life events, but I will at least say trigger warning: this is a documentary about pedophilia and not even the documentarians seem to realize that. Anyway, the story is harrowing and —I hate to say this even more, considering the source, but—you’ll find a more compelling story about this tragedy in The Cut, which includes much of the missing context from this low-rent documentary.
Stay watchin’,
Brooke
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