Degrees of becoming on recent Netflix docu-shows: Representations of women in Unbelievable and Mercury 13 vs. The Keepers and The Staircase

Abstract

Although billed as a ‘crime TV drama’, the Netflix series Unbelievable (2019) is more of a docu-drama. The correspondence between fact and fiction creates a powerful empathic relationship with audiences, the nature of which is comprehensible through how this film, alongside more traditional format documentaries on the online platform, engages ‘the real’ through representing bodies and actions that manifest cinematically in ‘the aesthetics of the frame’. What can be described as the occurrency of these manifestations is found both in a present- and past-oriented description of material facts, whether actual or imagined, and a future-oriented sense of becoming that derives from a relationship that docu-subjects and characters have with potentiality in the progression of the story. Some films describe what people do or have done, while others write docu-subjects and characters as people who have a view to the future. This takes the form of both an objective sense of agency qua freedom and autonomy and a subjective sense of psychodynamic potential formed by representations of their conative orientations towards a future. The sense of possibility that emerges reflects a more nuanced and subjectivized sense of becoming than explained by Ilona Hongisto as constituted by the generation of ‘imagination’, ‘fabulation’ and ‘affection’.