Dark side of the Moon

The tone of the “documentary” begins with low key revelations of NASA working closely with Hollywood at the time of the Moon landings. Over the course of the tale, Karel postulates that not only did Kubrick help the USA fake the moon landings but that he was eventually killed by the CIA to cover up the truth. First hand testimony backing these claims come from Rumsfeld and Dr. Kissinger seems to lend credence to the story.

It is finally revealed that this is a mockumentary as the end credits roll over a montage of blooper reels, with the main participants laughing over the absurdity of their lines or questioning if particular ones would give the joke away too soon. Besides being a comedic documentary, it is also an exercise in Jean Baudrillard’s theories of hyperreality. In a 2004 interview, the director was asked why he would elect to make a film “closer to a comedy than a serious film”; Karel replied that in the wake of having made serious documentaries, the objective was “de faire un film drôle” (to make a funny film).

Australian broadcaster SBS television aired the film on April 1 as an April fools’ joke, and again on 17 November 2008 as part of Kubrick week. It was aired again on 27 July 2009, perhaps to coincide with the anniversary of the moon landing.

Several of the fictitious interviewees, such as Dave Bowman and Jack Torrance, are named after characters from movies directed by Stanley Kubrick. There are also references to other characters; Eve Kendall and George Kaplan, each featured in the documentary, are characters in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and Ambrose Chapel, also a Hitchcock location.

The soundtrack also includes the song “The American Dream” from Barry Levinson’s Wag the Dog, a fiction feature about a secretly government-commissioned Hollywood production of a fake war. —Wikipedia.