Exit Through the Gift Shop

Can we take Exit Through the Gift Shop at its word? Better still, should we? Viewers have speculated since its Sundance premiere that this documentary—about a camera-wielding chronicler of the street art scene who unexpectedly enters the movement—is itself a prankish postmodern stunt on the part of its director, the prankish postmodern British street artist Banksy. Is the questionable filmmaking career of subject Thierry Guetta, and his subsequent and improbably successful transformation into street artist “Mr. Brainwash,” a verifiable occurrence? A construction? Some combination thereof? Banksy, himself a notoriously elusive figure who appears in the film shrouded in a dark cape and vocally cloaked via a voice-altering mechanism, has publicly vouched for the film’s veracity. And indeed, there is nothing on the surface that explicitly tells you to cock your eye in skepticism.

Well, unless it’s towards Guetta’s at once guileless and cynical foray into the world of street art, an event the film treats with baffled bemusement and more than a touch of exasperation. Indeed, it’s here that Exit Through the Gift Shop’s potential as an elaborate put-on becomes most enticing, with Mr. Brainwash (or MBW, as Guetta labels himself in a calculated act of self-branding) becoming a Golem-like manifestation of the street-art world’s increasingly commercialized ethos run sleazily amuck. It’s not that his work is egregiously bad; an oversaturated juxtaposition of Michael Jackson’s face and Marilyn Monroe’s hair has a Warholian flippancy, as does a doctored image of Elvis, who now fondles a Fisher Price machine gun in place of his iconic guitar. But what is the ultimate statement, beyond the sound bite-ready snippets on cultural violence and media saturation offered up by MBW? Not a damn lot, Banksy and the other street artists featured imply with an eye-roll, although Exit Through the Gift Shop is canny enough to recognize that the “meaning” of any street art has always been a contestable topic. What makes Guetta a suitable subject for mockery—and a intriguing vessel for the movement’s anxieties—is the extent to which he thinks of his art in terms of chic market value, not subversive cultural impact.

It proves doubly galling for this to come after the footage of earlier street artists, whose on-the-fly acts of principled vandalism the film treats with energy and affection. Guetta, a French-born family man who ran a vintage clothing store in Los Angeles, first began filming the artists after being introduced to the scene by his cousin, the famed street artist Space Invader. Guetta’s obsessive documentation of Invader soon grows to include other famed members of the movement like Shepard Fairey (famous for his red-white-and-blue poster of Barack Obama) and Banksy himself. The works he captures span the gamut from the cleverly innocuous—a carefully-cut-up plastic bag balloons into a facsimile of a dog when filled with air from the subway grate below—to the overtly political, as seen in Banksy’s much-publicized series of painted “cut-out” along Israel’s contentious West Bank barrier.

The artists agree that their documentarian is a little whacked, but given the ephemeral nature of their work, it’s nice to know that these pieces will be preserved on film and eventually featured in a documentary, or so Guetta says. In reality, he hoards his hundreds of tapes without any idea as to what form they will ultimately take. Under pressure, he cuts together a visual collage: an incoherent mess that inspires Banksy to review Guetta’s footage and see what he can do with it (hence the directorial credit, although the insular quality of this arrangement only increased speculation that Banksy controlled the footage all along). He attempts to get Guetta out of his hair by encouraging him to go back to L.A. and create some street art of his own. From this directive comes the birth of MBW.

Exit Through the Gift Shop offers a spirited view of the street artists’ DIY spirit, energetically chronicling how their public-art statements often come together under cover of nightfall and after hours of preparation. Still, it’s Guetta that ultimately fascinates, even as he repulses. Looking like Rob Schneider’s shlubby older brother (complete with unkempt mutton chop sideburns and goofy porkpie hat), his preparations for his debut show largely consist of dishing out vague, contradictory orders to his put-upon staff and figuring out the ever-escalating prices that collectors will pay for his pieces. Banksy does little to hide his distaste—a voiceover by actor Rhys Ifans is particularly slow-cooked in sarcasm—even as he ultimately paints Guetta as a willing manipulator of a ludicrous art-world scene whose gatekeepers jostle to crown the “next big thing.”

Indeed, Exit Through the Gift Shop’s attitude toward its subject sometimes feels a little too unambiguously flippant. There’s a shooting-fish-in-a-barrel quality to some of Banksy’s choices here, especially if we are to believe that Guetta’s story is a factual one. (Then again, who’s to say that the publicity-hungry Guetta didn’t get the last laugh anyway?) The film’s slippery nature ultimately makes it difficult to pin down just how we’re supposed to interpret Guetta. Is he a lucky buffoon? A crazy-like-a-fox media master? A Frankenstein monster stitched together from the street-art world’s collective fears and let loose amongst the masses? That all and none of these could be the answer just might be Banksy’s slyest trick.

                                            Matt Connolly