One of my brothers has been into these tapes for awhile. I've had a very casual interest in them. I couldn't take longer stretches of them, but I think I appreciated the humor of it. This is an effective documentary, because I came out of it feeling more strongly about the tapes.
Their arguments are drunken, and packed with a terrible sense of cruelty. They're mean enough that it seems like it would have been difficult to live near them, let alone be anywhere near them.
The story of the creation of these tapes is fascinating though. Initially created out of sense of self-preservation, it seems remarkable that the subjects were aware that they were being taped, but never seemed to care. The two guys who taped their neighbors seem to be remarkably decent, too. They have clearly had a lot of time to wonder about their moral and ethical position. More importantly, they've reached an unusual relationship to the tapes. I understand this, and it's strange. The humor is mostly gone, and they're left with a very intimate portrait of these two men, roommates, fighting savagely. As much as they argue and fight, they seem to have a strangely intimate relationship.
I once taped one of my roommates in college. He was unintentionally hilarious. He wasn't terribly bright, and he would say incredibly ignorant things constantly. I occasionally have a sense that maybe I shouldn't have taped him. But I haven't spread the recordings of him around the world. But I understand their quandary.
The one area that I find more confusing is how the play based on the tapes was possible. It looks absurd, but it also looks remarkably dull. It loses all sense of truth.
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