Kitty Green's recent Netflix documentary, Casting JonBenet (2017), has produced an overwhelming amount of criticism, both positive and negative, for its depiction of a community still grappling with the heinous murder of child pageant star JonBenet Ramsey twenty years after it occurred. Green's approach both challenges existing paradigms of documentary reenactment (and reenactment theories) and reclaims notions of gossip and public life. This article proposes that Casting JonBenet redirects attention away from the sensational trappings of the murder case to shine a light on the case's distributive impact. Triple-casting each player–as actor, character, and themselves-goes beyond the usual doubleness of reenactment documentaries to uncover the hidden intimacies of the local, in its many performative and revealing permutations.
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Fall 2017
