Cameras are not neutral – they change the subject. But while everyone lies in front of the camera, some people live in the camera. Throughout the film, West often seems most aware of how history might view him, driven by the feeling that in a room full of people, the most important connection he could make was with Simmons’ lens. (See the scene where he and Mos Def rap “Two Words” and West appears to be staring through the camera’s aperture sometime in the future.)
Simmons provides a largely room-filling voiceover throughout the film, not so much an unreliable narrator as an insecure one. There’s either way too much or not nearly enough of him, more likely the former: the segments where he links West’s story to his own feel particularly ill-placed, a distraction that provides no context on the main topic. And some narrative choices are contrived: Too much time is spent on West’s desire to be featured in an MTV News segment that spotlights new artists. (It just so happens that MTV was where Simmons and Ozah met.)
The success Simmons had hoped to achieve eventually became his term of notice – when West’s career finally took off on its own, he left Simmons (and his footage) behind. That alone would have made for a compelling film. But the third segment, which is much more spread out, is largely made up of scraps Simmons collects over the next few decades, an era when West becomes something unknown to him: a superstar building a world.
This episode is less satisfying and more coherent than the first two, but Simmons’ random eye and his pre-existing comforts with West end up being trumps. Where Simmons had an aspiring subject in the early 2000s, he now has someone who stands between superhero and autocrat, a figure who performs not just in front of one camera but in front of a world of cameras and observers.
There is a grim scene where West speaks to potential real estate partners, a bunch of older white men, and tells them, “I took bipolar medication last night to carry on a normal conversation and become alien to English.” He likens his treatment by the public to being pulled and quartered.
Simmons sticks around for a while – this is who his subject has become, and it’s just as important to watch as any of the clips from the days when he was just a newcomer. But real as it is, this is not the West that Simmons knows or can tolerate. There’s something tickling in the camera work, and eventually Simmons does something that doesn’t seem to come naturally: he turns off the camera.