The Queen of Versailles -- CALL DIscussion Group

The Queen of Versailles

Director Lauren Greenfield

     This documentary follows David Siegel, the powerful 74-year-old owner of the Westgate Resorts time-share company, as he and his beauty queen wife Jacqueline, 43, build the largest single family private home in America. I won’t go into the stats because real estate porn should be indulged in private. But their current 26,000-square foot mansion -- which will ultimately become Jacquie’s “my private island” -- is a bit cramped. The new building project was supposed to be the film’s focus. But in 2008 the US and global economies are shaken by the  Lehman bankruptcy, the subprime mortgage collapse and the fragility of debt-riddled countries, companies and families. Forced to downscale, the ostentatious Siegels abandon their unfinished dream home, putting it on the market for a mere $75 million (The banks want them to ask 15). Will the financial challenge affect this happy average American family?   

First, the sermon. In two parts.

(i)The popular misconception is that a documentary is factual, unlike the “fiction” or unreality of the non-documentary. In fact, a documentary is as much its director’s fabrication as a fictional feature is. The director may use found rather than staged material, but sometimes even stages scenes with the real-life characters. (e.g., Siegel charges that the director staged the stretch limo-to-McDonalds visit.) The director still chooses the subject and is constantly making choices in what and how to shoot, how to edit, and what “story” or themes to pull out of all that raw material. The documentary can be as personal (read “subjective,” “creative,” “biased”) as any fictional work. Did you really think Michael Moore is an objective, disinterested chronicler of his time? Conclusion: a documentary can be analyzed with the same strategies and rigour as a fiction film for the director’s meaning. Cherchez the themes.

(ii) Remember Aristotle’s distinction between History and Poetry. By poetry he meant what we call Fiction, not just rhythms about Man’s first disobedience and to justify God’s ways to man or rhymes about that epic hero from Nantucket. History, Aristotle wrote, retails just what happened once. Fiction (his “poetry”) is about what happens all the time, eternal patterns of life. He therefore ranked Fiction above History. The latter may record merely the result of the interplay of accidents at the time; it has no significance beyond itself. But we turn to fiction for the essential models of life. All fiction implicitly begins with “Once upon a time.” That’s the lie on which the truth of fiction is based. It really didn’t happen...once. It recurs, even/especially if it never happened exactly in the way the story is told. Romeo and Juliet would be true even if there never had been Montagues and Capulets. The best documentary will therefore transcend the limiting particulars of history to convey the larger truths of a fiction.

Now, to the questions.

1. So, okay, is The Queen of Versailles history or fiction? If the latter, what truths beyond this particular case are told? What do either David or Jacqueline mean, or signify? Their house? Their saga? How is this film about us, about mankind, our culture?
2. Every new work of art enters the field of possible connection to every other work of art  --  past, current, future (See Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”). The scene in the Siegel’s storage building evokes Citizen Kane, Orson Welles’s classic study of an arrogant, ambitious, cold empire builder, itself a fictionalized version of William Randolph Hearst. Welles’s working title was The American. How is the Siegel film illuminated or inflected by connection to Welles’s?
3.   The camera prowls through the Siegels’ real world. But once a real object appears in a story, on screen, in a work of art whatever the genre along the Reality-Fantasy spectrum, it ceases to be just itself and has the possibility of being read as a symbol. What symbols crop up here? e.g., the wastepaper baskets full of Barbie dolls; the wall to wall dog shit; the Risk and Monopoly games David gets for the last Christmas and the kids’ “In a Pickle”; his Life Fitness treadmill? What about the motif of putting out the lights, from the domestic to “the brightest sign on The Strip”? The Filipino nanny’s Plymouth sweatshirt? The Jesus Calling book on the desk when a staff member phones clients trying to raise money?
4. So, too, language doesn’t just happen here accidentally. It also has the potential to resonate. For example, in this context, what does “time share” come to mean? At the end David is trying to “buy time.” What other metaphors emerge from this true-life situation? The company’s dupes called “mooches”? “There she is,” Jacquie says, returning to the old, small house of her childhood, but also echoing the Miss America Show climax? In what ways is Jacquie still an Engineer? And what about the real estate agent pronouncing the palace “Ver-size”?
5. Where do you see Director Greenfield inflecting the material through her choices in editing? e.g., cut from David saying Jacquie is “a good mother” to the nanny bathing two kids. Cut from the poor black couple tempted to buy a time share to Jacquie’s incredible shoe collection. Or the cut from “You have to decide what you want to be when you grow up” to a darting snake? In camera placement? e.g., the interplay between closeups and long shots, like Jacquie and the director dwarfed by the dream house skeleton. 
6. Do the opening -- David in his gilded throne -- and closing -- the Disney fireworks outside the abandoned, junked dream home -- shots suggest anything? Are they related?
7. Where is the “vicious circle”? How does David’s parents’ fate, being lured into blowing their wad in Vegas, reflect on his tale?
8. Who is the film’s villain? Who are the “pushers”?
9. What, finally, is Greenfield’s attitude toward the Siegels? How do the minor characters -- e.g., the nanny, Jacquie’s high school best friend Tina, their bankrupted driver, the adult son -- serve to reveal this? Does her -- or our -- attitude towards them change?
10. Why did the director omit the 2008 court order that Siegel pay an ex-employee $610,000 for battery? The plaintiff claimed she declined his offer of $1million to have sex with him.
11. How/why does the director keep us aware of the process of filmmaking?
12. What significance emerges from these lines:
1. “Mommy, what are all those people doing on our plane?”
2. “What’s the name of my driver?”
3. “I’d rather not say, because it may not necessarily have been legal.”
4. “I didn’t know we even had a lizard.”
5. “This is the staircase I’d use if I were visiting the children.”
6. “the largest time share company in the world”
7. “There’s no place like home.”
8. “Trust me.”
9. “My husband deserves the new house.”
10. They didn’t set out to build America’s largest home. “It just happened.”
11. “Because I could.”
12. “Make sure they buy something.”
13. The driver observes, “It’s feast or famine.”
14. “They might have to go to college now.”
15. “No-one is without guilt.”

Now, back to the sermon. An epilogue. Or two.

(i)Unlike a fiction, the characters in a documentary -- if they’re lucky -- live on. In this case David Siegel sued the director and the film’s distributor for defamation, for claiming his company was not paying its bills. He insists he is financially secure, his company booms again and he is resuming construction of his ‘umble abode. Jackie talks of doing a reality TV show. Not because she needs the money, presumably.

(ii) From BloombergBusinessweek, Siegel explains how he got Bush elected:

“Whenever I saw a negative article about [Al] Gore, I put it in with the paychecks of my 8,000 employees. I had my managers do a survey on every employee. If they liked Bush, we made them register to vote. But not if they liked Gore. The week before [the election] we made 80,000 phone calls through my call center—they were robo-calls. On Election Day, we made sure everyone who was voting for Bush got to the polls. I didn’t know he would win by 527 votes. Afterward, we did a survey among the employees to find out who voted who wouldn’t have otherwise. One thousand of them said so.”