Interview with Megan Spencer

Megan Spencer is the perfect poster girl for GenerationX. She reifies pop-culture as a deity, she explodes with awe for those who dedicate their life to the cultivation of an obsession and she finds poetic beauty in the seemingly mundane. “Pop culture replaced our god,” she laughs, without a hint of irony. “It replaced our children and our mortgages – for a while, anyway. And pop culture, in a sense, has replaced art. I don’t mean to sound like a philistine but I guess I find the most artistic gratification and profound poetic experiences usually through pop culture.”

Certainly, as Spencer herself admits, it takes a significant dose of “crazy one-eyed fandom” to centralise an entire career around a love of cinema, which is exactly what she’s done. In fact, Spencer has skipped through the entire spectrum of Australia’s film industry – as a reviewer for both radio and television, as the artistic director of Perth’s own Revelation Film Festival, and as a filmmaker in her own right, specialising in a raw, ‘guerrilla style’ portraiture.

No prizes for guessing the kind of subjects that Spencer chooses for her own documentaries. So far, she has consistently focused upon exploring the lives of passionate, unique individuals devoted to their personal obsessions. From fanatical AFL supporters to professional dominatrixes, Spencer has no qualms about entering social spheres that are far removed from her own, and from the realities inhabited by most of her viewers. In her latest DVD release, Lovestruck: Wrestling’s #1 Fan, she tracks almost ten years in the life of Sue Chuster, Australia’s most devoted wrestling fan.

Chuster doesn’t fit the expected demographic of a wrestling fan, and yet she’s dedicated the last 35 years of her life to the sport, has travelled to America twice in hot pursuit of wrestling superstars, owns over 4000 wrestling DVDs and videos, and has plastered her house shift in a make-shift wallpaper composed of over 4000 wrestling photos. It would have been dangerously easy for Spencer to adopt a condescending or ridiculing perspective with this film, but instead she has injected it with a warm, heartfelt and emotionally sensitive tone.

“If it was a superficial look at her, then it could have been become that, but that was never my intention. I wouldn’t want to make a superficial film about anyone. And I was determined to dig deeper with Sue and hang in there until that deeper reason presented itself. She is a bit more of an extreme figure… But I admire the way people can take something that is seen as banal or everyday or of no cultural value and turn into something that has enormous value, even if it’s just personally to them. I think those sorts of stories are really valuable and really entertaining and really reflective of who we might actually be.”

Unfortunately, Spencer believes that the heartfelt honesty with which she represented Chuster is also the reason why she had so much trouble obtaining funding from broadcasters and public boards. In the end, Spencer was restricted to releasing her television-friendly fifty-minute film through DVD – a not entirely regrettable decision, because it did allow her the space to include over thirty minutes of special features.

“I think [broadcasters] are scared of real people, and of not presenting them in a controlled way,” she elaborates. “In parts of Lovestruck, sometimes the subject is making the film and I don’t put in any voice-overs telling you how to receive it or react. And I think we have a pretty generic, formulaic approach to television documentaries in this country. I am generalising [but many directors]… try to clean their films up, and they end up second guessing their audiences which is something I refuse to do and don’t need to do and don’t want to do, and if it keeps me on the margins then I’m happy to stay there.”