You Don’t Know Me: The Celebrity Documentary Propaganda Complex

Words: Lottie Hughes

I resisted the three-part documentary Victoria Beckham on Netflix for weeks, until I finally caved. Following its release in February, I will probably also refuse and then later consume the six part documentary: Being Gordon Ramsey. There are countless others in the running stream of personal narrative documentaries, too: Pamela: A Love Story (2023), Being Eddie (2o25), Beckham (2o23), Take That (2026). And perhaps the most insidious iteration MELANIA, released in 2025 by Amazon MGM studios. 

Distinct from the scandal documentary, these recent films are often affectionately or colloquially named to assume the viewer’s familiarity. Occasionally they do portray complex stories. For example, A Love Story reveals that Pamela Anderson’s life has been splintered by childhood trauma, as she describes being a sex symbol and in her own words feeling like  ‘something else’. Often though, as I’ve watched a few of these films, I sense I’m being worked upon and some other motive lingers in my periphery. The celebrity documentary has largely become an intervention and instrument to serve or pivot the media narrative surrounding an individual.

They remind me of the bildungsroman form: a text following the psychological and social evolution of an individual from their formative years. Typically these Netflix films include archival footage, family photos, accounts from friends and interviews with the celebrity themselves. Similarly in the bildungsroman, the reader follows the protagonist’s difficulties and growth. Such growth often follows an upwards trajectory. Yet in many of the recent Netflix documentaries, the bildungsroman is shaped into a shinier heterogenous form. Inflected with narratives around commercial success and business enterprise, presumably to propel the celebrity and their ventures forward, in a hyper-linear motion. On screen we follow Ramsey’s ‘most ambitious project’ to date, Victoria Beckham preparing for the ‘biggest fashion show’ she has ever done, or Taylor Swift’s roll out of her 7th album Lover. Very often the celebrities are shown in motion, usually exhausted or anxious, being driven in 4x4 cars, arriving and departing through the back entrance. 
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Movement is of course appealing to contemporary audiences. We buy into rising markets, and desire growing finances, many of us immersed in the relentless search for accumulation. Such narratives of success are, perhaps, re-assuring. These observations are not new. In Naomi Fry’s 2016 article for The New York Times she writes about American reality TV, “the movement is the same, relentlessly upward.” Ten years after Fry’s observation in 2026, there goes Gordon Ramsey planted on the roof of a sky scraper, in his final form, his staggering growth achieved, exerting himself over London and other major cities, ready to siphon our cash via his increasingly corporate eateries. 

“The notion that the audience believes they know the celebrity undermines the conscious interplay between famous person and civilian, and disavows the audience's power to enable celebrity in the first place.”

Something interesting, however, is that after watching Victoria Beckham, I am haunting her website, floundering through silk dresses. The slinking, twisted, halter forms are so appealing and briefly I am putty in the image’s shining hands. My desire to consume has been seamlessly re-directed to her brand. The documentary’s power reverberates in real time, beyond the film’s reach, likely via immense cash flow and ever-green exposure. 

To achieve this influence, the films often begin with the premise that we think we know someone, "People think they know Gordon”. Then the documentary reminds us that we don't know them at all: “The Music You Know, The Story You Don’t.” Any assumption I think I know Gordon Ramsey lacks insight and I’d argue most civilians don’t believe they really know a famous person. There have been moments when a celebrity’s presence or skill has reached beyond the screen and I’ve felt captivated, but not familiar - not closer to knowing how they feel about their parents, or if they’re afraid of the dark. Audiences today are highly aware of their para-social relationships. The notion that the audience believes they know the celebrity undermines the conscious interplay between famous person and civilian, and disavows the audience's power to enable celebrity in the first place. 

After revealing the shocking premise that we don’t know this person, the film is primed to deliver a truthful glimpse into the life of the celebrity. We’re given the opportunity to build a relationship  founded on honesty, stripped back to the real. With this, the documentary positions itself as an intervention to reset the narrative, or as a moment in time where we can watch the individual deal with what Ramsey calls the ‘needle of fear’ as they invest in a new project, or to witness the tyrannical arrogance of Melania Trump smugly claiming: ‘Everybody wants to know, so here it is.’ (I really don’t want to). We can experience the famous person’s syntax in conversational form, watch them make coffee, walk through their minimalist living room and talk to their assistant. The audience can witness personhood and fame intersecting, of public and private spheres co-mingling in front of the camera. 

Importantly, this is contingent on technological developments as Michael Cannan writes on documentary for the BFI: “The camera is now able to follow its subjects across social boundaries that previously served to keep it from intruding, to enter the semi-private places and intimate spaces of everyday life whose portrayal was previously the privileged province of fiction.” While this medium may be entertaining, in the realm of Netflix documentaries, I don’t think we are much closer to the real or to everyday life. Multiple decisions have gone into the film’s making: where to film, when to film, who to film, what personality or project to centre. They portray a synthesised reality with vested interests. 

This fact alone doesn’t always make the celebrity narrative inherently bad. But the paranoia around fact and fiction does render any claim to ‘documentary’ redundant. The documentaries are desperately suggesting their subject is a good or normal person to such an extent, they become unreal, difficult to know, almost sickly repellant. This unreal aspect has been written on by the late cultural critic Mark Fisher, in his foundational 2009 text Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?,  in which he describes ‘a kind of hemorrhaging of the Real’. Consistently, it feels as such, both in our television and broader political landscape. 

In the last century, documentary has been one of the most important mediums to reveal lived experience and social change. Some have left indelible marks on myself about the ungraspable aspects of human nature and action. Grappling with deep complexity, leaving me disoriented, but left with a kernel of authentic feeling and real shock. Netflix and other major platforms monetise the power of this medium, and our historical implicit trust in documentary. 

The documentaries recently released churn out narratives which are entirely self-contained and hyper-sensical, packaging narrative as product and moving forward without stopping for rest. It’s disconcerting to think of the ethos behind Netflix, who have described their biggest competitor as ‘sleep.’ In conversation with David Beckham, Victoria Beckham states near the end of the three episodes, “I’m not stopping yet”. In many ways Netflix could be considered as speaking through her, as the platform continues to release more tiresome iterations of similar formats.