Stricken with obsessive-compulsive disorder, Matthew Van Dyke nonetheless acquires a masters degree in Middle Eastern studies at Georgetown University. Then a new obsession joins his old one. Lamenting his knowledge of the Middle East as one confined to the intellectual plane, Van Dyke sets off on a backpacking motorcycle excursion of the area. Covering 35,000 miles, the journey includes a video camera mounted on his helmet, capturing his every plight and adventure. No mere chronicler, he sometimes stages time-consuming photo shoots.
With a background as a loner (“the only child of an only child of an only child”) and a coddled middle-class child, Van Dyke is no stranger to solitude. When he meets a few Middle Easterners while in Libya, he takes quite a shining to his new friends. Enough so that after returning to his stateside girlfriend after the trip, it’s not long afterward that he decides put his camera back on and go back and be a volunteer soldier. The occasion? The outbreak of the Libyan Civil War that seeks the ouster of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. The underlying purpose? “To give myself a crash course in manhood,” Van Dyke says.
In Marshall Curry’s unique documentary Point and Shoot, the massive amount of raw footage (over 200 hours) shot by Van Dyke takes shape. Curry sometimes seems to be looking at Van
Dyke with a jaundice eye as if the self-indulgence of his project outweighs any merits of valor. Interspersing Van Dykes’s footage with a considerable number of interview scenes, he captures the weirdly disarming nature of Van Dyke’s personality, as well as his serious and admirably self-deprecating introspection. When Van Dyke gets captured by the Gaddafi forces and spends nearly six months in solitary confinement, Curry substitutes deftly done animation for the lack of Vandyke footage during the incarceration. Given that Van Dyke’s OCD condition includes serious germaphobia, the grimy conditions of his prison stay prove to be problematic. Curiously, we do not learn of the details surrounding his release. His decision to stay after his release despite warnings against it from a human rights activist, seems curious. Before long, as the fighting gets more immediate and increasingly dangerous, Van Dyke is asking himself, “Am I a soldier or a cameraman?” At one point, he declares he’s going to shoot his camera and it doesn’t sound like he’s joking.
Van Dykes’ scenes of warfare in the social network age chillingly include shots of many rebel soldiers yielding cellphones to capture images to send back home–as much for self-aggrandizement as for any historical record. Curry asks Van Dyke what propels him to take up arms and Van Dyke responds with what seems like a sincere reference to not being able to sit on the sidelines while his friends are at risk–friends the vast majority of us would regard as acquaintances. Thus, something seems off with Van Dyke. Is he a bona fide eccentric fighting against an oppressive regime? Or a foolhardy desperado pumping himself up with a pluck fueled by a grandiose yen for violence? Curry could have been a little more probing of Van Dyke in trying to provide an answer.
Or there may be an answer that’s contained in the film all along: Van Dyke’s friend from Tripoli, Nuri, a “peace-loving hippie” who transforms to join the rebels but never loses his warmth and humanity. Nori is the kind of character who will stay with this viewer a long time after the rest of the film fades. He exudes an amazing joie de vivre, an unflappable sense of humor all the more heightened by its irrationality in the face of potential imminent death. Perhaps their comradeship propelled Van Dyke in a way that enriched him in a way in which he was previously unaccustomed, and he’s not such a damn fool after all.