“There’s Just No Point in Doing a Commentary Where Everyone’s Just Going to Sit and Criticize the Movie”: Auteurism and the Creation of Hoax “Unruly” Extra Features in the DVD Era

Most scholarship on DVD supplements has emphasized how such materials operate in unusually close proximity to the primary text, with these bonuses often characterized as being heavily guided by the interests of the filmmakers and/or the releasing studio. Extras that are “unruly” (in the terminology of John Thornton Caldwell) now tend to be excluded from the final package, to avoid the potential for scandal or legal challenges. This article will consider the DVD editions of the feature films Blood Simple (1984), Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story (2004), and Incident at Loch Ness (2004), which contain faked examples of unruly commentary tracks. In these examples, the participants appear incompetent and narcissistic, with little to no overt textual indication elsewhere on the disc that the contents should be interpreted humorously. The material offers insights into the production of “regular” DVD commentaries, highlighting the content restrictions, censorship, and post-production editing often necessary to produce a track that masquerades as an intimate recording, supposedly captured in real time. The question remains, however, whether these faked texts are truly subversive, or whether they are simply designed to reiterate the comic mastery, and validate the auteurist control, of the creators when the hoax is revealed.