Moby Is Even More Insufferable Than You Thought

A t the moment, you may harbor vague suspicions that the music-maker known as Moby is a pretentious self-absorbed twit. That feeling, however, will not survive a viewing of his new documentary Moby Doc. No, by the end of the film you will be in a state of absolute metaphysical conviction that Moby is a pretentious self-absorbed twit.

Moby Doc is a twee pity party heaping with bursts of cutesy animation and deadpan irony that are meant to make a 90-minute testament to its subject’s suffering palatable. Instead, the sensation generated is powerfully emetic. Moby wants us to feel his pain but also feel that he’s being extremely clever and dry about it when, for instance, he goes for a walk with the Grim Reaper, mutters of his woes on a cellphone call while wandering around an Indian grocery store, or dramatizes his therapy sessions with an actress playing his shrink. She looks terminally bored and as eager to escape mopy Moby as I was while watching the documentary.

Moby, we learn via little wooden dolls the size of chess pieces as they reenact his sorrowful early years (a 1920s-style silent-film card reads “The Childhood Trauma Re-Enactment Players”), was born in Harlem to a feuding couple, the male half of whom was a Columbia professor who after being thrown out of the house “drove into a wall at 100 miles per hour,” leaving the boy fatherless. Growing up in Darien, Conn., Moby, whose real name is Richard Hall, believes that he and his mom constitute the poorest little family in a rich town, where it was his impression that “everyone knew exactly how much money everyone else had,” which is one of many assertions he makes that seems unlikely.

In high school, Hall says that he used to order his friends to drop him off in front of the local country manse to advance the fraud that he lived there. As a tyro musician deejaying for $25 a night, he claims that three people he knew were murdered in an abandoned lock factory where he supposedly lived by bribing a watchman with $25 a month, and also claims that the space contained “millions and millions of square feet.” He suggests that he finally hit it big after spending several years handing out his tapes of his work in public spaces in New York City, at which point a remix of his first single, “Go,” sold big in Europe and earned him a friendship with David Lynch, whose TV show Twin Peaks provided the musician with a strings sample he built into the song. Lynch pops up in the movie to share insights such as “There’s trillions of ideas. You know, they’re thoughts, in a way,” which is about as deep as anything else on offer in Moby Doc.

Moby then says that he became a degenerate rock star, which isn’t quite right. I don’t quibble with the contention that he was a degenerate, but the music he assembles is techno, not rock, and he is not a star, he is a teensy bald knob-twiddling homunculus. “Techno homunculus” is quite different from “rock star.” Having shared the stage many times with his pal and New York City neighbor David Bowie, Moby ought to have learned the difference.

Not that knob-twiddling is to be denigrated! He came up with the era-defining album Play (1999) — the soundtrack for all the TV commercials anybody ever saw on Scrubs or The West Wing. Moby’s cool background stylings really made those two- or three-minute breaks more bearable while we were waiting, and for that we should all be grateful. Moby was the master of creating gentle, recessive soundscapes that managed to be pleasing without demanding that you pay much attention to them — the Muzak of the 21st century.

Yet sudden wealth made Moby even unhappier than poverty did, or so he would have us believe. He attempts to convey as much via gloomy interludes of himself standing perfectly still with his arms stapled to his sides on top of a desert-rock formation, or standing perfectly still with his arms stapled to his sides as animated planets get superimposed over him while he tells us tales of being so wasted that he woke up on a tour bus covered with poop. (“I don’t know whose poop it was,” he adds.) Aggressively odd but uninteresting visual montages roll in, giving us (for instance) a climactic mix of mouse puppets, girls in lingerie rollerskating, and Moby committing gross acts of cultural appropriation in a mariachi getup. These half-thought student-film assemblages range from tiresome to execrable.

Moby is under the impression that in this film, which he co-wrote with Rob Gordon Bralver and which Bralver directed, he’s creating a frank confessional document graced with delightful weirdness. I, on the other hand, had the throwback sensation of sitting through a George H. W. Bush–era R.E.M. video stretched out to 90 excruciating minutes. The surrealist stylings can’t cover up the banality of his assorted grudges and gripes; a New York Times review said one of his albums was so bad it represented “the end of music,” Moby grouses, adding that the review “was on their homepage for a week.” The hurtful phrase “Nobody listens to techno!” appears repeatedly on screen, though Moby does not speak the name of the critic who popularized this phrase: one M. B. Mathers of Detroit, Michigan, in a memorable 2002 track called “Without Me.”

Moby Doc is, in other words, perfectly insufferable even before Moby starts in with his People’s Front of Veganism propaganda, telling us first that eating meat is as bad as slavery and then that it’s worse, “the dumbest, cruelest thing we have ever done collectively as human beings.” Meat, he avers, is the cause of all the world’s problems including starvation because “all the food they’re feeding to cows, etc., could be fed to people.” Er, cows live on grass, genius, people don’t. But, hey, maybe people can live on techno!