Less is more in Janis Joplin doc
The Show: American Masters — Janis: Little Girl Blue The Moment: The high school reunion
Janis Joplin, already famous, is back in tiny Port Arthur, Texas, for her 10th high school reunion, resplendent in round sunglasses, with pink and purple boas in her hair.
“Did you go to football games?” a local reporter asks.
“I think not,” Joplin replies. “I didn’t go to the prom.” “But you were asked,” he persists. “No, I wasn’t,” Joplin says quietly. “I don’t think anyone wanted to take me.” It’s a sad beat. So, laughing, she makes a joke: “And I’ve been suffering ever since.”
By this point in this documentary, director Amy Berg ( An Open Secret) has shown us how Joplin’s feeling like a perpetual outcast fuelled both her pain and her art. We’ve seen her shunned in Texas; we’ve heard her apologize in letters to her parents (read by Cat Power) for being a disappointment.
But what I love about this sequence is, Berg doesn’t explain why in hell Joplin would want to go to her reunion. She doesn’t have interviewees say, “She needed the acceptance,” or “She wanted to rub their faces in it.” Berg simply shows us the footage.
That is the mark of a good doc. It feeds us information to a point, after which it trusts us to understand what we’re seeing. It lets us sit with emotional moments and draw our conclusions. That’s what we remember.
Something else I won’t forget: The groovy, long-haired, dangerouslooking boys Joplin loved, whom we see in period footage, are now sweet-looking, gray-haired or bald grandpas. Not a one can speak of her without choking up. Janis: Little Girl Blue airs at 8 p.m. Tuesday on PBS. Johanna Schneller is a media connoisseur who zeroes in on pop-culture moments. She usually appears Monday through Thursday.