Influencer culture has taken hold of the United States in 2024. Many people point to maybe the Kardashians, perhaps Paris Hilton, for where patient zero was: the OG Influencer. Documentarian RJ Cutler nails the hammer on the beautifully curated head: Martha Stewart is where lifestyle promotion in a modern sense started, so might as well dig deep into the woman that so shaped the way the social world works today, on the most socially prevalent streaming platform.
What you see is standard documentary fare, just more beautifully rendered. Stewart sits down and gives talking head commentary on the beats of her life, including her modeling career (she was and still is a smokeshow), marriage to Andrew Stewart, pivot to lifestyle business, becoming a global icon, and at least a little, about her big insider trading case and her friendship with Snoop. While Cutler let’s Martha design the set she gets to sit in everyday, he’s designing his story as Martha: OG Influencer, framing her whole life through that lens.
For any fans of Stewart, she mostly comes off positively here, so rest easy. I mean, you don’t become a billionaire if you’re not very devoted and hard working, which Martha proves she is over and over again. She is obsessed with control, which she tries to do on a regular basis. That’s because she trusts herself and very few others to aim for perfection she desperately craves in everything she does. That high of a goal is basically impossible, but Stewart makes sure she does everything she can to see if she can hit pure perfection in her life as many times as is humanly possible.
So is Martha just hagiography? Not quite. Underneath the surface level conversation, Cutler plants one or two verbal traps to force Martha to actually reveal parts of herself she’s clearly not interested in talking about, quietly pissed she’s lost control of the narrative in her own documentary. Those hypocrisies make Stewart more human, so it’s really fascinating to see that she’d rather forget those parts of her exist, in favor of the perfectly curated version we’re seeing from her point of view alone. Martha is too smart to fully cede control of her story to Cutler, but we see a few glimpses of maybe the version of this doc we would get if Martha had already passed away, painting a more flawed, but real, person underneath the flashy exterior.
That makes Martha just a smidge better than most docs about famous people. So documentarians, take lessons from this one. You might have to defend yourself in the press a bit, but keep searching for the real story underneath the fake one being presented you by the subject of your tale. In other words, bring a little journalism into those personal journals.