 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
True Stories
|
 |
|
David
Byrne’s True Stories is an annoying and troubling film in several respects. It
is the kind of film which floats purely on hype: financed by hype, promoted by
hype. When this hype gets to the sorry point of touting the film (alongside, in
its day, Blue Velvet, 1986, or Down By Law, 1986) as a principal
representative of New American independent/experimental film, it’s once again
time to wonder about all the authentically funky little American films we will not be seeing because this one has, for
a month or so, cornered the novelty market.
If
I mention that loaded term authenticity,
that is because all disagreements over True Stories will occur around this
issue. Byrne’s loosely knitted collection of skits and stories are in an
anecdotal sense true – reportedly adapted from the more fanciful items in
popular tabloid rags. But true clearly means much more to Byrne: folksy, down
to earth, normal, everyday … and authentic.
True Stories is an undoubtedly
perfect artefact. It illuminates in a single stroke the whole mindset of an
arty middle-class dude leaving the postmodern big city and heading South to find real
life. This real life – once properly assembled, stylised and distanced
through careful mise en scène and codes of satiric middle-class acting – is
then supposedly celebrated. But the celebration never relinquishes a
patronising, condescending tone.
The
film is, from scene to scene and detail to detail, a hit-and-miss affair. But
what hits and misses, and for whom, depends wholly on cultural tastes and
identifications. If, like me, you find yourself fighting the freak show nature
of much of the film, you will take respite and possibly pleasure in those
moments which somehow manage to be non-judgmentally natural, spontaneous and
daggy. Whether this is due to the occasional stroke of apparently authentic
casting (some delightful cameos in the miming of “Wild Wild Life”), the
exactness of the verbal idioms here and there (due perhaps to Beth Henley’s
hand in the script), or indeed Byrne’s own better creative decisions (the kids
who stroll around bashing out “Hey Now” on bits of tin; the two teenagers who
double up laughing at the newsstand as they read items from The Weekly World News out aloud), True Stories does, now and again, ring
true.
Trying
to make a positive case for the movie out of its best moments, it might be
ventured that True Stories brings together and mutually transforms two previous
tendencies in Byrne’s work as a songwriter for the band Talking Heads. The
first tendency is his portrayal of the modern individual: incurably neurotic,
mind and body never in sync, head and heart in conflict, classically alienated
(as in “Psycho Killer”). The second, tendency, blooming in the mid ‘80s, is his
attempt to characterise society in general as a collectively neurotic body
spaced out on utopian dreams, visions and delusions, but too happily dumb to
know better (“Road to Nowhere”).
When
Byrne sets these preoccupations down South, personal alienation suddenly
becomes an agreeably crazy way of coping, resisting and surviving the daily
drudge; while the collective social dream becomes an equally merry means of
improvisation (as in Byrne’s celebration of shopping malls and other Southern
architecture).
However,
for another segment of its audience, True Stories will be about none of these
things. Its funniest and truest moments will be those in which seasoned,
satirical actors like Swoosie Kurtz or Spalding Gray enact cruel stereotypes of
Southern stupidity. Its climatic deep-and-meaningful moment will occur – like
in Nashville (1975), where a
state of fools chants in unison “It Don’t Worry Me” in the face of a political
assassination – when a character sings:
People like us,
We don’t want freedom,
We don’t want justice,
We just want someone to love.
According
to this reading, which the film abundantly invites, its viewpoint is
immaculately distant and sneering. This is the True Stories I happen not to like. It is also the one which
generates most of the hype-acclaim.
If
there is anything abidingly ‘80s about the film’s tone and sensibility, it is
the constant, almost hysterical oscillation between complicity with and disdain
for its subject matter – a fundamental ambiguity located first and foremost in
Byrne’s quasi-fictional presence as narrator. Over-accommodating his object of
enquiry, Byrne turns himself into a Looney Tune echoing the exotica around him,
and performs curiosity for real life and normal folks in a fashion that reeks
of bad faith.
For
the fact is that, despite endless implicit protestations of his desire to merge
with the sublime Southern masses, Byrne (as director) can never get enough of
his own image. He sneaks it in everywhere – on TV’s and in fleeting cameos.
This in itself might constitute an interesting performance-art game with
media-identity (Bob Dylan and Neil Young have tried similar tricks in their
various film projects). But, in this context, it sticks out as aggravatingly
city-slick and narcissistic.
What
of True Stories as a movie? If there
is such a thing as cinema-by-numbers, this is surely it. The film alternates
two basic visual styles: the static, distant, primary-coloured postcard view
(thanks, cinematographer Ed Lachman); and frenetic,
blink-and-you-miss-something-significant montage. Plus a few cute touches:
artificial back-projection; a Brechtian intertitle device; and many POV
tracking shots with actors staring into the camera and mouthing off.
What
all this adds up to is that unfortunate cliché proved,
for once, absolutely accurate: the film is one long rock video clip. There is
no articulation, no sense of system (open or closed, either would do). Like
most clips, it tries to work off the immediate impact of each spectacular
and/or jokey moment, to the detriment of any overall complexity of form or
sense.
Perhaps
this recourse to the rock video mode is due to Byrne’s filmic inexperience. But
I cannot help suspecting there may also be an element of calculation involved.
For an amnesiac film style is also a way of evading and slipping past the
viewer certain troublesome contradictions and uncertainties in the material. I
am sure David Byrne would not want to be caught visibly wavering between
celebration of and contempt for ordinary people. So his solution is to fabricate
an object which is, in the language of hype, a pure event. And an event True
Stories may be; but it ain’t much of a movie.
Postscript 2004: I have not re-seen True Stories in the seventeen years
since writing this piece. But, in re-reading my text, some extra contexts for
judging the film – some pre-dating it and some subsequent to it – occur to me.
Secondly,
my cultural critique of Byrne’s attempt to ‘capture the real’ probably came
before I finally caught up with the definitive comic film essay on this topic:
Albert Brooks’ sublime Real Life (1979).
Thirdly,
and this time looking ahead to what Byrne’s career became post ‘87 – generally
less popular and more arty – it is intriguing to realise that True Stories stages his first foray into
what was become a major topic of both his own work and an entire ‘one world’
New Age movement: the relation to cultural Others (especially in so-called
primitive countries), and the effort to find some decent poise somewhere
between ecstatic embrace of the subaltern and grubby Western appropriation.
Byrne’s dedication and seriousness in sticking to this adventure can put True Stories, in retrospect, into a
slightly more flattering light.
© Adrian Martin May 1987 / July 2004 |
