Interviewing, in the journalistic sense—the art of extracting personal statements for publication….
The major interview is a carefully constructed transmitting device, a medium, a mirror.
—Edward Price Bell, Major Interviewing: Its Principles and Functions, 1927

Lately I’ve been meditating on how incomplete my skill set is as a nonfiction writer. One skill in particular is interviewing. I’ve only done a few in my career and reading those again I realize how much more they were about me, rather than the subjects.

Part of this was self-centered immaturity and part was that as an aspiring young writer and would-be journalist I had read enough interviews to intuit what Edward Price Bell pronounces above: that an interview is a “carefully constructed transmitting device.” But I surely didn’t have the maturity to know that an interview is also “a medium, a mirror” reflective of the interviewer’s interests and biases.

I’ve also been thinking about interviews because of David Lynch’s Interview Project, a series of brief video interviews with regular folks from California to Maine, and the New York Times’ very similar Web feature, One in 8 Million, consisting of dozens of handsome photo slide shows accompanied by New Yorkers telling their stories in their own words.

From a conceptual and design point of view the two are uncannily similar. Head shots of the interview subjects are laid out in a mosaic format, and when you drag your mouse pointer over a thumbnail the audio of the interview is activated.

This nifty effect immediately put me in the mind of Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” with its emphasis on the truth and beauty to be found in the lives of people from all walks and stations of life. It also called to mind Studs Terkel’s humanizing portraits of people at work in Working, and Evans and Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, revered for its unwieldy and sometimes troubling ambition to make art out of the lives of the downtrodden.

Though Whitman, Terkel, Evans and Agee produced very different books, they all seem to be possessed of a similar belief: that there is great and transcendent beauty in lives of everyday people.

But despite the uncanny similarities between Lynch’s Interview Project and the New York Time’s One in 8 Million, the main differences between the two add up to very different uses and views of the interview and, ultimately, two different visions of humanity.

Lynch’s Project, launched in June 2009, is made up of interviews of people from all over the United States who were discovered by Lynch’s assistants along a cross-country route from California to Maine and back. The route begins southerly, taking us through Arizona, Texas and Arkansas, lingering in Louisiana for several interviews, then on to Mississippi, West Virginia, over to the Carolinas, then north through Virginia, Pennsylvania and Connecticut, avoiding the New York metro area. The team then headed west through Upstate New York and into Ohio and Michigan, where the project is currently stopped (the rest of the return trip interviews are still in production).

As with all of Lynch’s work, which is heavily influenced by the German Expressionistic school of cinema in which actors are coached to emote and hold exaggerated expressions longer than is natural, Lynch’s interviewees are consistently interesting (and sometimes startling) to look at. Close-ups of their faces, and especially eyes, reveal not just age, but deep-running emotions and psychic wounds.

The interviewers’ questions are often existential: What’s life like here? What is your purpose in life? Did you have dreams when you were child? Is there a God?

Sometimes you hear the interviewer asking the questions, sometimes not. Framing each of these interviews is an introduction by David Lynch in his deadpan, alien voice telling us where his production “team” “found” the subject—often sitting on a front porch or walking along the street—followed by a black screen and a deep, disconcerting, speaker-testing rumble—the kind of industrial noise that pervades the soundscapes of Lynch’s work.

Then we get an establishing shot of the landscape—fields of grain, mountains, main street USA—and music to suit, often folk music reminiscent of Lynch’s The Straight Story, and other times carnivalesque accordion tunes a la Nino Rota of Fellini fame. The music tapers and we get folks like long-haired Glenn, 39, in rural Ohio wearing a Slipknot (think death metal) t-shirt standing outside a drugstore saying, “I really don’t see a purpose in life any more. I feel like I’m lost in limbo or purgatory.”

Or Danny Bloxton, 77, of Oak Hill, WV who says: “I guess never had any dreams. Might’ve had some nightmares. I don’t know that I ever had any dreams like some people have. I just grew up.”

Or Clinton of Fayettville, WV, a Stevie Nicks fan who, in homage, dresses in capes and claims that Nicks’ music dissuaded him from committing suicide.

Or Eric, 22, of Livonia, MI whose mother’s death caused him to try to turn his life around, but still regrets never getting to tell his mother that when you die you just go in the ground—that’s it.

Or Jeremie, an openly gay veteran, of Hammond, LA who says orgies “mak[e] me feel beautiful.”

But then there is Mrs. Dennis, 92, of Vicksburg, Mississippi, who says, “if you love God you have to love the people, and if you don’t love his people you don’t love God. Because you ain’t ever seen God, but you seen his people so if you don’t love them you don’t love God. That’s how you be a good Christian; that’s how you live a long life; that’s how you’ll be blessed.”

The lives of these people, many from the “fly-over” states of the heartland, begin to seem—even Jeremie’s and Clinton’s—all of one grand and tragically beautiful piece. Even when the subjects are elderly and well-established members of the community, they still seem other-worldly, just passing by on their way to some place else.

To be continued tomorrow.