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Good Letters

20100107-spirits-in-a-material-world-part-2

Continued from yesterday.

The stories that make up the New York TimesOne in 8 Million are not video vignettes, like Lynch’s Interview Project, but mini slide shows featuring sharp, black and white photos reminiscent of famous photos of dead presidents in crisis.

For example, Freda Degannes—the “Walking Miracle”—who suffers from a rare blood disease who made her doctor “believe in a God above.” Then there’s the colorful Lower East Side druggist, Joel Karp, who used to carry two guns to work and drinks shots of Bacardi with his Puerto Rican customers. There’s Melissa Dixson the “Urban taxidermist” who finds beauty in stuffing squirrels and wolves; Nancy, maid to the past four mayors of New York, who reflects on meeting Nelson Mandela; Joseph Cotton, the grandfather who daily babysits his three grandchildren and cannot believe how blessed he is to be able to spend time with them: “God asked me, ‘What do you want?’ and I said, ‘Time.'”

What’s interesting is that these stories seems much more worthy of being recorded than the one’s Lynch’s crew stumbles upon. The subjects are prosaic, sometimes lyrical, in their descriptions, and the stories have a shape that leaves us feeling uplifted and warmed.

But the warmth is short-lived. Ultimately, One in 8 Million seems an attempt by the formerly venerable New York Times to earnestly try its hand at real community journalism—to come down from its usually arch perch and get intimate with its readers. Not to say it’s merely a PR move, but newspapers can’t afford to NOT woo new as well as old readers. Ultimately, though, I feel the presence of the interviewer more in One of 8 Million, which is strange considering that, unlike Lynch’s interviews, you never hear the questions being asked.

Lynch’s interviews, though the questions asked are similar from person to person, don’t feel as controlled. This is because he gains access to people, places, experiences and points of view that are not often represented on any screen, silver, television, computer or otherwise. His interview subjects seem—correctly or not—seem to be more truthful, more real.

Thus, there is a sense at the end of his interviews, when the camera shows the subject walking away, or when the camera pulls back from the house where the subject lives, that though this is the end of the interview, their lives go on in ways that make me what to know what happens to them—a feeling that I don’t often associate with, say, celebrity interviews.

Was this strictly a crass voyeuristic impulse or was it real concern born of something the interviewers did well? In the Lynch interviews the subjects seem to be disarmed, having been ambushed by the crew; somehow the existential questions about purpose and meaning open them up.

I did not feel the same sense of realness and subsequent urgency to follow the sujects in One in 8 Million beyond the end of their narrative. This is because I feel like I’ve seen these stories before. Despite the uniqueness of the stories, and despite the real pathos of some of them, the slick and handsome black and white rhetoric of the slides imbues the subjects with a sense of unreality, a sense that they are actors in a movie and these are the stills.

Lynch’s interviewees are found in places like Vickburg, Mississippi, Fayetteville, West Virginia, Livonia, Michigan and, in one of my favorite interviews, Fostoria, Ohio, which happens to be my birthplace.

In Fostoria, the crew interviews best friends Joyce and June. Captured in the high definition digital color, they do not appear glamorous or dramatic; they look bemused that someone is interested in interviewing them. Sitting there on the steps of a Methodist church, Joyce answers a cell phone call and says to the person on the phone, laughing, “I’m sitting here on the steps of the Methodist church being interviewed by three people.” She stifles a laugh when asked what life is like in Fostoria. She talks about the good money she makes from delivering newspapers. She wishes that she could convince her husband that there is a “higher power.”

Once the interview is over, the camera pans to follow the women as they cross the street to continue delivering papers. There is something sweet, simple and mundane about the interview. This has always been one of David Lynch’s strengths, representing life on the margins in a way that makes it uncanny: both mundane and otherworldy at once—sublime.

So, while I am definitely biased against these New York stories and toward these existential portraits of small town and rural life, it is ultimately because to me “small town” and “rural” are indices for authenticity. I’m cynical about the real-life stories the purveyors of culture choose for us, how they present them to us, and I’m pissed off that they may be our greatest cultural export: Are you the biggest loser or the most eligible bachelor? Are you in desperate need of a home makeover? Are you a housewife with bad ass attitude? Are you the next American Idol?

Returning to where I began: the interview is “a carefully constructed transmitting device, a medium, a mirror.” These ostensibly real stories, these carefully contrived and mediated encounters with real people, are extrapolations on the humble Q & A. They are mirrors that reflect back and mediums that project outward that most deep and pathological human failing: vanity.

And so my affection for the Interview Project is that he raises the interview to the level of art. The cinema verité mise-en-scène, the questions his interviewers ask, the music layed over top of the images, all seem aimed at making sure the world of the subject appears in all its imperfection, and to allow it to loom large (and strange) enough before us that we want to walk into it ourselves.

Because once we’ve entered into it, we have made the first step toward empathy, the first step toward understanding that whether we live on lonely back roads or in the midst of a teeming borough, we share something huge and defining: that we are finite beings whose role in the universe is a great and wonderful mystery to be pondered.

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The Image archive is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Written by: David Griffith

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