83: Telling Your Own Story

I'm interested in stories that blur the line between real life and fiction, in a suspicious sort of way. The past couple of years, I've been thinking about movie-as-memoir, and wondering how much extra-textual information is appropriate to read into these movies.

Memoir movies come in at least three different strains. There's straight documentary by and about the subject. Sandy Tan's Shirkers is one of my favorites, as is Kirsten Johnson's Cameraperson; both use the form to interrogate themselves, their work, and the way they move through the world. (Officially sanctioned celebrity memoirs likely fall under this category as well, although these movies are more about preserving a specific image, rather than questioning it: Beyoncé's Renaissance concert documentary, Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, and Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields all come to mind.) Then there's the recent string feature films based on details from the director's life: Celine Song's Past Lives, Steven Spielberg's The Fabelmans, Charlotte Wells's Aftersun, Joanna Hogg's The Souvenir, Alice Diop's Saint Omer, James Gray's Armageddon Time. The final strain is what I've been thinking about as auteur retrospective: a sort of taking stock by an established director of their life's work and how they approach the world through their art. The Fabelmans absolutely falls under this category. The case could be made for Kelly Reichardt's Showing Up and Michael Mann's Ferrari. The label definitely applies to Jafar Panahi's No Bears and Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon.

Critical conversations around Oppenheimer and The Killer this year have speculated about Christopher Nolan and David Fincher's relationships to their work, respectively; it's those conversations that make me think about the appropriateness of bringing in extra-textual details to analyze these movies. As with the elements of real life and fiction, the lines get blurry. How much did these directors gravitate toward the stories they tell because they resemble other stories they've told before? How much of the resemblance is their own thumbprints on the material? There's a little of every artist in their work, but there's also a distinct difference between how that work is intended to go, and how it's received. The empty space between filmmaker and audience is where the movie floats, open to interpretation, a medium between sender and receiver that at its best serves to clarify something between artist and audience.

What I wrote:

For Seeing & Believing, I reviewed Hayao Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron. It was really hard not to go long; the plot is deceptively simple, but the story is beautifully multilayered. I can't wait to see it again.

What I watched:

Kelly Reichardt's Showing Up, which has been consistently the movie I've pulled out of my back pocket this year whenever anyone asks me what my favorite has been. I'm writing about it for Bright Wall/Dark Room's Best of 2023 issue.

What I'm reading:

Martha Wells' Murderbot novellas. I'm a sucker for stories about cyborgs and androids, and Murderbot is such a distinctive variation: a security construct who hates what it's been built for, and who'd rather just watch TV. I love this character, and I hope it manages to climb its way out of its own self-loathing.