SARAH POLLEY’S "STORIES WE TELL," MEMORY AND REALITY: A MOVIE REVIEW

Sarah Polley’s new movie, Stories We Tell, is excellent in revealing character after character from her childhood as she seeks to know her mother more completely. The film entertains while raising big questions about our ability to apprehend reality through memory.

 

It’s a subject that invites didacticism and pretentiousness, but Polley has found a way to show rather than tell, to enact important, interesting experiences rather than summarizing or lecturing about them, even when her overall purpose is as philosophical—as epistemological—as it is personal.  

Her strategy involves a question of authorial honesty: do the ends justify the means? But I can’t delve into that without spoiling the movie experience for others. I’ll just say this: your take on the movie won’t be complete unless you’ve paid careful attention to the closing credits.

A film about the nature of memory and reality might sound too heavy for a summer’s evening, but Polley’s characters and plot keep moving right along in this 1960s home movie camera’s characterization of Sarah Polley’s mother, Diane, and some significant people in her life. That movement is both entertaining and intellectually engaging, as people and events are alternately revealed and concealed.  

I think most viewers will be pulled into the Polley story and care about some or all of these people—the lively, charismatic, lovable Diane and, more importantly, two generations of her inner circle as they react to Diane.

The memories and versions of Diane are slightly or dramatically different from each other. It’s like that parlor game called Telephone, or Truth, where the story that was whispered by Benny to Betty becomes altered significantly as it’s passed on in whispers to and from a half dozen or so other friends. In Polley’s movie, the stakes are higher; the story is much more than a parlor game. But who has it right?

The characters are articulate, interesting Canadians who have done interesting things—especially in the world of theater. And the stage, of course, presents its own questions about reality. Why might we weep for King Lear but not the old crank across the street? 

If Lear’s daughter Goneril and his loyal servant Kent gave their separate, personal accounts of what has happened to the father and king, we might think we were hearing about two different people. Of course, honesty in the telling would be an issue, too.

The evil Goneril and the impossibly loyal Kent would also be narrating what they need to believe. On top of being genuinely mistaken about the actual Lear, they might knowingly deceive their audience here and there in order to win them over. By the end of the story, we might throw up our hands and wonder if we can know the old guy even existed.

Can a movie that moves and sounds as natural and realistic as Stories We Tell raise legitimate epistemological questions? Can it stir us to wondering (again, I hope) how we can or cannot know what we think we know? Yes, I think so. For pleasure and for more careful thinking about the past, see this film. Then wonder, till the cows come home, whether the popcorn was real. Either way, it’s a richer two hours than anything else you’d have done.

Jean Valentine, W.S. Merwin: Bees in Poems and Show, Don't Tell

Go, Tigers!

Moreover, in my latest chats with bees, they have seemed healthy and busy, unlike that alarming experience a month ago (September 6, 2011).  Naturally that's led me to look again for poems involving bees.

One of the most common maxims about writing poetry (and fiction, for that matter) is, "Show, Don't Tell." Don't summarize, generalize or preach to readers; create an experience and let readers draw their own conclusions.

I've been thinking about that in relation to these two rather different poems by long-established American poets Jean Valentine and W.S. Merwin  (Merwin was U.S. Poet Laureate until Phillip Levine took over recently). I'm interested in your responses, whether or not they are specifically connected to the issue of Show, Don't Tell.

Bees by Jean Valentine : The Poetry Foundation

The River of Bees by W. S. Merwin : The Poetry Foundation

Roethke's "The Meadow Mouse" Part 3, Conclusion

Part 3

Before I quit, let me discuss two of the poem’s gifts.
The Meadow Mouse by Theodore Roethke at Old Poetry
First, there's the daring opening, “sleeps the baby mouse” instead of “the mouse sleeps,” or some other less charming phrasing.

The inverted, perhaps archaic syntax in “sleeps the baby mouse” instantly creates the tone of a children’s tale, which the rest of the poem pretty much sustains, effectively forcing us to revive our childlike sensibilities. That diction might even offer the argument that compassion and sensitivity are inherently childlike responses, what Wordsworth called the “primal sympathies, which having been must ever be.”

Although I still fault Roethke’s poetic excesses in this direction, they might create an interesting position about human psychology. What if every instance of human sympathy or empathy is, and must be, the resurrection of a child’s heart and mind? What if that’s the only way we can even begin to understand compassion? What if adulthood without that inner child is limited to sterile, desiccated, egocentric, often mean thoughts and behavior?

Why would this be so? Because adults have learned to expect “adult” behavior from others—cunning, aggression, intrusion. Defensively, that requires of each adult constant vigilance, suspicion, strategizing, guile. Without those stone walls and nimble maneuvers we are children, spontaneous and empathic but vulnerable.

Maybe we are especially susceptible to feeling stupid






for not having foreseen and thwarted the trickery of our peers. “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” The adage that W. made extra famous is probably more relevant to the adult’s world than the child’s, though it’s impossible to know when and how barriers begin to rise and thicken. And, lest we over-romanticize puerile innocence, let’s remember that most of these defenses are necessary to psychic or even physical survival.

Secondly, part of my resistance to Roethke’s final line grows from what I imagine without that line. It’s considered heresy in critiquing a friend’s poem to rewrite images or lines for him, but I’m going to do just that—to an icon, no less. I’d have encouraged Roethke to consider this ending:

I think of the nestling fallen into the deep grass,
The turtle gasping in the dusty rubble
of the highway, the paralytic stunned
in the tub, the water rising.

The End. If we omit Roethke’s final line, we have a turn from vulnerable mouse toward vulnerable human, the paralytic. And stop. Although it’s a sudden, even shocking turn, it’s been implied all along. The poem is about all things vulnerable, not just baby mice.

The Meadow Mouse by Theodore Roethke at Old Poetry

In my suggestion there are risks of causing the poem to seem disjointed or herky-jerky at the end—and making the poem more anthropocentric. Maybe I’m suggesting, “You thought it was about the mouse? It was always about the human, always will be, if a human’s telling the story.”

But that would not glorify humans; it would simply pin down the nature of human sympathy, confessing that we care about the mouse primarily because that sympathy clarifies the way we care about our own, our collective Me. To say otherwise is at least a little dishonest.

Let me repeat that I have no axe to grind with Theodore Roethke, whose poem “The Waking” I admire as much as any poem I know. “My Papa’s Waltz,” “I Knew a Woman,” and “The Geranium” are not far behind.

The Meadow Mouse by Theodore Roethke at Old Poetry

I also love the parental instincts here, the compassion, the heart, the . . . reverence? . . . for everything fragile in “The Meadow Mouse.” However, I think those feelings might have more power if they’d been forced to struggle for existence, struggle to be expressed, if there were a sense that Roethke had tried to hold back more of his flood of sensitivity, if the poem were a little tougher about its emotionality. In the old, good bromide, “Show, don’t tell,” I wish the poem had told a little less and been satisfied with what it showed.

So I'm outta here on this. You think you're sick of the subject? Imagine how I feel. Happy February.

Favorite Lines: What Is It We Remember?

Whether or not she meant to, Altadenahiker in her visitor comment yesterday reminded me of the old writing guideline, "Show, don't tell." It works for both fiction and poetry, and I think I believe in it strongly.

On the other hand, I find myself as well as others loving lines that are at least on the verge of telling. Whether or not we mean to, I suspect we all go to writing and the arts for wisdom as well as beauty, entertainment, and other purposes.

Here are a few lines that come to my mind. If they’re not didactic, full of message, and “telling” more than showing, aren’t they perilously close to it? Yet I remember them and love them, whether or not I believe in them. And I am not a crook—though I wonder if there’s a streak of Bible-thumper in me that makes me like these truths. Truths? Well, there are no turkeys here.

Please feel free to offer your own favorites in response.


Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all Ye need to know.

I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

Can't repeat the past? Why, of course you can.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Do not go gentle into that good night.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing,
For every tatter in its mortal dress.

Ah, Margaret, are you grieving
Over goldengrove unleaving? . . .
It is the blight man was born for.
It is Margaret you mourn for.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

A poem should not mean, but be.

. . .

And what if William Carlos Williams had not begun with “so much depends upon”?

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