True Stories
At a glance...
- Directed by David Byrne
- Released in 1986
- Runtime 90 minutes
- Watched at home
- Final feelings: Talking Heads teaches you the myth of Americana
Vignettes of stagnant American mythology that we have both long since moved beyond and also still remain under the shadow of, True Stories has some interesting things to say. But after the movie, my friend played Once in a Lifetime on her phone while getting ready to leave and I realized this whole movie is just that song but 90 minutes long.1
David Byrne is tapping into something real here: the unspoken and unacknowledged ennui of the American dream. Did people in the 80s think this felt hollow? By being so descriptive, the movie feels like it can take on any number of roles depending on when you watched it. There must be people who saw this upon release who just felt that this was a pretty nice and sweet town, and John Goodman heroically got the connection he wanted. What really strikes me in 2024 is the feeling that I'm still living in a world where most of the people who have power look at this myth of small-town America, with its polite conservatism and subtle segregation, as a spiritual guiding light with zero irony.2 To them, all those weird sounding Talking Heads songs are probably pretty catchy and worth playing at the campaign rally to score "grassroots" donors. I guess I'm just saying there's a political vacuousness to the visual and narrative landscape here that is both fitting and immensely tiresome to me.
John Goodman is perfect in this. He's the perfect approachable yet charismatic dude. He's the perfect teddy bear of a man. He's the perfect harmless looking fella, and the closest thing we get to narrative tension and release. He literally sings a song about not wanting freedom or justice, and instead just wanting a person to call his own...and then he marries the most shallow and advertising-pilled woman in the whole damn town. If that's not just the most on-the-nose analog for the entirety of American culture, for virtually everyone living in this fucked up country, I don't know how to say it any more plainly.
I am not a big Talking Heads girl, not from a lack of interest or desire but just because I am bad at listening to music. I recognize that probably a huge part of David Byrne's whole schtick is putting the hollow American Dream on display in his lyrics. I acknowledge this film is just a continuation of the stuff he was already doing, once he had enough success with Stop Making Sense to fund this film.
Time for cringe, in 2016 after Trump won the election I also jumped on the bandwagon (which the Democratic party has largely refused to leave to this day) that the problem was that the dems had ignored these exact people, these rural and small town voters. I thought we did not understand them, I did not understand them, and that was the problem with liberal political strategy. Countless books and New York Times articles were written litigating this fact, which is why we all had a collective hallucination where we idolized that stupid book, Hillbilly Elegy (check out my review of Gummo where I also bring up this book a little bit).
I think in light of this attitude, this implicit worship we culturally accept over a caricature of a tiny fraction of the population living in this country, Sam Levinson's Assassination Nation would be a thematic double feature with this. Compare and contrast how liberals depicted and understood small towns in 1986 with 2018 when the full capabilities of the microprocessors being made in the humble state of Texas are realized in the form of the modern surveillance state. Both movies are unsubtle and preachy in their own ways (though obviously Assassination Nation has got this film beat by a mile when it comes to anti-subtlety). Both movies are trying to relate to American conservatism, but one is fueled by the psychosis of the Trump administration while the other is living under the homely roof of the Reagan administration, perhaps the precursor this country needed to make a TV star and (failed) real estate mogul into its president. All American small-town movies are in conversation with each other in some way, they are all responding to a fundamental contradiction between ideals and lived experiences, but these two feel like they might be an interesting contrast just from the films I've seen, where I think there are elements major and minor that are mirrored between them.
And it's probably hyperbole to say this, but maybe Gummo is something of an antidote to both those films. I think I'd rather watch Gummo now than Assassination Nation in response to this. Maybe the triptych is True Stories, Assassination Nation, Gummo. Maybe I'm just drawing lines between all the small American town movies I've seen in the last year.