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We’ve elected the Terminator. He’s returned
from the future again, this time to save California, which should
be relatively easy for him compared to the last three times, when
he saved the future of humanity.
The recall election is just the latest and perhaps
most tragically hilarious example of the ever-blurry line between
truth and fiction. It’s not surprising, really. I mean, California
is home to Hollywood, which has always been pretty surreal. And
critics and philosophers have been arguing truth’s mutability
for eons, but it’s only recently that pop culture has really
dared to wear its artifice on its sleeve.
My favorite movie so far this year, American Splendor,
is a story of art imitating life, but it also manages to blur the
line between representation and reality by presenting three interchangeable
versions of cartoon author Harvey Pekar: an actor, a cartoon character,
and the real, present-day Pekar. Bowling for Columbine
has transformed the way we look at documentaries, which have always
had a love-hate relationship with the truth. They’ve now emerged
from the obscurity of festivals and PBS to become mainstream theatrical
attractions. Even School of Rock (the latest rehash of
the ever-popular To Sir With Love), slips us a little self-consciousness
with the closing credits, as Jack Black and his pre-teen rock band
croon, “The movie’s almost over, but we’re still
on screen.”
But the most spectacular example of pop culture’s
increasing fascination with itself is Millennium Actress,
the latest anime offering from director Satoshi Kon (Perfect
Blue). The memoir of Chiyoko Fujiwara, a fictional Japanese
movie star, the film traces the aging actress’s story as told
to a documentary filmmaker and his cameraman. Her narration quickly
gives way to flashbacks, which in turn become inextricably intertwined
with her movie roles; memory fuses with fiction and history, and
both are subordinated to Chiyoko’s overwhelming drive to fulfill
a girlhood desire.
In the first flashback, set in WWII Japan, we see
a pre-teen Chiyoko help a mysterious artist to escape from the police
by hiding him in her family’s storage shed. He sneaks away
one night, leaving behind a mysterious key that he has told her
is “the key to the most important thing in the world.”
From that moment on, Chiyoko has found her life’s pursuit:
to return the key to its rightful owner, a man with whom, in the
swoon of adolescence, she is convinced she is in love. Narrating
a luminous career encompassing roles in everything from Shogun-era
historical epics to futuristic space adventures, she manages to
bend the storyline of each movie to her single, relentless quest
to return the key and be reunited with her beloved. The costumes,
scenery and supporting characters change endlessly around her, but
the drama is ever the same.
Simultaneously a personal memoir, a snapshot history
of Japan over the past century and a continuous narrative structured
around a single formative event, Chiyoko’s story is further
complicated by the increasing involvement of the filmmaker and cameraman.
Appearing initially as bystanders (akin to Mr. Scrooge’s ghostly
visits to Christmas past), they eventually become part of the story,
even becoming characters in Chiyoko’s films. In effect, they
construct the story with her, reminding us that film is a form of
shared experience, a kind of communal memory.
Millennium Actress is smart and complex and
beautifully constructed. Unlike most of the anime films popular
in the States, there are no giant robots, tentacle rape, or morphing
mutant blobs; just a brilliant, joyous roller coaster meditation
on how desire can shape not only the course of one’s life,
but the process of recalling and understanding that life, and how
our personal memories are thoroughly bound up with community and
history.
Unfortunately, my friend (who had generously invited
me to the free preview screening) did not enjoy the film as much
as I did. He had expected it to be more historical and he found
it implausible that Chiyoko had made the same film over and over
again, just with different costumes and settings. Clearly he was
looking for something else, a history lesson or something more closely
resembling “reality.” I found his reading too literal,
but upon further reflection, realized that his reaction was not
so far from my own just a few weeks earlier when faced with a similar
suspension of “truth.”
My personal essay class teacher had assigned a pair
of readings. The first piece was a criticism of memoirist Vivian
Gornick, who had admitted to “composing” parts of her
memoir, Fierce Attachments. The second was Gornick’s
response, in which she maintained that it was sometimes necessary
to sacrifice absolute fidelity in order to communicate a greater,
underlying truth. It bothered me that Gornick had played fast and
loose with the details of time, place, personality and conversation.
Shouldn’t a writer who claimed to be writing from personal
experience remain faithful to the “truth,” even if it
was only the truth as she happened to perceive it on any given day?
To my surprise, not one of the other students in the class took
issue with Gornick’s creative license. They all sided with
her and with my teacher in asserting that it was perfectly ok to
use composite characters, compress timelines and simply “make
stuff up.” Oddly, I found myself on the other side with Jonathan
Yardley of the Washington Post, who said, “There’s a
word for that: fiction.”
I wasn’t sure why I was being so curmudgeonly.
In graduate school, we tossed phrases like “social construction”
and “subject formation” around like rag dolls. History
is told by the winners; race, gender and sexuality are arbitrary
markers along the continuum of human variation; and individuality
is merely a by-product of language. But this time I was the dumb
bunny, the thick-headed literalist in search of “truth”
and “reality.” Despite my excellent education to the
contrary, it bothered me that someone could write a personal essay
about something that wasn’t entirely true. It was ok to misremember,
to have forgotten a detail – such is the purview of the “personal”
– but to knowingly collapse time, or make up a conversation?
It just didn’t seem right.
Like Chiyoko’s key, I suspected that the source
of my intransigence began somewhere back in the misty recesses of
childhood. In those days, I had no problem with fiction: fiction
was my best friend. I knew entire passages of Black Beauty
by heart, and was so taken with a book called Little Mouse on
the Prairie that I turned it into a recurring game involving
elaborate reconfiguration of pillows from our sectional. In contrast,
my dad was and is strictly a non-fiction kind of guy. I always associated
his reading list, full of business strategy and biography, with
dry, adult reality. Fiction and make-believe were the luxuries of
childhood. Maturity seemed paved with books by Lee Iacocca.
So it seems perilous that lately I’ve been feeling
rather grown up. I’d rather listen to NPR than the hyperactive
dramas played out in popular music. I would watch the Food Network
twenty-four hours a day if I didn’t have to make a living,
and I haven’t read a work of fiction in over a year. I’m
beginning to understand my father’s fascination with “reality.”
As I get older, I’m confronted with an ever increasing number
of things over which I have no control (I can’t think of a
better definition of reality.). Non-fiction, documentary and even
the news are more interesting because they’re all stories
of how other people deal with things over which they have no control.
In other words, coping with the reality of adulthood requires considerably
more effort than rearranging a few sofa cushions.
Of course reality looks a little different these days.
There’s nothing but “reality” on television, all
of it set-up, groomed and edited for maximum shock value. Everyone
knows it’s fake, but therein lies its appeal. The thing about
reality TV is that unlike traditional documentaries, it never fails
to expose the seam between truth and fiction. It reveals the workings
beneath the surface, not just by going “behind the scenes”
(candid interviews with participants, infrared “private”
moments), but in transplanting “reality” into the well-ordered
universe of a game show. Reality TV shows are not only biased by
selective shooting and editing the way traditional documentaries
are, but by elaborate rules and regulations, clearly stated and
repeated ad nauseum for the edification of the viewing audience.
So Reality TV is sort of real and somewhat fake. Despite
the moniker, we know we are watching a performance, and the performers
know we are watching them. Similarly, movies and books that draw
attention to the fact that they are “made up” make us
aware of how we construct the narratives of our own lives. A story
like Millenium Actress (however fictional) asserts that
the power to understand our destiny and to share it (and hopefully
shape it) with others lies within our own memories and imaginations.
It’s all about how you spin it, after all. The very real fact
that the Terminator is now my governor makes me want to cry, but
on the other hand, it also makes me strangely proud to live in California,
a state of hyper-reality where truth and fiction are now completely
fused.
< back to film
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