I had recently arrived back stateside from China. Ben & Jerry’s seemed like something you should only eat on your wedding day, and the idea of a pile of meat between two pieces of bread was just gross. American supermarkets looked like the supermarkets of royalty, so pristine, so many beautifully packaged and meaty cuts of meat. There is something about the absence of fat in the marketplace. It says, This is a country where no one starves.
I had flown into San Francisco, and from there to Oregon, then Missouri and Chicago, but right now we’re at the True/False Film Festival, and I am staying with my brother in Columbia, MO, because there are three films I want to discuss from that festival. If you have not seen these films, you may want to cease reading this article now as there will be spoilers. How is it possible for there to be spoilers in documentary films? This is one of the things I have learned! The three films are, Stories We Tell, The Act of Killing, and The Institute.
These are films that play with our sense of reality, perhaps intentionally and formally, perhaps because they just happen to be about the play between the real and the imaginary, perhaps because here we have a film where the protagonists arrive at a kind of truth through play-acting. All three of these films are about the fantasies we tell ourselves. We’ll begin with the last of the three. The Institute.
This was Sunday night and I had been waiting in the on-call line outside for an hour and had developed a small circle around me who I was regaling with tales of my time in China, and the woman I left behind, and how I had never had any intention to fall in love in China. I had gone there to save money so I could move to Chicago from Eugene, because there was no work in Eugene. Or more specifically, there was no work fighting wildfires, and I couldn’t go back to the only other work in town because I’d lost my temper at my boss and refused to apologize during our little session with HR. So, it had been off to Zibo where I’d gotten pneumonia, and then Hong Kong to escape Zibo, and then Yangshuo, where I’d lived for a year and met the woman in question. I had been gone for a year and a half in total, and the following day I was to finally take that bus to Chicago, except that now I didn’t want to go.
They called us in, we found our seats, and I prepared myself mentally for disappointment.
We are given a key with a room number on it, and in that room is a television set. We are told by video about the many remarkable achievements of the Jejune Institute. Things like Poli Water, a more condensed form of water with a higher boiling point, and the Memory to Media Center (“removing remembered images from your active memory”), but the final and most remarkable achievement is of course, the Algorithm, a small device that will miraculously remove all human conflict, violence, and heartbreak. This is the global vision to which, we are told, a man named Mr. Octavio Coleman, Esq. has dedicated his life.
When the man himself comes on the television set, he says things like, “You in particular have been chosen because of your unique abilities and other irregularities,” and that therefore, “you will begin to notice the divine occurring all around you in a thousand miniscule ways,” who tells you once you have filled out the form NOT to read the instructions, or if you have already read them then certainly do not TELL anyone about them and especially not to DO them. Instructions on how to get out of the building without having to pass security or the front desk. How to find the various plaques announcing these sites to be Elsewhere. Pushing aside metal lock boxes looking for codes, locating hidden bricks on ancient churches. And finally. A shrine for Eva Lucien hidden in an alleyway. The quest for Elsewhere begins.
Although at the time I had no idea what I was watching, according to Rick Paulas of Awl, in his article on the Jejune Institute and the universe that’s been created around it, I was watching a film about an ARG or “alternate reality game”, in which players are thrust into another possible alternate reality within our own and role-play it. Rick goes on to explain that this is part “public-art installation, part scavenger hunt, part multimedia experiment, part narrative story”. The story specifically revolves around two competing forces, the Jejune Institute and the Elsewhere Public Works Agency. It revolves around a mystery involving the disappearance of a punk girl named Eva Lucien in 1987, and a quest to find and secure the Algorithm. The Jejune Institute clearly comes out as the villain in this story, which I find interesting specifically because the philosophy behind it so perfectly mirrors the philosophy of the Church of the Subgenius. Instead of Bob Dobbs we have Dr. Octavio Coleman Esq. Both belief systems present themselves in similar language that is clearly meant to be understood ironically. But the clearest indication of similarity is the core belief of both. For the Church of the Subgenius the goal of all who follow its tenets is to achieve Slack, while at Jejune it’s Nonchalance.
Nonchalance also happens to be the name of creator Hull’s “consultancy with an expertise in situational design”. What is situational design? A scene from the film perfectly illustrates.
An email announces that a person needs to be at a specific corner at a specific time. The person arrives, the phone rings, they’re told to go to another place. Once there, the phone rings again. They are told to start dancing. Once they do, a man comes out in a boombox and dressed in b-boy gear who then starts cutting it up with them. A moment later a man in what appears to be a yeti costume joins in and hands off a folder of secret material. This is magic.
When I speak of magic, I am not referring to the magic of some medieval wise man who claims to see the secret structure of the universe, the magic that predates science and is a kind of naturalistic reasoning. I mean magic as a transformative act in which we come away changed, the alchemy of the soul that Jung was so interested in. Nonchalance was nothing short of play, and perhaps it was just play, but sometimes we play and this play is merely a form of escape that allows us to avoid change and growth and greater understanding, and sometimes this play leads us to Elsewhere. The question is whether Elsewhere is an elsewhere that is also very much a here and now or whether elsewhere is simply elsewhere and pure escapism. Are we both in the moment and out of it? Or are we just out of it? And what is “the moment”? Couldn’t it be so much more? The players of the Game of Nonchalance were given a possibility, not only to escape for an afternoon in an ARG, but to create an alternate reality, and thereby actually change the whole world. I did not see that happening, but this IS what’s happening in a film called, The Act of Killing.
II.
Filmmaker Josh Oppenheimmer had been in Indonesia for years interviewing survivors of the 1965 genocide, an anti-communist purge that followed a failed coup and led to the deaths of between 500,000 and a million civilians. Oppenheimer had the audacity to interview the men responsible, and these men were more than pleased to boast of the numbers they had killed and how they had performed these heinous crimes. Oppenheimer ends up focusing on a small-time gangster named Anwar Congo who has killed perhaps hundreds or even upwards of a thousand people on his own, and today is “revered as a founding father of a right-wing paramilitary organization that grew out of the death squads”. Early on, we see Anwar demonstrating how exactly he killed so many people (with wire) and when shown the footage, he feels that it does not depict him correctly. His hair should be black. He should be wearing the clothes of 1965. Anwar and his buddies begin the process of turning their escapades into a feature film.
These men were huge fans of the American gangster films of the time. They had started out as ticket scalpers and would often go directly from watching some American gangster film at the local cinema to the office where they were to slaughter their quota for the night. When the filming begins, they’re dressing like they’re about to audition for Mean Streets.
But Anwar’s efforts to glamorize this period of his youth rapidly devolves into the grotesque and disturbing. He and his death squad buddies reminiscing in make-up that makes them look like ghouls. Anwar’s main sidekick in a very lavish drag and Anwar buried from the neck down while his in-drag henchman taunts him with raw bloody meat, saying its rancid as he chuckles and slaps Anwar’s already blood-tacky cheeks while Anwar dry-heaves. This film within a film feels more like something directed by David Lynch than Martin Scorcese.
There is one scene in particular in which Anwar and his buddies are attempting to recreate the massacre of an entire village. A minister from the government has come to watch the initial filming. Afterwards, he is telling them that maybe they seem a little too bloodthirsty and they need to tone it down a bit, but then changes his mind and says it will give a strong indication of the power of Indonesia to foreigners. All the victims are played by the murderers’ immediate families. They are play-slaughtering their own daughters and play-raping their own wives. Afterwards, one distraught member is consoling his daughter, telling her she did such a good job play-crying but that she can stop crying now.
Leo Strauss, perhaps best-known as the father of the Neoconservative Movement in America, often spoke of what he called noble lies, or lies that maintain the stability and welfare of the nation-state. These are the lies a nation is built on, such as for example that this “land is our land”, and not stolen from those who lived here before us. One of Indonesia’s noble lies is that this genocide was a just and necessary thing. But those who are trapped playing the heroes of this fiction, and knowing first-hand the actual reality, are madmen waiting to awaken into the hell that’s been marinating within the silenced conscience of each. At one point in the film, an actor playing one of Anwar’s victims gives him an award and thanks him for sending him to heaven.
I met a woman from Indonesia while I was living in China. She was going to college in Tianjin but was in Yangshuo for a few months to improve her Chinese at the Chinese language school affiliated with the Omeida English Academy where I was teaching at the time. This was right when I’d gotten there from Hong Kong and I was still in shock from the whole 36-hour-train-ride-with-eleven-thousand-yuan-strapped-to-my-inner-thigh-followed-by-handing-my-passport-to-a-tiny-Chinese-man-I-had-never-met-before-over-the-turnstyles-in-Hong-Kong-so-he-could-get-me-a-new-visa thing. Not to mention the two months of pneumonia I’d had before that, and the working-six-days-a-week-and-spending-every-morning-hooked-up-to-an-iv-in-a-dingy-clinic-five-minutes-away thing.
This woman never spoke of genocide, and I never thought to ask her, but she had this hardness in the way she looked at you. In Indonesia we say like this, and she presses the tips of two fingers together and makes a triangle with her thumbs. Then she presses the palms of her hands together like she’s praying. Then the tips of the fingers of each hand are touching the wrist of the other hand. From kissing to intercourse to 69. But for you it is probably like this, she said and smashed her palms together and smeared front of hand against back of hand and interlaced her fingers in an approximation of sloppy American sex.
This was at this quiet bar, Alley Bar, and there were two Chinese women on either side of me, one a dour adolescent and the other a bubbly preschool teacher. I’m not sure how much they were following our conversation. But everyone was drinking, because it was someone’s birthday, and giving her a prod about how many boyfriends she had, one back home in Sichuan and one in Yangshuo they were saying while she just smiled beatifically and assured these foreigners that no she was a good girl. But the head is sacred, my Indonesian friend was saying.
When I watched the film, I thought of that woman. Who was she? She looked ethnically Chinese, and ethnic Chinese accounted for a large percentage of those persecuted and killed. She had seemed desperate specifically to find either a Chinese or Western husband, and at the time I had assumed it was because of her stifling home life or the male chauvinism to be found in her mother country. I always envisioned her over-worked and underfed, but as I was watching this film, hearing the story of one man’s Chinese stepfather being murdered, or ethnic Chinese being extorted for money, it was like I was seeing my Indonesian friend for the first time. The desperation, to not return home, to find someone, anyone to take her away. This film showed me the pain she was running from, and it was greater than psychology. This is the pain of being born in the dark. The pain of dying in silence. It is the pain of an entire people.
Oscar Wilde, writing against the social realism of the day, described fiction as a beautiful untruth. Artifice for its own sake. The wonder of the beautifully crafted lie. Play for playing’s sake. This is the difference between the magic that Oppenheimer renders through allowing these mass murderers to go play, and the magic of the Game of Nonchalance.
The difference is the difference between a play in which someone is honestly fighting for their life and a play that is never taken seriously. Both may begin as games, but for play to truly be transformative at some point, it must become genuinely dangerous. Play can be an amusing word game or it can be a round-about way to face a very frightening thing. The question is how far we believe in the game and what it is capable of.
There were moments in the Game of Nonchalance that did approach this level. At one point in the film, a player tells how he broke into a house that was in some way involved in the storyline and followed signs that led him into a maze of underground waterways in search of the mythical Algorithm. Other players were called to perform a rescue and go in the other way and did indeed find him. The adventure is definitely there, but is the socio-engineering?
Creator Jeff Hull claimed towards the end of the documentary that the primary purpose of the Game of Nonchalance had been to honor Eva Lucien who was an actual woman who had explained to him about Elsewhere, a place where your imagination can roam free. This woman who had supposedly gone missing was also killed by one of the interviewees whose face we never see, who is obviously a very terrible actor, but an actor who the other players speak of as just another player, who they had met and knew, who at some point had stopped playing because he was taking the game far too seriously. Who spent much of his time telling other players that this is not a game. You get the feeling that this character exists to push the players beyond the complacency of “just” playing the game. To push them to actually BELIEVE and not just believe with the knowing smirk is such a popular bedfellow in the grand old U.S. of A.
It is a fascinating game, but in the end, the film rings false. Filmmaker Spencer McCall never questions Hull on this point of the obviously planted player. We do not believe the interviewee in the shadows when he confesses to killing Eva Lucien, but the fact that McCall never calls him out leaves us feeling that the whole film is just a fraud. Like I said. Spoilers.
The question is, When does the game end? In both of these films, the characters believe themselves to be playing. What is the difference? The difference is desperation. The difference is a genuine fear. The difference can be seen in my Indonesian friend’s eyes. Her desperation at even at the lightest of times. While the players in the Game of Nonchalance seemed completely at ease even when describing being lost in sewage pipes below the city. That’s the difference.
III.
As I mentioned before, I fell in love in China. I didn’t plan for it, but I kind of expected it all the same. I ended up chasing her to Beijing, and now I am planning on going back again next Fall and we’re talking about getting married in Sichuan. She is what the Chinese call a Lamei (拉美), or a “spicy beauty”. She likes to call me Yazuishou (鸭嘴兽)—Chinese for platypus, as in, I am ugly as a platypus—and Shibaba (屎爸爸)—literally, “Daddy Shit”. She tells me how much she hates me every time we speak on the phone and that there’s no need for me to call her ever again. And shouts about how much she wants to punch me and so on. I just want to punch you,”she says and lingers on the final syllable while eyeing me evilly.
And ever since I met her, I’ve been crying with greater frequency. I used to cry a lot as a little kid, but very infrequently as an adult, except that now I find myself fighting back the tears while listening to a particularly powerful rendition of some indigenous folk music. I’ve become THAT guy. And it all started shortly after I first noticed how adorable she was while she practiced the breast stroke in the Li River for five hours straight. This is what she’s taught me.
If you allow yourself to love, then life becomes a very real thing that you are in the middle of doing. If you do not, then the game goes on and everyone’s a loser. It’s that simple.
Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell is a film about her family and its secrets. About love and what it can do to people. About her mother, and about lies. Not noble lies, or beautiful untruths, but just regular everyday lies and what these lies do to people, and how we fashion our lives around them. Our ideas of a person and how much are these ideas a fabrication? It’s a beautifully framed film that undermines our expectations with such a clearly-constructed narrative, that it’s very easy to forget that Stories we Tell is a story that Polley has told. It is her creation and not the abstract truth. Think of the fact that she allows Michael to read his written description of the events of the narrative, but not Harry. Michael’s description that is his rendering of the story she has told him. Michael has given voice to her picture of the events of the story, but that is not made clear in the film.
There are some brilliant tricks she uses that I don’t have the heart to give away. I already find myself pulling my punches. For example, Michael and Harry. Who are they? I’m not telling. But the most brilliant trick for me is the way she uses super 8 to create the similitude of veracity and when we become aware that we’ve been had, it’s like we are awakening from a dream with Polley. She is taking us on her journey with her.
Of course, Polley does acknowledge her hand in the crafting of the story. Once we’ve come out of the woods so to speak, she starts showing us her own hand in everything, which leads to us questioning the film while it’s happening. More and more, there is this question. To the point where I have to wonder whether she wanted the viewer to ask questions like I did in the paragraph before last. She certainly kept Harry’s own concerns about the project in the film. It’s so well-crafted that the audience walks away stunned by the journey we’ve been taken on, but when I think of Ms. Polley and the story she has presented, I think she has honestly tried through her artifice to present to the best of her ability the truth as she sees it, to strip away the noble lies of her family, and that perhaps this film was made because the noble lies had already been thrown away and it was a last ditch effort to save them by presenting an authoritative document of the truth as she sees it. That the motives behind making this film were more personal than artistic.
The film seemed very much to have been made FOR her father, and there was something poignant in the fact that she couldn’t come to the screening because her father was very seriously ill. At the end of the film, the viewer is left wondering whether it was her mother’s lies that had killed her, and I personally couldn’t help wondering whether this outing of the truth had anything to do with her father’s illness. I don’t know if I mentioned that my grandmother is a Jungian psychologist who very much believes that our psychology and our body are indistinguishable.
But now I’m the one who’s pretending this is just a game. How can you write that like that about a real person and her real father? But. I didn’t edit it out. It’s still there, like an accident waiting to happen.
Because the things we say are very real, and whether we say them in jest, as actors on a set, or in secret, they have an effect. Because the imagination is a place. It is not a place you can go to, but you’re always there. It’s home to your heartache. It’s where your lies come from, and the stories we tell are the stories that lead us in and out of this place. They are our paths through the woods. This is how we find our way home and this is how we got lost in the first place.
In the end, Stories We Tell leaves us wondering what fictions were left out for the sake of Polley’s sincere perception of the facts. In the end, we see Anwar’s complete collapse. In the end, the Jejune Institute held a seminar; Mr. Octavio Coleman Esq. came and they had a motivational speaker who talked about trust and everyone had to get under the parachute. And in the end, the movie just ends because everything ends eventually.
Gabriel Boyer has been making up stories about himself for as long as he can remember. There was never a time he was not fully seated in his various delusions. He continues to delude himself daily. His latest release is below. You can read more about him here.
