Today’s politically correct anthologies of American literature are filled with rediscovered writing by rediscovered women and ethnic minority writers. Their writing is sometimes as interesting as well-known writing by well-known writers, but it’s nonsense to pretend that, in general, it is as culturally important. You can tell me that Gwendolyn B. Bennett, Rolla Lynn Riggs, and Elizabeth Madox Roberts, who all have work in the p.c. Heath Anthology of American Literature, are as central to understanding the 1920s as Dorothy Parker, but I won’t believe you.
I use the old-fashioned Norton Anthology of American Literature because, unlike the Heath, it includes Parker. Norton gives her only two and one-third pages and her overdone story “The Waltz,” but at least they say the right things about Parker and the 1920s:
This was the decade of “flaming youth,” the beginning of the “youth culture” that still characterizes American society. All over America, the activities of trend-setting and privileged young people were considered newsworthy. Dorothy Parker, a talented writer of wit and charm [question: are there untalented writers of wit and charm?], was among those whose sayings and doings were recorded in the gossip columns of New York newspapers and repeated around the country.
The anthology mentions that wisecracking suddenly came out of the closet and into newsprint and that “nobody was more skilled at it than Parker,” but it doesn’t print any of her wisecracks, nor her one immortal poem: “Men seldom make passes / At girls who wear glasses.” Here are some of Parker’s wisecracks:
He’s a writer for the ages -- four to eight.
One more drink and I’d have been under the host.
[Of the young actress Katharine Hepburn]
She ran the whole gamut of her emotions from A to B, and put some distance between herself and a more experience colleague lest she catch acting from her.
If all the girls at the Yale Prom were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.
[Her contribution to the Algonquin Roundtable’s “Most Unlikely Headline” contest]
“POPE ELOPES”
If you’ve got to be raped, you might as well lie back and enjoy it.
[Scene: two women meet before a door. The women: Dorothy Parker and Clare Boothe Luce, the glamorous, witty writer-politician wife of Henry Luce, founder of Time Inc.]
Luce (with a smile, gesturing for Parker to precede her): Age before Beauty.
Parker (stepping forward): Pearls before swine.
[On hearing that Miss Luce was kind to her inferiors]
And where does she find them?
Parker was a drunk and a perfectionist, which meant that her writing, unlike her fast mouth, pressed against deadlines. Harold Ross, the founding editor of The New Yorker (1925---), sometimes sent a copyboy round to her apartment to get what she’d written, superbly finished or not. One mid-day the copyboy pounded on Parker’s door for a long time before her hoarse voice came from within: “Tell Ross I’m too fucking busy. And vice-versa.”
Though not a twenties feminist in her personal life, Parker the public figure opened doors for women to be as funny and as raunchy as men. But at least once, we now know, one of her immortal wisecracks was topped by something even better, though then unprintable. The wits at the Algonquin Roundtable were told one lunchtime that President Calvin Coolidge had just died. "How can they tell?" Parker blurted out.
"He had an erection," said humorist Robert Benchley, Parker's sometime lover. Benchley’s comment passed down through his family and was only published in 1987.
Showing posts with label journalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label journalism. Show all posts
Five Professional Women
In 1993, struggling to find something to write about, I decided that since I was so interested in women I’d write about them and their daily work in jobs that interested me. The resulting profiles are in the posts that follow. I showed them to several people in publishing, thinking I might have the start of a book that would appeal to parents looking for something vocational to inspire their daughters. The publishing people said, “Gee, interesting. I wonder who’d publish it.”
I thank the women who permitted me to interview them: a victim's advocate, a foreign correspondent, a high school English teacher, a performing arts administrator, and a movie translator. I gave each woman a copy of her profile. One said she and her colleagues didn't recognize themselves. Another said she didn't have the color (orange) clothes I described. I hope that if any reads her profile now, she is glad to have an image, however imperfect, from her past.
Had the book been published, I planned to put as epigraph what the dead Mrs. Gibbs says to the dead Emily, who wants to revisit her life, in the third act of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town: "Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough."
I thank the women who permitted me to interview them: a victim's advocate, a foreign correspondent, a high school English teacher, a performing arts administrator, and a movie translator. I gave each woman a copy of her profile. One said she and her colleagues didn't recognize themselves. Another said she didn't have the color (orange) clothes I described. I hope that if any reads her profile now, she is glad to have an image, however imperfect, from her past.
Had the book been published, I planned to put as epigraph what the dead Mrs. Gibbs says to the dead Emily, who wants to revisit her life, in the third act of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town: "Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough."
Foreign Correspondent
At 11 a.m. on Thursday July 15, 1993, Lisa Beyer, Time magazine's Jerusalem correspondent, starts her weekly staff meeting.
"It was great not meeting last week. I know -- you don't have to thank me," she says with a chuckle. "We've got mucho things to discuss today."
Lisa, 29, is wearing pale orange shirt and pants. A cheery, wisecracking person, she is somewhat subdued in the meeting. The four full-time members of her staff have worked in the Jerusalem bureau far longer than she, and they are a good deal older. She listens hard to what they say.
"As some of you know, we got an O.K. on the Plia Albeck story," Lisa says. "I cabled on Tuesday and it will run in 'Talk of the Streets.'"
Plia Albeck has just been removed from her post as head of the civil claims department in the Israeli Ministry of Justice. For years she had provoked controversy by her insensitive handling of Palestinian suits against the Israeli government. An example: in 1992, a court awarded $333,000 to a Palestinian who lost both hands when an Israeli officer ordered him to remove a Palestinian flag from a live power line; Albeck protested that the award was excessive because the man, a street vendor, could "sell falafel with artificial arms."
Time's "Talk of the Streets" is a series of paragraph-long reports in its international edition.
Lisa says the Time editors in New York need three things. "A picture of Albeck, which I assume we have."
"We will have," says Anni Rubinger. Her husband, David, nods. David Rubinger, Time's staff photographer, is one of Israeli's most celebrated photographers. Anni is the bureau's photo-archivist and -researcher. The Rubingers are in their sixties and came to Israel from Austria.
David photographed Plia Albeck some years ago against the day when she might be important enough to make Time. A smiling image of her will be culled from the files to run, with nice incongruity, alongside the paragraph about her losing her job.
"Great," Lisa says. "They want to know why the Palestinian woman was killed by the Israeli army -- you know, when Plia argued that her husband shouldn't get any money because now he didn't have to support her."
There are groans at the table.
"Do you remember, Jamail?"
The incident happened in 1991.
Jamail Hamad is the bureau's Arabic-language reporter. A Palestinian in his 50s and a well-known writer, Jamail replies after a moment's reflection. "It was an accident. I don't remember how it happened."
"Can you find out?"
"Yes. I can try."
"Finally, they want some pithy quotes about Plia getting sacked. Some happy, some outraged. I'll get those, but if any of you have heard good things, tell me.
"Now, we need to come up with stories we can propose."
Silence at the table.
"Well, the army's moving north," says Jean Marx, Lisa's administrative assistant. "Leaves have been cancelled." Jean, who is in her 50s, surveys the Hebrew press. She came from England.
The table is silent. The army suddenly moving additional troops into southern Lebanon has happened countless times before. Many people hoped it wouldn't happen under the new, liberal Israeli government.
"Yah," says Lisa. "Something's happening up there."
"Shelling," several people say.
"The army's not going to tell us anything yet," Lisa says. "I think I may have to go there. Anyhow, that's for next week."
"There's Demjanjuk," someone says.
"All we can do is an update," Lisa says. "That's next week too -- when the Supreme Court verdict comes out."
"It's done," one of the staff says.
"Why do you say that?" Lisa asks.
"Someone in Justice told me."
"It's written?"
"At the printer's."
Lisa thinks for a moment. "I ought to be able to get a confirmation on that."
John Demjanjuk is the retired Cleveland autoworker whom an Israeli court condemned to death in 1988 for being the notorious "Ivan the Terrible" of the Treblinka death camp in Poland. Subsequent evidence has suggested that, while Demjanjuk was a guard at another Nazi camp, he wasn't at Treblinka.
"Everybody think he's going to be acquitted?" Lisa asks.
Everybody does. Israel can't afford to kill a man who might be innocent; that would smack too much of the Holocaust.
"Ivan-the-Not-So-Terrible," Lisa says, repeating a phrase from the papers. "I heard on French radio that the 40th anniversary of the UZI is coming up. That's in a month or so. We'll propose a story."
There is talk about the whereabouts of the submachine gun's inventor.
"I think the best thing we can propose is the 'Fractured Fatah' story again," Lisa says. "They didn't run it four weeks ago, but with Abdel-Shafi's blow-up at Arafat it's bigger than ever. It's really a new story.
Dr. Haidar Abdel-Shafi, a Palestinian negotiating with the Israelis, has just demanded that Yasser Arafat, the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, cede his autocratic power to a collective leadership.
"I know what they're going to say in New York," Lisa says. "'Aw, this is defrosted fish! Everybody's read it.'
"Yeah, right --" she answers her own accusation, "everybody in the office! Four weeks ago we would have been the first to publish, but we still can be, maybe. Anyhow, it's the best we've got."
There is consensus on this, and Lisa says she'll send a cable suggesting the story and the new angle on it that afternoon.
"Hey, if I do go north," she says, as the meeting is breaking up, "where's that bulletproof vest I heard about?"
There's some laughter. Jean Marx says it's up in the storeroom.
"Good," Lisa says. "Would you bring it out, Jean? We want the chief to be taken care of."
Lisa and the staff chuckle.
Fifteen minutes later, beneath a trellis of bougainvillea in a nearby café, Lisa digs pita bread into a mound of hummus and tells her guest she always wanted to be a reporter. "I'm a very confrontational person. I love being able to pick up a phone and ask questions and have people feel some compulsion to answer.
"I'm a Louisiana Cajun -- proudly. I went to Texas just because they had a better Journalism department. And then I found, more important, The Daily Texan."
The Daily Texan is the University of Texas at Austin's student newspaper. Lisa worked for the Texan as reporter, copy editor, managing editor, and, finally, editor-in-chief.
"I didn't know what I wanted. I guess I dreamed about a conventional newspaper career culminating with The New York Times. If you'd held a gun to my head, I'd probably have said, 'The Austin American-Statesman, The Dallas Times-Herald, The Cleveland Plain-Dealer, and then The New York Times.'
"Red Gibson, famous teacher, neat guy, said -- it's the only thing I remember from the class -- 'If you want to get to The New York Times, be editor-in-chief of The Daily Texan.' So that gave me the goal.
"I had a great time as editor, hobnobbing with the campus administrators and the politicians who wanted our endorsement. I didn't know what would happen when I graduated.
"One night I was walking across campus and I met a teacher I'd had in American Studies. He asked me what I was going on to and, when I said I didn't know, said, 'What kind of grades do you have?'
"Well, no one in Journalism cares about grades, not if they're serious about journalism. A lot of the Daily Texan staff doesn't graduate when they're supposed to -- you know, like athletes -- because they've been doing something More Important.
"But they didn't have my mother. I told my teacher, 'I have a perfect 4.0' and mashed my teeth together in a big smile.
"'My God,' he said, 'we've got to get you a Rhodes!'
"I don't think I said, 'What's a Rhodes?', but I may have. It had never crossed my mind. Anyhow, to make a long story short, I was a finalist but didn't get a Rhodes. And I was a finalist for a Luce Fellowship, from the Henry Luce Foundation, which sends young people with no background in Asia to work there for a year.
"I called up my American Studies teacher and said, 'Should I go for the interview?' I thought I'd probably bomb out again in the interview. He said, 'Why not? If you don't get it, you've had a trip to San Francisco and a learning experience."
"'But what if I don't get it?'
"'Then you won't have to go to Asia!'"
Lisa laughs. "I'll never forget that line. I got the Fellowship, so I had to go. I worked for Asia Week in Hong Kong. It was really tough being away from the States and my friends for the first time, and in Hong Kong, the meanest city of them all. After Hong Kong, New York is a piece of cake.
"It took time -- maybe half a year -- but I adapted. I always loved the work. So when the editor asked me to stay on, I said, 'Where do you need a correspondent?' The answer was Singapore.
"Singapore was another world. New. Clean -- because if you dropped a candy wrapper you got a $100 fine. Waterskiing the whole year round. Remember 'I have seen the future and it works'? Well, I have seen the future and the reason it works is tyranny.
"I was in Singapore for three years having fun and falling more and more out of favor with remarkable Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew. Until I wrote about the detention without trial of a group of Catholic church workers. Lee banned the sale of Asia Week in his happy island republic.
"Asia Week screamed for a while and then sold me out. The magazine would return; I would go.
"They offered me a job in Hong Kong, but I preferred to come back to the U.S. I went through the torture of thinking I wouldn't have a job -- I'd never not had a job.
"But I landed on my feet at Time and in New York. Beat out a Rhodes Scholar, which was sweet. I wrote for the International Edition for a year, then foreign affairs for the domestic magazine. I learned a lot from the people who edited me, particularly a genius named George Church. How to be colloquial but not too colloquial. How to make news a story. How never to create a question in the reader's mind you don't answer right away. How to condense, condense, condense, and then tighten.
"I wasn't getting noticed. The American audience doesn't care about foreign affairs. The glamor assignments in the magazine are everywhere else. I had to wear pantyhose, and I felt my pantyhose wasn't sexy enough.
"Then a big break: Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. I became a star because of my first sentence in the story: 'In hindsight, it made perfect sense that . . .' In fact, an early version of the sentence had been in a correspondent's story.
"People asked, 'Should a woman be writing the war for us?' But I was a star: a star can do anything. Forget about pantyhose."
After lunch, Lisa and her guest stroll over to the Israeli foreign ministry where she chats with friends about the status of the Demjanjuk verdict. She is told that it has been sent out to a private printer.
Back in her office, she phones a printer on the outskirts of Jerusalem. She greets the person on the other end of the line in Hebrew, and then says, in English, "I'm Lisa Beyer, correspondent with Time magazine. Do you have a spokesman, someone who does press relations?"
She learns that there are Israeli troops outside the building making sure only authorized people enter.
"This is a journalist's dream," she says to her guest. "Important news and a great place to live. Everybody's got an opinion that they put forward very strongly. I found South East Asia hard to take because you can't argue about anything. Everything's hidden to save face. I have a tough time chitchatting, and the Asians think that's what women are for -- keep the conversation going.
The guest asks whether it's an advantage or disadvantage being a woman reporter in the Middle East.
"I don't know," Lisa says. "It's both. The Israeli military are reluctant to have me as a correspondent. Don't want a woman killed on their watch. On the other hand, the officers love to flirt, and interviewing is a kind of flirtation.
"There's tremendous formality in all my relations with the Arabs. Sometimes, like when I interview the fundamentalists, Hamas or other, I have be heavily dressed, with my hair covered, no bright colors.
"It turns me into a wild beast. I can't hear. It's degrading and absurd. I type interviews into my laptop as they're taking place, and the men think I'm the secretary for Jamail or whoever is translating. I'm a non-person. It's awkward, but you can't let it hurt your professionalism. You can't let it affect your reporting.
"
People are always asking me, 'How do you like it here?' What they mean is, 'Which side are you on?' I say, 'I love my job -- and the weather.' I hope that reading my stuff they don't have any idea what my politics are."
Lisa spends the rest of the afternoon (1) phoning to get quotes for the Plia Albeck story ("Small items can be as time-consuming as big ones," she says) and writing them up ("Says a right-winger: 'They're only picking on her because she's not a leftist.' A left-winger responds: 'She's a racist, an abomination. She should have been dismissed long ago'"); (2) writing an update on the Demjanjuk case, which begins with a color sentence about the suburban printer protected by army troops; (3) writing a proposal that something be done for the UZI's anniversary; and (4) writing a proposal for a 500-word story combining Abdel-Shafi's criticism of Arafat with an article she wrote four weeks earlier on conflicts among the Palestinian leadership.
By five p.m., all this is sent via electronic mail to Time's offices in New York, where it is 10 a.m.
At midnight Jerusalem time, Lisa is asleep in her apartment when a Time International editor phones to say they want the Abdel-Shafi story. Lisa has to file it by 5 p.m. the next day, Friday, so that Time will can edit, check the edited version with her, title, format, picture and caption the story by the Saturday press deadline.
While Lisa talks on the phone, the man she calls her "semi-spouse," the writer Ze'ev Chafets, who woke her, returns to a couch in the living room and lies down. He is watching American TV via satellite. Lisa gives him a kiss and returns to bed. Ze'ev is in the throes of the first draft of a novel. During the night he occasionally pads to his study to write more pages. Then he returns to the couch, where he watches The MacNeil/Lehrer Show and part of Larry King Live before falling asleep with the TV on.
The next morning, Lisa has set up a tennis match for her guest, herself, and Richard and Natasha Beston (Richard is the Jerusalem correspondent for The Times of London). One of the Bestons is sick, so Lisa and her guest play singles.
On the drive to the court, the guest protests that Lisa has a big story to write by 5 and probably can't afford to play tennis.
"I write better under pressure," she says. "I'm already writing it in my head."
"Do you have the first sentence?"
"Yep, I think I so: 'It had been clear for some time that Dr. Haidar Abdel-Shafi was cranky.' That gives me something to unwrap. The difference between a newspaper dispatch and a Time article is that we present the news as part of a process, an unfolding, a story."
Lisa plays a strong game of tennis -- she worked her teenage years in a pro shop -- but she doesn't get much involved in the match. She stops early, drives home, showers, grabs a bite to eat, and is in the office before noon.
"In a way, it's good not to give them a story too soon," she says. "Because then they don't have time to get tired of it or to change it a lot.
"No calls," she tells Jean.
Lisa closes her office door and doesn't reappear for more than an hour. She then drinks two cups of water from the water cooler, an abstracted look on her face. After that, she comes out every half hour or so.
"Others smoke and drink bourbon," she says. "I fret. I have to walk around. I drink water. Which makes me go to the bathroom. Which makes me wash my hands. Which makes my hands chapped. Which gives me something else to fret about."
One time when she appears, she says flatly, "I have to get each sentence right. Arrrg."
Her dispatch is on the wire at 5:25 p.m. Lisa has written so hard that when she gets home at 6 she takes a nap.
Lisa and Ze'ev spend weekends at his house in Tel Aviv, less than an hour away. After her nap, Lisa drives there. On route, she says, "The story used to be that Time had such a thick layer of editors because they never knew how many would be drunk. It's tough, tough work. I always try to put in an extra paragraph so the editors feel they improved the story by cutting."
After dinner, at 10:45 p.m., much later than she'd like it to be, Lisa calls Jamail to find if he's learned how the Israeli army killed the Palestinian woman in 1991. Jamail, it turns out, has just returned from a two-hour drive to a Palestinian village, tracking down the facts. Unfortunately they are too complicated for the Albeck paragraph, and Lisa decides simply to say that the army killed the woman "mistakenly."
An hour later, the fax machine at Ze'ev's receives Time's first edit of the Abdel-Shafi story.
At 12:49 a.m., Lisa sends back her comments, prefacing them, "Nice chopping. A few niggles." She makes nine points about the edited story, offers suggestions on things that can be cut if space requires, and closes: "that's all from me. thanks and I'll be in touch with the saturday staff on updates tomorrow. albest."
"It was great not meeting last week. I know -- you don't have to thank me," she says with a chuckle. "We've got mucho things to discuss today."
Lisa, 29, is wearing pale orange shirt and pants. A cheery, wisecracking person, she is somewhat subdued in the meeting. The four full-time members of her staff have worked in the Jerusalem bureau far longer than she, and they are a good deal older. She listens hard to what they say.
"As some of you know, we got an O.K. on the Plia Albeck story," Lisa says. "I cabled on Tuesday and it will run in 'Talk of the Streets.'"
Plia Albeck has just been removed from her post as head of the civil claims department in the Israeli Ministry of Justice. For years she had provoked controversy by her insensitive handling of Palestinian suits against the Israeli government. An example: in 1992, a court awarded $333,000 to a Palestinian who lost both hands when an Israeli officer ordered him to remove a Palestinian flag from a live power line; Albeck protested that the award was excessive because the man, a street vendor, could "sell falafel with artificial arms."
Time's "Talk of the Streets" is a series of paragraph-long reports in its international edition.
Lisa says the Time editors in New York need three things. "A picture of Albeck, which I assume we have."
"We will have," says Anni Rubinger. Her husband, David, nods. David Rubinger, Time's staff photographer, is one of Israeli's most celebrated photographers. Anni is the bureau's photo-archivist and -researcher. The Rubingers are in their sixties and came to Israel from Austria.
David photographed Plia Albeck some years ago against the day when she might be important enough to make Time. A smiling image of her will be culled from the files to run, with nice incongruity, alongside the paragraph about her losing her job.
"Great," Lisa says. "They want to know why the Palestinian woman was killed by the Israeli army -- you know, when Plia argued that her husband shouldn't get any money because now he didn't have to support her."
There are groans at the table.
"Do you remember, Jamail?"
The incident happened in 1991.
Jamail Hamad is the bureau's Arabic-language reporter. A Palestinian in his 50s and a well-known writer, Jamail replies after a moment's reflection. "It was an accident. I don't remember how it happened."
"Can you find out?"
"Yes. I can try."
"Finally, they want some pithy quotes about Plia getting sacked. Some happy, some outraged. I'll get those, but if any of you have heard good things, tell me.
"Now, we need to come up with stories we can propose."
Silence at the table.
"Well, the army's moving north," says Jean Marx, Lisa's administrative assistant. "Leaves have been cancelled." Jean, who is in her 50s, surveys the Hebrew press. She came from England.
The table is silent. The army suddenly moving additional troops into southern Lebanon has happened countless times before. Many people hoped it wouldn't happen under the new, liberal Israeli government.
"Yah," says Lisa. "Something's happening up there."
"Shelling," several people say.
"The army's not going to tell us anything yet," Lisa says. "I think I may have to go there. Anyhow, that's for next week."
"There's Demjanjuk," someone says.
"All we can do is an update," Lisa says. "That's next week too -- when the Supreme Court verdict comes out."
"It's done," one of the staff says.
"Why do you say that?" Lisa asks.
"Someone in Justice told me."
"It's written?"
"At the printer's."
Lisa thinks for a moment. "I ought to be able to get a confirmation on that."
John Demjanjuk is the retired Cleveland autoworker whom an Israeli court condemned to death in 1988 for being the notorious "Ivan the Terrible" of the Treblinka death camp in Poland. Subsequent evidence has suggested that, while Demjanjuk was a guard at another Nazi camp, he wasn't at Treblinka.
"Everybody think he's going to be acquitted?" Lisa asks.
Everybody does. Israel can't afford to kill a man who might be innocent; that would smack too much of the Holocaust.
"Ivan-the-Not-So-Terrible," Lisa says, repeating a phrase from the papers. "I heard on French radio that the 40th anniversary of the UZI is coming up. That's in a month or so. We'll propose a story."
There is talk about the whereabouts of the submachine gun's inventor.
"I think the best thing we can propose is the 'Fractured Fatah' story again," Lisa says. "They didn't run it four weeks ago, but with Abdel-Shafi's blow-up at Arafat it's bigger than ever. It's really a new story.
Dr. Haidar Abdel-Shafi, a Palestinian negotiating with the Israelis, has just demanded that Yasser Arafat, the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, cede his autocratic power to a collective leadership.
"I know what they're going to say in New York," Lisa says. "'Aw, this is defrosted fish! Everybody's read it.'
"Yeah, right --" she answers her own accusation, "everybody in the office! Four weeks ago we would have been the first to publish, but we still can be, maybe. Anyhow, it's the best we've got."
There is consensus on this, and Lisa says she'll send a cable suggesting the story and the new angle on it that afternoon.
"Hey, if I do go north," she says, as the meeting is breaking up, "where's that bulletproof vest I heard about?"
There's some laughter. Jean Marx says it's up in the storeroom.
"Good," Lisa says. "Would you bring it out, Jean? We want the chief to be taken care of."
Lisa and the staff chuckle.
Fifteen minutes later, beneath a trellis of bougainvillea in a nearby café, Lisa digs pita bread into a mound of hummus and tells her guest she always wanted to be a reporter. "I'm a very confrontational person. I love being able to pick up a phone and ask questions and have people feel some compulsion to answer.
"I'm a Louisiana Cajun -- proudly. I went to Texas just because they had a better Journalism department. And then I found, more important, The Daily Texan."
The Daily Texan is the University of Texas at Austin's student newspaper. Lisa worked for the Texan as reporter, copy editor, managing editor, and, finally, editor-in-chief.
"I didn't know what I wanted. I guess I dreamed about a conventional newspaper career culminating with The New York Times. If you'd held a gun to my head, I'd probably have said, 'The Austin American-Statesman, The Dallas Times-Herald, The Cleveland Plain-Dealer, and then The New York Times.'
"Red Gibson, famous teacher, neat guy, said -- it's the only thing I remember from the class -- 'If you want to get to The New York Times, be editor-in-chief of The Daily Texan.' So that gave me the goal.
"I had a great time as editor, hobnobbing with the campus administrators and the politicians who wanted our endorsement. I didn't know what would happen when I graduated.
"One night I was walking across campus and I met a teacher I'd had in American Studies. He asked me what I was going on to and, when I said I didn't know, said, 'What kind of grades do you have?'
"Well, no one in Journalism cares about grades, not if they're serious about journalism. A lot of the Daily Texan staff doesn't graduate when they're supposed to -- you know, like athletes -- because they've been doing something More Important.
"But they didn't have my mother. I told my teacher, 'I have a perfect 4.0' and mashed my teeth together in a big smile.
"'My God,' he said, 'we've got to get you a Rhodes!'
"I don't think I said, 'What's a Rhodes?', but I may have. It had never crossed my mind. Anyhow, to make a long story short, I was a finalist but didn't get a Rhodes. And I was a finalist for a Luce Fellowship, from the Henry Luce Foundation, which sends young people with no background in Asia to work there for a year.
"I called up my American Studies teacher and said, 'Should I go for the interview?' I thought I'd probably bomb out again in the interview. He said, 'Why not? If you don't get it, you've had a trip to San Francisco and a learning experience."
"'But what if I don't get it?'
"'Then you won't have to go to Asia!'"
Lisa laughs. "I'll never forget that line. I got the Fellowship, so I had to go. I worked for Asia Week in Hong Kong. It was really tough being away from the States and my friends for the first time, and in Hong Kong, the meanest city of them all. After Hong Kong, New York is a piece of cake.
"It took time -- maybe half a year -- but I adapted. I always loved the work. So when the editor asked me to stay on, I said, 'Where do you need a correspondent?' The answer was Singapore.
"Singapore was another world. New. Clean -- because if you dropped a candy wrapper you got a $100 fine. Waterskiing the whole year round. Remember 'I have seen the future and it works'? Well, I have seen the future and the reason it works is tyranny.
"I was in Singapore for three years having fun and falling more and more out of favor with remarkable Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew. Until I wrote about the detention without trial of a group of Catholic church workers. Lee banned the sale of Asia Week in his happy island republic.
"Asia Week screamed for a while and then sold me out. The magazine would return; I would go.
"They offered me a job in Hong Kong, but I preferred to come back to the U.S. I went through the torture of thinking I wouldn't have a job -- I'd never not had a job.
"But I landed on my feet at Time and in New York. Beat out a Rhodes Scholar, which was sweet. I wrote for the International Edition for a year, then foreign affairs for the domestic magazine. I learned a lot from the people who edited me, particularly a genius named George Church. How to be colloquial but not too colloquial. How to make news a story. How never to create a question in the reader's mind you don't answer right away. How to condense, condense, condense, and then tighten.
"I wasn't getting noticed. The American audience doesn't care about foreign affairs. The glamor assignments in the magazine are everywhere else. I had to wear pantyhose, and I felt my pantyhose wasn't sexy enough.
"Then a big break: Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. I became a star because of my first sentence in the story: 'In hindsight, it made perfect sense that . . .' In fact, an early version of the sentence had been in a correspondent's story.
"People asked, 'Should a woman be writing the war for us?' But I was a star: a star can do anything. Forget about pantyhose."
After lunch, Lisa and her guest stroll over to the Israeli foreign ministry where she chats with friends about the status of the Demjanjuk verdict. She is told that it has been sent out to a private printer.
Back in her office, she phones a printer on the outskirts of Jerusalem. She greets the person on the other end of the line in Hebrew, and then says, in English, "I'm Lisa Beyer, correspondent with Time magazine. Do you have a spokesman, someone who does press relations?"
She learns that there are Israeli troops outside the building making sure only authorized people enter.
"This is a journalist's dream," she says to her guest. "Important news and a great place to live. Everybody's got an opinion that they put forward very strongly. I found South East Asia hard to take because you can't argue about anything. Everything's hidden to save face. I have a tough time chitchatting, and the Asians think that's what women are for -- keep the conversation going.
The guest asks whether it's an advantage or disadvantage being a woman reporter in the Middle East.
"I don't know," Lisa says. "It's both. The Israeli military are reluctant to have me as a correspondent. Don't want a woman killed on their watch. On the other hand, the officers love to flirt, and interviewing is a kind of flirtation.
"There's tremendous formality in all my relations with the Arabs. Sometimes, like when I interview the fundamentalists, Hamas or other, I have be heavily dressed, with my hair covered, no bright colors.
"It turns me into a wild beast. I can't hear. It's degrading and absurd. I type interviews into my laptop as they're taking place, and the men think I'm the secretary for Jamail or whoever is translating. I'm a non-person. It's awkward, but you can't let it hurt your professionalism. You can't let it affect your reporting.
"
People are always asking me, 'How do you like it here?' What they mean is, 'Which side are you on?' I say, 'I love my job -- and the weather.' I hope that reading my stuff they don't have any idea what my politics are."
Lisa spends the rest of the afternoon (1) phoning to get quotes for the Plia Albeck story ("Small items can be as time-consuming as big ones," she says) and writing them up ("Says a right-winger: 'They're only picking on her because she's not a leftist.' A left-winger responds: 'She's a racist, an abomination. She should have been dismissed long ago'"); (2) writing an update on the Demjanjuk case, which begins with a color sentence about the suburban printer protected by army troops; (3) writing a proposal that something be done for the UZI's anniversary; and (4) writing a proposal for a 500-word story combining Abdel-Shafi's criticism of Arafat with an article she wrote four weeks earlier on conflicts among the Palestinian leadership.
By five p.m., all this is sent via electronic mail to Time's offices in New York, where it is 10 a.m.
At midnight Jerusalem time, Lisa is asleep in her apartment when a Time International editor phones to say they want the Abdel-Shafi story. Lisa has to file it by 5 p.m. the next day, Friday, so that Time will can edit, check the edited version with her, title, format, picture and caption the story by the Saturday press deadline.
While Lisa talks on the phone, the man she calls her "semi-spouse," the writer Ze'ev Chafets, who woke her, returns to a couch in the living room and lies down. He is watching American TV via satellite. Lisa gives him a kiss and returns to bed. Ze'ev is in the throes of the first draft of a novel. During the night he occasionally pads to his study to write more pages. Then he returns to the couch, where he watches The MacNeil/Lehrer Show and part of Larry King Live before falling asleep with the TV on.
The next morning, Lisa has set up a tennis match for her guest, herself, and Richard and Natasha Beston (Richard is the Jerusalem correspondent for The Times of London). One of the Bestons is sick, so Lisa and her guest play singles.
On the drive to the court, the guest protests that Lisa has a big story to write by 5 and probably can't afford to play tennis.
"I write better under pressure," she says. "I'm already writing it in my head."
"Do you have the first sentence?"
"Yep, I think I so: 'It had been clear for some time that Dr. Haidar Abdel-Shafi was cranky.' That gives me something to unwrap. The difference between a newspaper dispatch and a Time article is that we present the news as part of a process, an unfolding, a story."
Lisa plays a strong game of tennis -- she worked her teenage years in a pro shop -- but she doesn't get much involved in the match. She stops early, drives home, showers, grabs a bite to eat, and is in the office before noon.
"In a way, it's good not to give them a story too soon," she says. "Because then they don't have time to get tired of it or to change it a lot.
"No calls," she tells Jean.
Lisa closes her office door and doesn't reappear for more than an hour. She then drinks two cups of water from the water cooler, an abstracted look on her face. After that, she comes out every half hour or so.
"Others smoke and drink bourbon," she says. "I fret. I have to walk around. I drink water. Which makes me go to the bathroom. Which makes me wash my hands. Which makes my hands chapped. Which gives me something else to fret about."
One time when she appears, she says flatly, "I have to get each sentence right. Arrrg."
Her dispatch is on the wire at 5:25 p.m. Lisa has written so hard that when she gets home at 6 she takes a nap.
Lisa and Ze'ev spend weekends at his house in Tel Aviv, less than an hour away. After her nap, Lisa drives there. On route, she says, "The story used to be that Time had such a thick layer of editors because they never knew how many would be drunk. It's tough, tough work. I always try to put in an extra paragraph so the editors feel they improved the story by cutting."
After dinner, at 10:45 p.m., much later than she'd like it to be, Lisa calls Jamail to find if he's learned how the Israeli army killed the Palestinian woman in 1991. Jamail, it turns out, has just returned from a two-hour drive to a Palestinian village, tracking down the facts. Unfortunately they are too complicated for the Albeck paragraph, and Lisa decides simply to say that the army killed the woman "mistakenly."
An hour later, the fax machine at Ze'ev's receives Time's first edit of the Abdel-Shafi story.
At 12:49 a.m., Lisa sends back her comments, prefacing them, "Nice chopping. A few niggles." She makes nine points about the edited story, offers suggestions on things that can be cut if space requires, and closes: "that's all from me. thanks and I'll be in touch with the saturday staff on updates tomorrow. albest."
Golden Moments, Twisted People
[This essay was published in the Winter 2006 “Documentary Imagination (Part Two)" issue of The Michigan Quarterly Review. It is dedicated to J.B. Colson.]
The fields of documentary, oral history, first-person reportage, case-study and participant-observer social science, and human-interest journalism were little studied and certainly not understood to be related when, in 1970, I was in the suicidal throes of beginning my dissertation, which became a book, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (1973; second edition, with retrospective afterword, 1986), that established my small career as college teacher.
The book published, I felt I’d exhausted documentary (or it, me). I had aired the opinions I had, many of them lifted from conversation with the photographer Walker Evans, and felt I couldn’t teach documentary history or theory because I had nothing new to say to people who knew, or might read, my book. I set off looking for another theme of equal interest (never found it, but that’s another story).
Then, in 1988, while team-teaching an undergraduate history of photography course with J.B. Colson, a photojournalist and photohistorian at my university, he and I came up with the idea of team-teaching the practice of documentary: a graduate course where students would do documentary projects (“written, photographed, videotaped, or—God save the mark—sung, danced, or drawn,” as our final syllabus said) and we would comment and provide background: examples of paradigmatic earlier work (there’s the history), and theory.
We gave the course, which I called “Documentary Explorations,” a dozen times till I retired, and J.B. and our remarkable students taught me things about documentary that—like the existence of Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels (1941) and of American comic books of the late 1930s that horrifically pictured Nazi concentration camps—I wish I had known when writing my dissertation. This essay discusses the two most important things I learned.
Finally, some of us are too shy or too well brought up to pry into others’ lives. We won’t thrust our camera in their faces. We can’t force ourselves to ask stinging questions. Hurrying back to school from lunch, a 16-year-old girl wraps her car around a tree, killing herself and one of three friends with her, and what is your job as the youngest reporter in the office? To get not only to her house but in it, get family photos of her, and ask her parents and anyone else on hand what she was like, what her hopes for life were, and—of course—how they, whoever you’re talking to, feel. Some of us flat can’t do it. Can’t do what Jim Goldberg did to get amazing personal confessions from the people he photographed in Rich and Poor (1985): he told some of his subjects what they had said about themselves wasn’t frank or interesting enough and they could do better, implying otherwise they wouldn’t get in his book.
Shyness, kindness, Episcopalian-taught politeness kept James Agee from making Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941, revised edition 1960) the book the New Journalist Tom Wolfe would have liked. Wolfe, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on American Communist writers of the 1930s, is a close friend of my University of Texas mentor William Goetzmann, who in 1972 asked him if he’d blurb my documentary book when it came out. Wolfe wrote me a charming letter saying he loved to, but then, when he saw the book in galleys, wrote nothing. I wondered why till I read his 1973 essay on the New Journalism that blasts Agee for not giving us nearly enough of what the sharecropper subjects of his book said, felt, and did.
Wolfe is right: Agee was a crummy reporter. He couldn’t bring himself to impose upon what he called “terribly undefended” people. Because he couldn’t report on the sharecroppers themselves, he moved his attention to the things of their lives, their clothing, room furnishings, food, tools, and, more interestingly, to the issue of documentary itself; he called documentary into question—“problematized” it, as critics younger than I would say—and turned whether and how to do social propaganda into a moral debate.
A better reporter than Agee, but still wanting by Wolfe’s standards, was George Orwell, whose Road to Wigan Pier (1937) is a documentary achievement to my mind of equal worth to Agee’s, equally rich in its moral vision (Orwell says the middle and upper middle classes, including his own “lower-upper-middle class,” believe the lower classes stink—who else had the guts to say it?), and half as long and a much easier read.
But Wolfe is right: what is missing in both The Road to Wigan Pier and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men are the human subjects of the inquiries: the talk of the sharecroppers and of the miners and their families. Talk really matters. Almost always it is the most important way we have of knowing a person to whom we are not related. The Maysles brothers, who have brought us such celebrated documentary films as Salesman (1968) and Grey Gardens (1975), have made much of their money over the years running what is called a “reality-based commercial production company” that makes TV and radio ads that have actual people, not actors, speaking their own unscripted words. Susan Froemke of Maysles Films says, “People will give you things a copywriter could never come up with. It’s what we call the real golden moments.” She acknowledges that “sometimes clients are afraid it’s a little too real.” Sam Telerico, executive producer at Maysles, says the company’s work “involves an education process for clients, agencies, everyone. Often they don’t realize what reality is and want to modify it, make it a little nicer.” But to make it nicer usually saps its originality and strength. As the documentary playwright and actress Anne Deveare Smith has said, “There is a moment when most people can talk and they say something that nobody else can say. They didn’t hear it on the news or read it in the paper, and it’s gorgeous.” A golden moment.
The problem with Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and The Road to Wigan Pier is that practically all the golden moments belong to Agee and Orwell.
“So we should be looking for golden moments?” a student asked J.B. and me in class. J.B. and I hadn’t been wise enough to be this blunt, but we said yes: their fieldwork should consist of hanging around until they felt they had a golden moment or two. Which of course begged the question of what a golden moment is.
For the oral historian Studs Terkel, it’s clear that a golden moment happens when people’s conversation shows contradictions in their values. In Terkel’s Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (1970), such contradiction occurs when the advertising magnate William Benton speaks with pride and shame of having doubled his income every year of the Depression (“progress through catastrophe,” Benton notes ruefully); of having invented the documentary advertisement (with a Maxwell House Coffee radio ad in which “you heard the coffee cups clinking and the coffee gurgling as it was poured” and a man smacking his lips with pleasure; “I invented a lot of things for which I now apologize,” he says); and of having bought the struggling elevator-music company Muzak, vastly expanded its locations, and multiplied his fortune several times because he had a tin ear and didn’t know good music from bad. “My mother, who was a fine musician, held Muzak in contempt. Anybody who knows anything about music holds it in contempt.”
(Does such self-contradiction happen in great literature, as Wiseman suggests? All the time. Consider the scene in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night where the wealthy father, furious at having been mocked for miserliness by his tubercular son, shouts that the boy can spend as much as he wants on a private TB clinic, “Spend all my money!”, while he, the father, is standing on the dining room table, unscrewing some of the light bulbs in the chandelier because he says the room is bright enough and electricity costs money.)
Contradictory values are at the heart of many of the golden moments in Wiseman’s films. His High School (1967), about life in a suburban school that prides itself on empowering the individual student, shows the dean of girls at a school assembly reading a letter from a graduate, now a soldier in Vietnam. The soldier writes with pride of being what the school made him: a body doing just what he’s told. The dean is tearfully grateful that the school has succeeded in “doing our job.”
The golden moments I’ve cited so far—involving William Benton, O’Neill’s father, the dean of girls—are all ironic: speakers speak without being aware of the context in which their remarks will be understood. What they say by itself isn’t the last word. Much more commonly, golden moments occur when speakers put brilliantly, “originally,” exactly what they mean:
I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.
Sighted sub. Sank same.
Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded.
Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy.
What constitutes a golden moment is of course a subjective judgment, though the speeches above have impressed enough people over time that I suspect most of us would put them in the pantheon. How does one know a golden moment when it’s brand-new, just spoken? Obviously by our individual emotional response to it—“belly feel,” as Orwell disparagingly called it. Fortunately, there’s a large overlap between human sensibilities, and I have little doubt that you will find some of the following statements—from the small anthology of golden moments I’ve collected on my hard drive—as striking as I do:
Queen Elizabeth I: “Had I, my lords, been born crested, not cloven, you had not treated me thus!"
Sydney Gaines, age 7, to his father, David Gaines, my friend and a professor of English at Southwestern University, Georgetown, Texas: “Dad, real friends are front-stabbers.”
Geoffrey Graham, 42, an Austin, Texas, artist and Gay Rights activist dying of AIDS: "I have no fear of death. It's a natural part of life. I trust the universe enough not to be fearful."
An unnamed woman overheard by a New Yorker music reviewer during the intermission of the Metropolitan Opera’s 2002 production of Anton Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron: “I survived Auschwitz—I don’t have to sit through this.”
The pro golfer Mike Reid, who cried when he blew a lead in the PGA Tournament: "That's O.K. I cry at supermarket openings."
The composer Aaron Copland: "Agony I don't connect with. Not even alienation."
The soprano Renee Fleming: "I was so much the good girl that I didn’t know what I wanted to have for lunch. I only knew what I should have for lunch."
Another high-achieving good girl, the comedienne Carol Burnett, after she became her real, imperfect, happier self: “I liked me better when I wasn’t me.”
The documentary filmmaker and public-access-TV pioneer George Stoney: "Forgiveness is far easier to obtain than permission."
David Rappaport, a 3-foot 11-inch dwarf and character actor, complaining that he was discriminated against: "I want to be treated like a regular, boring, normal person. I look at boring people every day, and I say, 'God, I wish I could be like that.' But my lot is to be unique, special, so I have to put up with it. It's a hard life." Two years later, Rappaport committed suicide.
Staff Sgt. Hattie Brown, a radio operator who relayed battle reports to headquarters from the field during the 1991 Gulf War: "I've confronted the idea of death and I try not to be scared. If I die, though, I hope I do it with pride, trying to get the enemy."
From the New York Times' obituary of publisher and philanthropist George Delacorte, who died in 1991 at age 97: “Mr. Delacorte was an avid storyteller in his later years. One day, however, when he was in the middle of an anecdote he lost his train of thought. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘at 92 the memory is the first thing to go.’ He paused for a moment and said, ‘Well, to tell you the truth, the first thing that goes is sex. Then your memory goes. But the memory of sex never goes.’” [This golden moment, placed near the end of a long Times article like a chocolate mint at the end of a heavy meal, would of course be the headline in a tabloid: “‘YOU NEVER FORGET SEX,’ SAYS 92 YEAR OLD.” ]
The actor Cary Grant: "Everybody wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant."
Jean Sexton, an Orphan Train rider in 1914, speaking of her arrival in the Midwestern town where she was "chosen": "They marched us across a stage in the opera house. First, my two brothers got chosen. And then it was time to make my stage appearance. I was only three, and my mother tells me that I was wearing a little white dress that by that time was terribly wrinkled. So when I came out on the stage I was smoothing the wrinkles from my dress. And she called out, 'I want that one.'"
The New York Jets’ lineman Dennis Byrd, a devout Christian, paralyzed in a 1992 game, asked
whether he had wondered “why me?”: “I know why me. Because of the strength on the inside. I know I can handle this." Less than a year later Byrd was walking with the aid of a cane.
Samuel Johnson, asked what the greatest pleasure in life is: “Fucking. And the second is drinking. Therefore I wonder why there are not more drunkards, for all can drink, though not all can fuck.”
Yelena V. Kozlova, whose daughter, Darya, a ninth grader, was one of 45 Russian children, mostly high school honors students on their way to a vacation in Spain, who died in a 2002 plane crash over Germany; Ms. Kozlova was speaking to her daughter’s grieving schoolmates: "Dig into life and be joyful."
My friend Archie Hobson’s remarkable mother, Verna, dying of cancer: “If there is an afterlife, won’t we be surprised!”
So this was the first important thing I learned about documentary and its outrider disciplines in social science and journalism after writing my dissertation: you have to get the golden moments. And if you don’t have the patience and the boldness to, or if you don’t fancy dealing with parents who’ve just lost their child, documentary is probably not for you.
My second point is more complicated but more quickly made. Those who have done me the honor of reading Documentary Expression and Thirties America will remember that I distinguish between two sorts of documentary: social and human.
Social documentary deals with public phenomena that are susceptible, with however much difficulty, of being changed, improved: the sharecropping system in the American South during the 1930s; the outrageous cost of California funerals; the lard in McDonald’s French fries; racism; the lack of anti-retroviral drugs to fight AIDS in Africa; battered children; Kashmir, Palestine, Northern Ireland, North Korea, Iran, Darfur; white slavery; guns in the hands of untrained civilians; the bitter circumstances of poor Muslims in Europe; bad breath, body odor, drunk driving, and the heartbreak of psoriasis (advertisements often use documentary techniques). I said in my book that when we speak of “documentary,” we generally mean social documentary.
And yet, as I didn’t say, the second sort of documentary is in fact much more common. Human documentary shows us natural, necessary, and often agreeable phenomena: childhood, festivals, dementia, work, faraway places, unusual people’s normal lives, political activity, sport, hurricanes, friendship, dying, spiritual questing, life in a Moroccan or Michigan village. “A Hospice Austin patient, a policewoman, a Mexican-American Pentecostal church, middle class women's recipes, the Creative Rapid Learning Center, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, a tattoo parlor, people’s jokes about God or Bill Stott’s lawn, a school for battered children, the custodians of this building, or Ralph the Swimming Pig”—as a late syllabus for J.B. Colson’s and my documentary class said, citing some projects done in earlier years.
When writing my dissertation I understood but only briefly acknowledged that “human documentary” was just another name for what is normally called art. Documentary, now so firmly considered a tactic for social change, actually begins with a work of art, a celebration of an unusual life: Nanook of the North. Robert Flaherty, the film’s maker, didn’t intend to change Nanook’s life—far from it. He wanted Nanook to stay just as he was and for us to admire him that way. When the film was released in 1922, it was a worldwide hit. But Flaherty didn’t send any of the money it earned to Nanook or his wife and kids, and they all died of starvation while Nanook was leaping about the screen in first-run theaters on five continents.
What holds our attention in a social documentary—The River (1937), say, or Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)—is the issue being treated and—and I underline this—the complexity the issue is shown to have. (If an issue is simple—Buy Bonds; Don’t Litter—all that is needed is a public-service ad.) The issue and its complexity hold us, not the human complexity of the people shown; indeed, the people are usually ciphers, “the halt and the lame . . . victims,” as a critic, Brian Winston, has put it, describing the people in social-reformist documentary.
On the other hand, in a human documentary, a piece of art that hopes to hold our interest, the person shown—as the New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm suggests in her brilliant The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), the last book of the semester in J.B.’s and my class—must have a certain kind of energetic, self-dramatizing richness of character, like buoyant Nanook. The center in non-satiric literature can’t be rigid and one-dimensional—can’t be Horatio or Fortinbras, must be Hamlet; can’t be Enobarbus, must be Anthony. Or Cleopatra, whose “infinite variety” “age cannot wither . . . nor custom stale.”
Are there successful documentaries that mix reformist propaganda with the depiction of a fascinating person or persons—documentaries both social and human? I’m tempted to say no for the same reason that the critic Lionel Trilling said there were no great New Deal (or “liberal” or “leftist”) novels: because propaganda privileges the community, art the individual; propaganda simplicity, art complexity; propaganda human possibility, art human limitation. Perhaps Grapes of Wrath comes closest—John Ford’s 1940 film, not John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel. The film can be considered a re-enacted documentary—there have been others of the kind, most notable Humphrey Jennings’ Silent Village (1943), Roberto Rossellini’s Rome: Open City (1945) and Paisan (1946), and Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966)—and Henry Fonda is spellbinding because he makes us feel the tremendous, justifiable violence suppressed in his calm Tom Joad.
Having said there may not be successful documentaries that are both social and human, let me close by pointing to an extraordinary film that is almost an exception. The film is Dennis O’Rourke’s Cannibal Tours (1988), which students in the documentary class brought to J.B.’s and my attention and which we thereafter closed the course with. The film shows Europeans on a tour in Papua New Guinea among people only a generation or two removed from the Stone Age and now selling souvenirs of their past while living on the margins of our (and their) civilization.
We see the tourists staring at, photographing and videotaping the natives and artifacts important in their past culture, having the natives explain the artifacts (“Is this the rock where you killed your sacrifices?” a fat red-faced German asks a wizened black man), and bargaining to get a lower price on souvenirs, though as one woman says to her companion, “This is so cheap”—at its first price—“I can’t believe it!”
Because the tourists and New Guineans interact only when the latter are in a subservient role—photographed, asked generally demeaning questions (“How do people taste?”), looked upon as retarded (“I don’t think they understand money”), haggled with over prices—we come to respect the few tourists who to a degree drop out of the tour, an Italian family who are having such fun together they ignore O’Rourke’s off-screen questions, a woman who sunbathes rather than do the scheduled activity, the handful who go to the last night’s festival dinner not, as they were supposed to, in New Guinean dress with war-paint on their faces, but in Western sport clothes.
It is O’Rourke’s genius in mid-movie to give us the obverse of what we have been watching. All at once, without explanation, it is the New Guineans—the wizened man and a plump middle-aged woman selling trinkets—who speak to us in their native language, subtitled in ours. “Why do they come see us and we not go see them?” “When I buy food at the store, they don’t give me a second price.” “Why do they have money?” “If I had money, I would travel.” “They don’t buy, and I need money to send my kids to school!” “When the white man came, we said, ‘Our dead ancestors have arrived; our dead have come back.’ Now when we see tourists, we say the dead have returned. That’s what we say.”
The polemical point is made: East is east and West is west, and so long as each sees the other as Other, there is no authentic, human way for them to relate. None of the people we have seen do it. As the film’s final credits pass on the screen, we in the audience realize sadly that, as O’Rourke says in a 1999 article he wrote about the film, tourism is not “a process which can lead to greater understanding between cultures. There must be a better way.”
But the film doesn’t end when the credits end. Suddenly, we see a huge greensward of mown grass, then a small propeller plane, and then people we’ve not seen earlier. One’s the pilot, a white man; another is a dark native. The third and fourth are a white middle-aged American couple in loud pastels, carrying handbags and tourist trophies, saying their goodbyes. The exuberant woman does the talking we hear. She exclaims about the plane, her upcoming trip, the greensward (“My lawn back home should look so good. I should look so good!”). She is, as Dean MacCannell, author of The Tourist (1976), has remarked, a “Bette Midler-type American”—which is to say a New Yorker and very likely a Jew with the huge energy and warmth such people have in a common stereotype. Among the things she’s carrying are several (MacCannell says five) painted wooden representations of fruit, tied together at one end. One can’t but think of them as anything but penises—MacCannell calls them “realistically carved dildos”—and that’s how the woman laughingly thinks of them. “I get to ride back with these in my lap!” she says. Before she gets in the plane, she gives their native guide a big hug—her husband shakes his hand and pats him on the back—thanking him and saying something about seeing him again. They get on the plane and we watch while it taxies up the greensward.
What we just have seen, I suggest, almost overturns the film’s earlier polemic, just as sexy Alcibiades’ arrival upsets all the philosophizing about love in Plato’s Symposium. If anyone could in two minutes, this wonderful New York woman would force us to admit that contact can be made cross culture: all it takes is a powerful, open heart to do it. But I find the scene strikes most viewers—MacCannell is one—as merely a flippant coda to the film, too brief and irresponsible to be treated seriously. The film’s point remains, again in O’Rourke’s words, “The promoted idea of tourism as ‘a dialogue between cultures’ is, I believe, a myth, because there exists such an economic and cultural disparity between the protagonists and all human encounter is inevitably distorted.” Even I must admit the New York woman’s farewell is almost certainly a distortion of the couple’s relation to their guide and his people.
Thus, as I said in my book, there are two sorts of documentary, and, as I didn’t say, each has a different sort of person at its center. Social documentary shows victims needing help in coping with their environment; human documentary shows people with a measure of command of their environment, capable not only of exciting our admiration (victims can do this) but of changing themselves and their worlds and what we think of both.
I respect social documentary, but I love human documentary, and the triumph of the profile in magazines, newspapers, and electronic media, of People Weekly and American Masters, of entertainment, historical, and sports biographies on TV suggests that I am far from alone.
My first thanks go to J.B. Colson with whom I joyfully taught for 20 years and from whom I learned most of what I know about photography and a good deal of what I believe about life. Next, thanks to Caroline Blinder of Goldsmiths College, London, who assured me I must have something to say about documentary after my years of silence. Finally, thanks to Tom Fricke and Keith Taylor of the University of Michigan, who invited me to contribute to their documentary issues of the Michigan Quarterly Review, and especially to Keith (Tom was doing fieldwork in Nepal), who emailed me encouragement.
I regret not being able to give citations for everything I quote. I kept the quotes for my delight (James Thurber: “Let me be the first to admit that the naked truth about me is to the naked truth about Salvador Dali as an old ukulele in the attic is to a piano in a tree, and I mean a piano with breasts”), for self-improvement (Carl Jung: “The great thing is here and now: this is the eternal moment. And if you don’t realize it, you have missed the best part of your life”), and for classroom use—not for research.
Late 1930’s comic books depicting Nazi concentration-camp horrors: Alfred Appel, Northwestern University, in conversation. Maysles Films: “Advertising,” The New York Times, 11/26/1993. The student who asked J.B. and me whether the class should be looking for “golden moments” in interviews was Nancy Mims. Benton, in Terkel, pp. 60-65. Anne Deveare Smith: NYT, 2/1/1997. The authors of the phrases bowels of Christ, sighted sub, nobody goes there, and you’re no Jack Kennedy are readily available through Google. Moses und Aron: The New Yorker, 2/18-25/2002. Mike Reid: NYT, 8/21/1989. Renee Fleming: NYer, 11/12/2001. David Rappaport: NYT, 5/4/1990. Hattie Brown: NYT, 1/22/1991. George Delacorte: NYT, 5/5/1991. Dennis Byrd: NYT, 1/13/1993. Yelena V. Kozlova: NYT, 7/4/2002. I’m sure I know the post-Flaherty history of Nanook from Pauline Kael’s early writing: see her note in NYer, 4/15/2005, p. 50. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, Doubleday, 1950. Brian Winston, "The Tradition of the Victim in Griersonian Documentary," in New Challenges for Documentary, ed. Alan Rosenthal, University of California Press, 1988, p. 284. The students who brought Cannibal Tours to J.B.’s and my attention were Angela Alston and Rebecca Campbell. Dennis O'Rourke, “On the Making of Cannibal Tours,” at
http://www.cameraworklimited.com/download.html?oid=2250047090; this essay includes Dean MacCannell’s quotes.
When choosing social “victims” to document, reporters, propagandists, and artists look for subjects with—no surprise— human appeal. The filmmaker Ofra Bikel has been profiling imprisoned felons for 14 years and gotten 13 of them released for wrongful conviction. As she acknowledges, she selects those she documents with great care. “I pity everybody [wrongly put in prison],” she says, “but I can't take somebody who has molested a child and now is in for the wrong murder. If I want to convince people [in the viewing audience], I have to be smart about it.” A convicted murderer, Patsy Kelly Jarrett, had been in prison 28 years and was almost certainly innocent, yet Bikel was hesitant to profile her for PBS’ Frontline because starchy food and a sedentary life had beefed her up. “She looked, really, like a guard, you know,” Bikel told a reporter. “This short hair of hers, it’s really impossible.” She finally decided, as the reporter put it, “that the details of Ms. Jarrett's case compensated for any lack of telegenic appeal,” did a profile of her, and got her released. See Julie Salamon, “Crusading for Prisoners When the System Fails,” NYT, 6/27/2005.
The fields of documentary, oral history, first-person reportage, case-study and participant-observer social science, and human-interest journalism were little studied and certainly not understood to be related when, in 1970, I was in the suicidal throes of beginning my dissertation, which became a book, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (1973; second edition, with retrospective afterword, 1986), that established my small career as college teacher.
The book published, I felt I’d exhausted documentary (or it, me). I had aired the opinions I had, many of them lifted from conversation with the photographer Walker Evans, and felt I couldn’t teach documentary history or theory because I had nothing new to say to people who knew, or might read, my book. I set off looking for another theme of equal interest (never found it, but that’s another story).
Then, in 1988, while team-teaching an undergraduate history of photography course with J.B. Colson, a photojournalist and photohistorian at my university, he and I came up with the idea of team-teaching the practice of documentary: a graduate course where students would do documentary projects (“written, photographed, videotaped, or—God save the mark—sung, danced, or drawn,” as our final syllabus said) and we would comment and provide background: examples of paradigmatic earlier work (there’s the history), and theory.
We gave the course, which I called “Documentary Explorations,” a dozen times till I retired, and J.B. and our remarkable students taught me things about documentary that—like the existence of Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels (1941) and of American comic books of the late 1930s that horrifically pictured Nazi concentration camps—I wish I had known when writing my dissertation. This essay discusses the two most important things I learned.
•
First: we all can’t do documentary, be photojournalists, anthropologists, reporters. Some of us aren’t personally secure enough to live in a different milieu; we never get over culture shock. Further, some of us haven’t the patience necessary for fieldwork. Frederick Wiseman says his documentary films—“subjective ‘fictions’ based in ‘reality’”—have their best sequences thanks to his doing nothing but wait: "If you hang around long enough, you stumble onto sequences that are funnier, more dramatic, and sadder than anything you can find, except in really great novels. You're not inventing them. You're just lucky enough to be there when they happen." Some of us are too antsy to hang around that long.Finally, some of us are too shy or too well brought up to pry into others’ lives. We won’t thrust our camera in their faces. We can’t force ourselves to ask stinging questions. Hurrying back to school from lunch, a 16-year-old girl wraps her car around a tree, killing herself and one of three friends with her, and what is your job as the youngest reporter in the office? To get not only to her house but in it, get family photos of her, and ask her parents and anyone else on hand what she was like, what her hopes for life were, and—of course—how they, whoever you’re talking to, feel. Some of us flat can’t do it. Can’t do what Jim Goldberg did to get amazing personal confessions from the people he photographed in Rich and Poor (1985): he told some of his subjects what they had said about themselves wasn’t frank or interesting enough and they could do better, implying otherwise they wouldn’t get in his book.
Shyness, kindness, Episcopalian-taught politeness kept James Agee from making Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941, revised edition 1960) the book the New Journalist Tom Wolfe would have liked. Wolfe, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on American Communist writers of the 1930s, is a close friend of my University of Texas mentor William Goetzmann, who in 1972 asked him if he’d blurb my documentary book when it came out. Wolfe wrote me a charming letter saying he loved to, but then, when he saw the book in galleys, wrote nothing. I wondered why till I read his 1973 essay on the New Journalism that blasts Agee for not giving us nearly enough of what the sharecropper subjects of his book said, felt, and did.
Wolfe is right: Agee was a crummy reporter. He couldn’t bring himself to impose upon what he called “terribly undefended” people. Because he couldn’t report on the sharecroppers themselves, he moved his attention to the things of their lives, their clothing, room furnishings, food, tools, and, more interestingly, to the issue of documentary itself; he called documentary into question—“problematized” it, as critics younger than I would say—and turned whether and how to do social propaganda into a moral debate.
A better reporter than Agee, but still wanting by Wolfe’s standards, was George Orwell, whose Road to Wigan Pier (1937) is a documentary achievement to my mind of equal worth to Agee’s, equally rich in its moral vision (Orwell says the middle and upper middle classes, including his own “lower-upper-middle class,” believe the lower classes stink—who else had the guts to say it?), and half as long and a much easier read.
But Wolfe is right: what is missing in both The Road to Wigan Pier and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men are the human subjects of the inquiries: the talk of the sharecroppers and of the miners and their families. Talk really matters. Almost always it is the most important way we have of knowing a person to whom we are not related. The Maysles brothers, who have brought us such celebrated documentary films as Salesman (1968) and Grey Gardens (1975), have made much of their money over the years running what is called a “reality-based commercial production company” that makes TV and radio ads that have actual people, not actors, speaking their own unscripted words. Susan Froemke of Maysles Films says, “People will give you things a copywriter could never come up with. It’s what we call the real golden moments.” She acknowledges that “sometimes clients are afraid it’s a little too real.” Sam Telerico, executive producer at Maysles, says the company’s work “involves an education process for clients, agencies, everyone. Often they don’t realize what reality is and want to modify it, make it a little nicer.” But to make it nicer usually saps its originality and strength. As the documentary playwright and actress Anne Deveare Smith has said, “There is a moment when most people can talk and they say something that nobody else can say. They didn’t hear it on the news or read it in the paper, and it’s gorgeous.” A golden moment.
The problem with Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and The Road to Wigan Pier is that practically all the golden moments belong to Agee and Orwell.
“So we should be looking for golden moments?” a student asked J.B. and me in class. J.B. and I hadn’t been wise enough to be this blunt, but we said yes: their fieldwork should consist of hanging around until they felt they had a golden moment or two. Which of course begged the question of what a golden moment is.
For the oral historian Studs Terkel, it’s clear that a golden moment happens when people’s conversation shows contradictions in their values. In Terkel’s Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (1970), such contradiction occurs when the advertising magnate William Benton speaks with pride and shame of having doubled his income every year of the Depression (“progress through catastrophe,” Benton notes ruefully); of having invented the documentary advertisement (with a Maxwell House Coffee radio ad in which “you heard the coffee cups clinking and the coffee gurgling as it was poured” and a man smacking his lips with pleasure; “I invented a lot of things for which I now apologize,” he says); and of having bought the struggling elevator-music company Muzak, vastly expanded its locations, and multiplied his fortune several times because he had a tin ear and didn’t know good music from bad. “My mother, who was a fine musician, held Muzak in contempt. Anybody who knows anything about music holds it in contempt.”
(Does such self-contradiction happen in great literature, as Wiseman suggests? All the time. Consider the scene in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night where the wealthy father, furious at having been mocked for miserliness by his tubercular son, shouts that the boy can spend as much as he wants on a private TB clinic, “Spend all my money!”, while he, the father, is standing on the dining room table, unscrewing some of the light bulbs in the chandelier because he says the room is bright enough and electricity costs money.)
Contradictory values are at the heart of many of the golden moments in Wiseman’s films. His High School (1967), about life in a suburban school that prides itself on empowering the individual student, shows the dean of girls at a school assembly reading a letter from a graduate, now a soldier in Vietnam. The soldier writes with pride of being what the school made him: a body doing just what he’s told. The dean is tearfully grateful that the school has succeeded in “doing our job.”
The golden moments I’ve cited so far—involving William Benton, O’Neill’s father, the dean of girls—are all ironic: speakers speak without being aware of the context in which their remarks will be understood. What they say by itself isn’t the last word. Much more commonly, golden moments occur when speakers put brilliantly, “originally,” exactly what they mean:
I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.
Sighted sub. Sank same.
Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded.
Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy.
What constitutes a golden moment is of course a subjective judgment, though the speeches above have impressed enough people over time that I suspect most of us would put them in the pantheon. How does one know a golden moment when it’s brand-new, just spoken? Obviously by our individual emotional response to it—“belly feel,” as Orwell disparagingly called it. Fortunately, there’s a large overlap between human sensibilities, and I have little doubt that you will find some of the following statements—from the small anthology of golden moments I’ve collected on my hard drive—as striking as I do:
Queen Elizabeth I: “Had I, my lords, been born crested, not cloven, you had not treated me thus!"
Sydney Gaines, age 7, to his father, David Gaines, my friend and a professor of English at Southwestern University, Georgetown, Texas: “Dad, real friends are front-stabbers.”
Geoffrey Graham, 42, an Austin, Texas, artist and Gay Rights activist dying of AIDS: "I have no fear of death. It's a natural part of life. I trust the universe enough not to be fearful."
An unnamed woman overheard by a New Yorker music reviewer during the intermission of the Metropolitan Opera’s 2002 production of Anton Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron: “I survived Auschwitz—I don’t have to sit through this.”
The pro golfer Mike Reid, who cried when he blew a lead in the PGA Tournament: "That's O.K. I cry at supermarket openings."
The composer Aaron Copland: "Agony I don't connect with. Not even alienation."
The soprano Renee Fleming: "I was so much the good girl that I didn’t know what I wanted to have for lunch. I only knew what I should have for lunch."
Another high-achieving good girl, the comedienne Carol Burnett, after she became her real, imperfect, happier self: “I liked me better when I wasn’t me.”
The documentary filmmaker and public-access-TV pioneer George Stoney: "Forgiveness is far easier to obtain than permission."
David Rappaport, a 3-foot 11-inch dwarf and character actor, complaining that he was discriminated against: "I want to be treated like a regular, boring, normal person. I look at boring people every day, and I say, 'God, I wish I could be like that.' But my lot is to be unique, special, so I have to put up with it. It's a hard life." Two years later, Rappaport committed suicide.
Staff Sgt. Hattie Brown, a radio operator who relayed battle reports to headquarters from the field during the 1991 Gulf War: "I've confronted the idea of death and I try not to be scared. If I die, though, I hope I do it with pride, trying to get the enemy."
From the New York Times' obituary of publisher and philanthropist George Delacorte, who died in 1991 at age 97: “Mr. Delacorte was an avid storyteller in his later years. One day, however, when he was in the middle of an anecdote he lost his train of thought. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘at 92 the memory is the first thing to go.’ He paused for a moment and said, ‘Well, to tell you the truth, the first thing that goes is sex. Then your memory goes. But the memory of sex never goes.’” [This golden moment, placed near the end of a long Times article like a chocolate mint at the end of a heavy meal, would of course be the headline in a tabloid: “‘YOU NEVER FORGET SEX,’ SAYS 92 YEAR OLD.” ]
The actor Cary Grant: "Everybody wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant."
Jean Sexton, an Orphan Train rider in 1914, speaking of her arrival in the Midwestern town where she was "chosen": "They marched us across a stage in the opera house. First, my two brothers got chosen. And then it was time to make my stage appearance. I was only three, and my mother tells me that I was wearing a little white dress that by that time was terribly wrinkled. So when I came out on the stage I was smoothing the wrinkles from my dress. And she called out, 'I want that one.'"
The New York Jets’ lineman Dennis Byrd, a devout Christian, paralyzed in a 1992 game, asked
whether he had wondered “why me?”: “I know why me. Because of the strength on the inside. I know I can handle this." Less than a year later Byrd was walking with the aid of a cane.
Samuel Johnson, asked what the greatest pleasure in life is: “Fucking. And the second is drinking. Therefore I wonder why there are not more drunkards, for all can drink, though not all can fuck.”
Yelena V. Kozlova, whose daughter, Darya, a ninth grader, was one of 45 Russian children, mostly high school honors students on their way to a vacation in Spain, who died in a 2002 plane crash over Germany; Ms. Kozlova was speaking to her daughter’s grieving schoolmates: "Dig into life and be joyful."
My friend Archie Hobson’s remarkable mother, Verna, dying of cancer: “If there is an afterlife, won’t we be surprised!”
So this was the first important thing I learned about documentary and its outrider disciplines in social science and journalism after writing my dissertation: you have to get the golden moments. And if you don’t have the patience and the boldness to, or if you don’t fancy dealing with parents who’ve just lost their child, documentary is probably not for you.
•
My second point is more complicated but more quickly made. Those who have done me the honor of reading Documentary Expression and Thirties America will remember that I distinguish between two sorts of documentary: social and human.
Social documentary deals with public phenomena that are susceptible, with however much difficulty, of being changed, improved: the sharecropping system in the American South during the 1930s; the outrageous cost of California funerals; the lard in McDonald’s French fries; racism; the lack of anti-retroviral drugs to fight AIDS in Africa; battered children; Kashmir, Palestine, Northern Ireland, North Korea, Iran, Darfur; white slavery; guns in the hands of untrained civilians; the bitter circumstances of poor Muslims in Europe; bad breath, body odor, drunk driving, and the heartbreak of psoriasis (advertisements often use documentary techniques). I said in my book that when we speak of “documentary,” we generally mean social documentary.
And yet, as I didn’t say, the second sort of documentary is in fact much more common. Human documentary shows us natural, necessary, and often agreeable phenomena: childhood, festivals, dementia, work, faraway places, unusual people’s normal lives, political activity, sport, hurricanes, friendship, dying, spiritual questing, life in a Moroccan or Michigan village. “A Hospice Austin patient, a policewoman, a Mexican-American Pentecostal church, middle class women's recipes, the Creative Rapid Learning Center, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, a tattoo parlor, people’s jokes about God or Bill Stott’s lawn, a school for battered children, the custodians of this building, or Ralph the Swimming Pig”—as a late syllabus for J.B. Colson’s and my documentary class said, citing some projects done in earlier years.
When writing my dissertation I understood but only briefly acknowledged that “human documentary” was just another name for what is normally called art. Documentary, now so firmly considered a tactic for social change, actually begins with a work of art, a celebration of an unusual life: Nanook of the North. Robert Flaherty, the film’s maker, didn’t intend to change Nanook’s life—far from it. He wanted Nanook to stay just as he was and for us to admire him that way. When the film was released in 1922, it was a worldwide hit. But Flaherty didn’t send any of the money it earned to Nanook or his wife and kids, and they all died of starvation while Nanook was leaping about the screen in first-run theaters on five continents.
What holds our attention in a social documentary—The River (1937), say, or Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)—is the issue being treated and—and I underline this—the complexity the issue is shown to have. (If an issue is simple—Buy Bonds; Don’t Litter—all that is needed is a public-service ad.) The issue and its complexity hold us, not the human complexity of the people shown; indeed, the people are usually ciphers, “the halt and the lame . . . victims,” as a critic, Brian Winston, has put it, describing the people in social-reformist documentary.
On the other hand, in a human documentary, a piece of art that hopes to hold our interest, the person shown—as the New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm suggests in her brilliant The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), the last book of the semester in J.B.’s and my class—must have a certain kind of energetic, self-dramatizing richness of character, like buoyant Nanook. The center in non-satiric literature can’t be rigid and one-dimensional—can’t be Horatio or Fortinbras, must be Hamlet; can’t be Enobarbus, must be Anthony. Or Cleopatra, whose “infinite variety” “age cannot wither . . . nor custom stale.”
Are there successful documentaries that mix reformist propaganda with the depiction of a fascinating person or persons—documentaries both social and human? I’m tempted to say no for the same reason that the critic Lionel Trilling said there were no great New Deal (or “liberal” or “leftist”) novels: because propaganda privileges the community, art the individual; propaganda simplicity, art complexity; propaganda human possibility, art human limitation. Perhaps Grapes of Wrath comes closest—John Ford’s 1940 film, not John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel. The film can be considered a re-enacted documentary—there have been others of the kind, most notable Humphrey Jennings’ Silent Village (1943), Roberto Rossellini’s Rome: Open City (1945) and Paisan (1946), and Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966)—and Henry Fonda is spellbinding because he makes us feel the tremendous, justifiable violence suppressed in his calm Tom Joad.
Having said there may not be successful documentaries that are both social and human, let me close by pointing to an extraordinary film that is almost an exception. The film is Dennis O’Rourke’s Cannibal Tours (1988), which students in the documentary class brought to J.B.’s and my attention and which we thereafter closed the course with. The film shows Europeans on a tour in Papua New Guinea among people only a generation or two removed from the Stone Age and now selling souvenirs of their past while living on the margins of our (and their) civilization.
We see the tourists staring at, photographing and videotaping the natives and artifacts important in their past culture, having the natives explain the artifacts (“Is this the rock where you killed your sacrifices?” a fat red-faced German asks a wizened black man), and bargaining to get a lower price on souvenirs, though as one woman says to her companion, “This is so cheap”—at its first price—“I can’t believe it!”
Because the tourists and New Guineans interact only when the latter are in a subservient role—photographed, asked generally demeaning questions (“How do people taste?”), looked upon as retarded (“I don’t think they understand money”), haggled with over prices—we come to respect the few tourists who to a degree drop out of the tour, an Italian family who are having such fun together they ignore O’Rourke’s off-screen questions, a woman who sunbathes rather than do the scheduled activity, the handful who go to the last night’s festival dinner not, as they were supposed to, in New Guinean dress with war-paint on their faces, but in Western sport clothes.
It is O’Rourke’s genius in mid-movie to give us the obverse of what we have been watching. All at once, without explanation, it is the New Guineans—the wizened man and a plump middle-aged woman selling trinkets—who speak to us in their native language, subtitled in ours. “Why do they come see us and we not go see them?” “When I buy food at the store, they don’t give me a second price.” “Why do they have money?” “If I had money, I would travel.” “They don’t buy, and I need money to send my kids to school!” “When the white man came, we said, ‘Our dead ancestors have arrived; our dead have come back.’ Now when we see tourists, we say the dead have returned. That’s what we say.”
The polemical point is made: East is east and West is west, and so long as each sees the other as Other, there is no authentic, human way for them to relate. None of the people we have seen do it. As the film’s final credits pass on the screen, we in the audience realize sadly that, as O’Rourke says in a 1999 article he wrote about the film, tourism is not “a process which can lead to greater understanding between cultures. There must be a better way.”
But the film doesn’t end when the credits end. Suddenly, we see a huge greensward of mown grass, then a small propeller plane, and then people we’ve not seen earlier. One’s the pilot, a white man; another is a dark native. The third and fourth are a white middle-aged American couple in loud pastels, carrying handbags and tourist trophies, saying their goodbyes. The exuberant woman does the talking we hear. She exclaims about the plane, her upcoming trip, the greensward (“My lawn back home should look so good. I should look so good!”). She is, as Dean MacCannell, author of The Tourist (1976), has remarked, a “Bette Midler-type American”—which is to say a New Yorker and very likely a Jew with the huge energy and warmth such people have in a common stereotype. Among the things she’s carrying are several (MacCannell says five) painted wooden representations of fruit, tied together at one end. One can’t but think of them as anything but penises—MacCannell calls them “realistically carved dildos”—and that’s how the woman laughingly thinks of them. “I get to ride back with these in my lap!” she says. Before she gets in the plane, she gives their native guide a big hug—her husband shakes his hand and pats him on the back—thanking him and saying something about seeing him again. They get on the plane and we watch while it taxies up the greensward.
What we just have seen, I suggest, almost overturns the film’s earlier polemic, just as sexy Alcibiades’ arrival upsets all the philosophizing about love in Plato’s Symposium. If anyone could in two minutes, this wonderful New York woman would force us to admit that contact can be made cross culture: all it takes is a powerful, open heart to do it. But I find the scene strikes most viewers—MacCannell is one—as merely a flippant coda to the film, too brief and irresponsible to be treated seriously. The film’s point remains, again in O’Rourke’s words, “The promoted idea of tourism as ‘a dialogue between cultures’ is, I believe, a myth, because there exists such an economic and cultural disparity between the protagonists and all human encounter is inevitably distorted.” Even I must admit the New York woman’s farewell is almost certainly a distortion of the couple’s relation to their guide and his people.
Thus, as I said in my book, there are two sorts of documentary, and, as I didn’t say, each has a different sort of person at its center. Social documentary shows victims needing help in coping with their environment; human documentary shows people with a measure of command of their environment, capable not only of exciting our admiration (victims can do this) but of changing themselves and their worlds and what we think of both.
I respect social documentary, but I love human documentary, and the triumph of the profile in magazines, newspapers, and electronic media, of People Weekly and American Masters, of entertainment, historical, and sports biographies on TV suggests that I am far from alone.
Acknowledgements and Endnotes
My first thanks go to J.B. Colson with whom I joyfully taught for 20 years and from whom I learned most of what I know about photography and a good deal of what I believe about life. Next, thanks to Caroline Blinder of Goldsmiths College, London, who assured me I must have something to say about documentary after my years of silence. Finally, thanks to Tom Fricke and Keith Taylor of the University of Michigan, who invited me to contribute to their documentary issues of the Michigan Quarterly Review, and especially to Keith (Tom was doing fieldwork in Nepal), who emailed me encouragement.
I regret not being able to give citations for everything I quote. I kept the quotes for my delight (James Thurber: “Let me be the first to admit that the naked truth about me is to the naked truth about Salvador Dali as an old ukulele in the attic is to a piano in a tree, and I mean a piano with breasts”), for self-improvement (Carl Jung: “The great thing is here and now: this is the eternal moment. And if you don’t realize it, you have missed the best part of your life”), and for classroom use—not for research.
Late 1930’s comic books depicting Nazi concentration-camp horrors: Alfred Appel, Northwestern University, in conversation. Maysles Films: “Advertising,” The New York Times, 11/26/1993. The student who asked J.B. and me whether the class should be looking for “golden moments” in interviews was Nancy Mims. Benton, in Terkel, pp. 60-65. Anne Deveare Smith: NYT, 2/1/1997. The authors of the phrases bowels of Christ, sighted sub, nobody goes there, and you’re no Jack Kennedy are readily available through Google. Moses und Aron: The New Yorker, 2/18-25/2002. Mike Reid: NYT, 8/21/1989. Renee Fleming: NYer, 11/12/2001. David Rappaport: NYT, 5/4/1990. Hattie Brown: NYT, 1/22/1991. George Delacorte: NYT, 5/5/1991. Dennis Byrd: NYT, 1/13/1993. Yelena V. Kozlova: NYT, 7/4/2002. I’m sure I know the post-Flaherty history of Nanook from Pauline Kael’s early writing: see her note in NYer, 4/15/2005, p. 50. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, Doubleday, 1950. Brian Winston, "The Tradition of the Victim in Griersonian Documentary," in New Challenges for Documentary, ed. Alan Rosenthal, University of California Press, 1988, p. 284. The students who brought Cannibal Tours to J.B.’s and my attention were Angela Alston and Rebecca Campbell. Dennis O'Rourke, “On the Making of Cannibal Tours,” at
http://www.cameraworklimited.com/download.html?oid=2250047090; this essay includes Dean MacCannell’s quotes.
When choosing social “victims” to document, reporters, propagandists, and artists look for subjects with—no surprise— human appeal. The filmmaker Ofra Bikel has been profiling imprisoned felons for 14 years and gotten 13 of them released for wrongful conviction. As she acknowledges, she selects those she documents with great care. “I pity everybody [wrongly put in prison],” she says, “but I can't take somebody who has molested a child and now is in for the wrong murder. If I want to convince people [in the viewing audience], I have to be smart about it.” A convicted murderer, Patsy Kelly Jarrett, had been in prison 28 years and was almost certainly innocent, yet Bikel was hesitant to profile her for PBS’ Frontline because starchy food and a sedentary life had beefed her up. “She looked, really, like a guard, you know,” Bikel told a reporter. “This short hair of hers, it’s really impossible.” She finally decided, as the reporter put it, “that the details of Ms. Jarrett's case compensated for any lack of telegenic appeal,” did a profile of her, and got her released. See Julie Salamon, “Crusading for Prisoners When the System Fails,” NYT, 6/27/2005.
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