Last year, film director Sarah Polley released her first feature length documentary, The Stories We Tell. The subject: her own family. Specially, her mother, who died when she was eleven years old. The film’s byline reads: “A film that excavates layers of myth and memory to find the elusive truth at the core of a family of storytellers.”
In The Observer in June, Kate Kellaway published an extended review of the film that included an interview with Polley. In the review, Kellaway states that the plot of the film is less important than the deeper themes it broaches. “What gives the film its distinction,” she writes, “are the questions it raises that reach beyond plot: do we own our own stories or do they own us? Is there such a thing as emotional copyright? And why is memory a teasing resource?”
In the extended quote below, Kellaway shares some of her interview with Polley and follows it with thought-provoking analysis of her own:
I tell Sarah I have been speculating about Michael’s [Polley’s father’s] writing and her film-making and wondering: were they each driven by the same need to control out-of-control experience? “I was more concerned the film should include everybody’s version and not be one-dimensional,” Sarah says, but concedes: “Telling stories is our way of coping, a way of creating shape out of a mess. It binds everyone together.” Yet her film also reveals that everyone has a subtly different story to tell. Memory is not a convenient barn in which truth can be stored through successive winters. It is permeable, unreliable and personal. And it is complicated because, in a family, as Polley points out, everyone is “committed” to their own version of the truth.
Polley’s film–and Kellaway’s review–point us back to the statement Kelly and Jeremy Elliott made in our Spotlight session this week: “We create meaning through narratives.” We don’t remember and retell an index of precise details from our lives; we remember and retell selectively constructed narratives that move beyond details to discover and communicate meaning.
But what happens when our constructed narrative doesn’t match someone else’s narrative of the same events? Who, if anyone, gets to determine the meaning of the events? Is the “truth” the precise details of the event or the meaning of the event?
8 responses to ““The Stories We Tell””
When our constructed narrative doesn’t match someone else’s narrative of the same events it creates controversy, to a degree. It can create arguments or difference of opinion. Usually, when there is a story being told many people are involved and in this case, many different stories are made but each individual went through the same events. But all people experience things differently and think differently about the same issues. This is because everyone is different, no one is the same. Therefore, many different sides of the same story are created. No one gets to determine the meaning of the events except yourself. A person determines the meaning of events as they felt and experienced the situation themselves. No ones meaning is better, they are all right. This is a good thing because if we didn’t have difference of opinion then we would only have one answer to one question. Difference of opinion and how people experience things helps see how everyone was effected by the event; which helps us understand where others are coming from. People may not like that others do not agree with them, but it is actually very helpful. There is not a “truth” of precise details of an event or the meaning of an event, it is how each individual sees the situation. As each person sees the event differently many beliefs and “truths” are created. Nobody’s meaning of the events is better than anyone else’s, it just means they are different.
Everybody can perceive an event differently. It doesn’t matter what the event may be, certain memories that stick out from it can trigger memories from that person’s past that makes them conceive the event the way that they do. For example, lets say that a couple who are dating go to a good friends wedding. The girl may love the wedding and remember the part where the preacher says, “And now you may kiss the bride,” and the girl gets so excited and can’t wait to spend the rest of her life with her boyfriend. Although on the other hand, the guy watches the preacher say, “..until death do us part,” and it reminds him of his father and how many divorces he has gone through. That wedding means nothing to the man because of his past experience and watching his father’s marriages constantly fail. He sees the bad in that day. While the girl, sees the liveliness and eternal love that the couple has, and how happy they are. Overall, the telling of events can be completely different, it all depends on your background and personality as to how you perceive them.
Stories are all about perspective. Joy and sadness can be found in he same story from different perspectives and its all about our past that decides how we view the world. The fact that we see through different eyes can create a lot of controversy and make people have friction within fractions. But what people have to realize is that there will always be a different opinion and to accept and love people more for their opinion. Back on topic, all a story is personal from the way you tell it to how it feels to you. Different narratives of the same event will always exist and one would not be as meaningful without the other.
When people don’t agree on what happened in an event, it causes confusion. I don’t think that anyone gets to chose what is the correct interpretation of an event if both people are honest. People are allowed to have different points of view from the same vent, and the same event might affect people differently. The truth is in the meaning that people take away from an event, and the truth can be different to different people.
Stories are the way we relay the way we interpret the world to others. It makes sense that people see the same event differently because we don’t all interpret the world the same way. An event may happen and it might trigger memories and feelings in me that makes me tell the story one way, and the same for another person. Truth is the meaning of the event. In reality, most of our memories are flawed. We’ve told the same stories over and over and the farther removed we are from the event, the easier it is to fill in blanks of past memories with details from newer memories. The way we feel about the event is the truth for us. No one can tell you how to feel a certain way about an event because its all about the perspective we see things from, which include our emotions and past memories.
I feel that truth is conveying the meaning of the story almost like the moral of the story. If someone tells you a meaningful story but fails to be completely accurate I don’t think that invalidates the story at all. Fictional stories can have the greatest meanings and lessons behind them despite their lack of facts. As far as who gets to determine the accuracy of a story I think that it varies from person to person and is hard to really determine.
Everyone is unique and thinks differently. Therefore, of course it is the case that we would think differently than one another. Our different thought processes would lead us to interpret stories from the past differently, but that does not make one more valid than another. We each have different memories and different stories to tell because we each have experienced different things in our lives, and we may have experienced the same thing, but in a different way.
Everyone has a unique perspective on life. Things can look one way to me and be completely different for another person. Happiness, Joy, sadness and pain are things that recorded in our memory are reflected on how we see things.
So as we try to make assumptions on stories from the past we use these memories and it clouds our perspective. We all see things from our own clouded perspective.