IF YOU CAN THINK OF IT, IT EXISTS SOMEWHERE
The true, or not, stories of David Byrne.
I talk a lot about artists and bands that stand the test of time, but never passed the sniff test of my own consumption bubble, or my peers’ recommendation bubbles. The Beatles, notably, were just a famous group that I never pressed “play” on, until I was 32 (this was like six months ago). Talking Heads is one of these bands, and David Byrne one of these artists, who superficially creeped into my life, and danced around my periphery, never fully grabbing hold of me. And then, the world was put on pause, and in the year plus that I had to sit at home, alone, digging into video and audio archives, I let them in.
David Byrne’s American Utopia is “a 2020 American concert film directed and produced by Spike Lee, from a screenplay by David Byrne. The film is a live recording of a Broadway performance of the show adapted from the touring show that supported the album of the same name” (Wikipedia). It’s complicated, right?
Not really. It’s one person, or twelve people, or something in between, on a stage, singing songs, moving their bodies, playing music, and talking. It is completely marvelous, it was my favorite pandemic viewing experience, and in a way, it is an exact copy of everything else Byrne has made (that I have experienced). Byrne is a simple man, for one that is so expressive and creative. Everything I find that he has made is so directly connected to the same central ideas and perspective and sources and theses, and everything that he has made that I have found is so streamlined and efficient and joyous and clear-eyed. The Talking Heads oeuvre, which I have some experience with now, is so connected to itself and its creator that in retrospect – the only perspective I’ll ever have of it – it almost simplifies it too much, narrowing it towards potential staleness.
But as always with Byrne, despite the narrowness, it is the more, the merrier.
Byrne’s movie, which he almost entirely re-wrote from an original script from Stephen Tobolowsky and Beth Henley, is a cinematic quilt, a patchwork of people in fake rural Texas populating a threadbare narrative about a celebration of specialness, the sesquicentennial celebration of Texas. According to Byrne himself, it’s “60 Minutes on acid”. The commentary on small-town life, suburban life, American life, is nothing new to Byrne, or myself, but the addition of photography to Byrne’s toolbelt, who was already a skilled creator of music and sound, expands his ideas into something equally more grand and more individual and specific. There are small moments where Byrne will pan the camera from left to right, starting on a simple, ideal suburban home that borders the edge of civilization and human life in the middle of the vast country, an image that is burned so deeply into my rural Illinois upbringing that a dormant part of me was shocked into consciousness in my movie theater seat. Byrne’s ability to talk to us, to me, to anyone, at the level we are at, but also to talk through us, and past us, towards other people and our other selves, is his magic. His performance on screen as the narrator allows him to look you in the eye while doing it – and also while pretending to drive a car down fancy new turnpikes – and deepens his affectations and his effects.
Frequently alongside Byrne on the screen is John Goodman playing Louis Fyne, a clean-room technician at a local science corporation, who is desperate not to fall in love, specifically, but to get Married, specifically. I hope you are already aware of Goodman’s ability as an actor to charm and persuade, but I bet you have no idea how wonderful his abilities to sing and dance and arouse happen to be. Goodman has always been one of our best performers, and he has always been so ready to live in the pocket of the director, to give in and give himself over to a character and a story. He can be scary (The Borrowers, 1997; The Big Lebowski, 1998; O Brother, Where Art Thou?, 2000), he can be charming (True Stories, 1986; Monsters, Inc., 2001; ARGO, 2012), he can be a good husband (Roseanne, 1988-2018; Speed Racer, 2008), he can be a bad husband (10 Cloverfield Lane, 2016; The Righteous Gemstones, 2019-2022), he can be Fred Flinstone (The Flintstones, 1994), he can be Santa Claus (Futurama, 1999; The Year Without a Santa Claus, 2006), he can be John Goodman (Sesame Street, 1995). Most frequently, he’s a devious devil driving a subplot of a Coen brothers movie. Here, he’s a warm, wacky, country-singing man just looking for his partner. He’s a complete delight, and this immediately became the performance that will jump to my mind whenever I think of him next.
The movie is frequently a music video, as well. The extended performance of Wild Wild Life, filled with an extended cast, is a barebones rotating lip sync battle, and everyone knows they’ve got the goods – especially the enthusiastically hip-thrusting Goodman. A fashion show that evolves into the PA announcer singing Dream Operator, is a music video filled with a wide-range of people outfitted in a wide-range of household fabrics crafted into household items. One woman is a marble pedestal, another a brick wall with ivy; one woman a wedding cake, one a bird fountain; one man and woman outfitted in artificial turf, another duo in a pillow sham and a bed sheet. Later, we move to a church with an expansive choir, who background a pastor, singing of puzzling evidence, maybe of the devil or sin or greed. Devils like the many but identical news magazine outlets, or the existence of CVS, or golf, or MasterCards. And then there’s Ramon, the factory production-line worker who can hear radio tones emitting from people’s heads, singing the song Radio Head, the eventual source of the name of the greatest band to ever happen to 20-something caucasian men (you know, Radiohead). My favorite side character – tied with everyone else in the entire movie – is Spalding Gray’s Earl Culver, a rich man responsible for bringing the big tech factory to Virgil, Texas, where the movie takes place. He is happily married, but doesn’t talk directly to his wife, nor she him. Gray, a talented storyteller himself, gives such an odd, specific performance of tonality and hand gestures, directing Byrne’s character through an explanation of the town and modern society with the help of a lobster, some cherry tomatoes, and some asparagus, among other things.
Byrne pulls off another one of my favorite traits of older movies, ones that I have spent a (short) lifetime not seeing, which is: being a hyper-obvious influence on many of my favorite things that would come afterward. There are direct imitations, copies, references, callbacks, and homages to True Stories in the work of David Lynch (an influence that clearly goes both ways), Wes Anderson, Mike Mills, Christopher Guest, and a half-dozen others that have slipped my mind. I believe Byrne, and the Talking Heads, is one of those “your favorite artist’s favorite artist” people and groups, and gaining access to that level of reference and source material feels like being let in to an exclusive club – one filled with the biggest of nerds, oddballs, and lovely creatives.
True Stories tells us simple truths, or forgotten truths, or truthful lies. The Lying Woman, played terrifically by Jo Harvey Allen, peppers the movie with intercut dialogue scenes where she talks, seemingly to no one in particular, about the outlandish and impossible stories that make up her life and her past, sharing and bragging about herself to anyone that will listen, or anyone that is in the room. Every event and story in the movie is something she was in the room for, and responsible for. We are all the Lying Woman, or at least have her inside, carefully watching for opportunities to share, or to inflate. Byrne says that most of these stories are based on truth, or reported truths in the papers he would read on tour with Talking Heads. In their simplest forms, these stories are completely absurd. But a feature of simplicity is the ability to penetrate and connect widely, absurd ideas or not. The things we cast away or ignore are the fruit that Byrne harvests. One man’s trash is David Byrne’s treasure.
The only thought in my head as I biked home from the theater after this mesmerizing experience was that our current lives, our current culture, our current story-telling, are running as fast as possible away from art like True Stories. We are leaving this kind of creativity in the past, or out of the spotlight. This movie itself has barely held on to the mainstream, fortunately getting restorations and continued screenings in theaters. There’s a universal connection, or state of being, or part of our lived experiences, that Byrne and his Talking Heads can speak to – they’ve been doing it for forty five years. But it slips from the front of our minds, it fades into memory, which itself fades into the infinite wealth of forgotten, as all things do. Seeing this movie, and anything Byrne does, grabs hold of someone else inside me, someone lost and weary, and shakes them awake. He pulls something and someone out of me, gives them a breath of fresh air, a few moments of sunshine, a life support. Maybe Byrne does only have one pitch, one speed, one move. But, if it ain’t broke,
I have great news, Portland peers: the Talking Heads concert film STOP MAKING SENSE is coming back to theaters sometime this summer. I say we pack a theater with our bodies and some oversized suits, make a night of it. I hope to see you there, or in my phone telling me you want to join.
In the meantime, I hope you spend this spring awakening season digging through your musical (or otherwise) archives, and find some long forgotten fruit. And I hope you share it with someone (this fruit doesn’t rot, I swear).
TTFN,
B