I Really Enjoyed Forgetting

True Stories, 1986

David Byrne directed one film in his entire life, which seems wrong. Surely one of the world’s most visual musicians should have made…more visuals? But no. Stop Making Sense was Jonathan Demme’s creation, and most of Byrne’s most striking images come from that film, not from True Stories, which is a whopping dose of weird that’s almost a slog to get through, but a good slog.

Byrne, in his role as director/creator, shifts his focus from abstract lyricism to folksy narration as he guides us through the town of Virgil, Texas, sometime in the 1990s. Only it doesn’t feel like the 90s, despite the star-studded, iconically 90s cast: it feels timeless. We’re walking through this austere desert town somewhere in the middle of nowhere with the same reverent pomp and familiarity as any community production of “Our Town.” Byrne is our guide, and if he doesn’t quite fit into the town in his uniform of brightly-colored cowboy kitsch, he certainly knows a lot about it. You might even say he loves it. He talks about Virgil, Texas the way I might talk about my hometown of Florence, Massachusetts: with a studied familiarity, a sense of the place down to its bones, a feeling of respect undergirded by mystery. Here is the church, here is the steeple. But when it comes to the people—well, who the fuck can understand people?

Can a town truly be more than its residents? It’s hard to say. I guess it depends on the residents. In True Stories, the townspeople are the main event: the film focuses on a few Virgil citizens who seem exemplary of the Virgil mode of life. They are deeply strange yet utterly respectable, in keeping with the conditional brand of strangeness that the town dictates. In Virgil, you can be a woman who never leaves her bed and still have plenty to say about society. You can be someone who tells outlandish lies in public but is never reprimanded. You can be John Goodman, a worker at the local computer manufacturing plant, who advertises for a spouse, recording his own personal ads for the local TV station urging interested parties to dial 1 800 WIFE.

Best of all, you can be Spalding Gray’s mayor of Virgil, Earl Culver. I’ll confess that Gray was the reason I wanted to see this movie in the first play. Gray is a figure who continues to fascinate me and who I’ll watch in just about anything. He started as an actor but that’s nowhere near the full sum of who or what he does as a performer. He’s perfect for this role because he’s the kind of actor who exists to gently subvert that midcentury model of American theater. As the stage manager in the 1989 production of “Our Town,” he was perfect; not simply acting as the guide to the town and all its residents, but seeming to underline by his mere existence the dollhouse structure of the play itself, its take on American life, its understanding of community, and the many ways in which, by the 90s, that play’s understanding had become limited and false.

Who could have told Thornton Wilder, for instance, about a man so lonely he needs to advertise for a wife, rather than the old standard of most people simply tripping into marriage, because it was just what you did? Who could have predicted the modern separateness with which we live our lives in the present? In True Stories, the nuclear family is still a presence, but a guilty one. Grays character Earl Culver is married to a woman he never speaks to, and has two children he doesn’t seem to know how to relate to. The people in Virgil, Texas often get together for a big event—a town parade, a fashion show at the mall—but outside of such events, they appear to live in isolation. The bedridden woman uses an eating device similar to the one used by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times: it lifts her fork to her mouth for her, lest she should tire herself with the effort. But is this a critique of her mode of living, or a way of accommodating her unique disability? The woman who keeps lying seems to do so because she feels it’s all she can offer, and society honors her by remaining entertained by those lies. To be in society, you have to perform a version of yourself that maybe isn’t the full truth, which is what I’ve always hated about being in a society. But that’s just the way it is.

Virgil, Texas in Byrne’s imagination really isn’t a very modern place. It’s full of people, but lacking community. There’s nothing exactly to recommend it, unless you happen to love wide open spaces. At the beginning of an event, Earl Culver makes a speech about the imagined beginnings of Virgil. The legend goes that God got tired in the midst of creating the place and decided to rest awhile before making the lakes and rivers. But when he woke up, it was too late: the ground had hardened, making bodies of water impossible.

“I know,” Culver says, as God. “I’ll create people who like it this way!”

That’s the main thing we know about the residents of Virgil: they seem to like it here. We don’t know whether or not the majority of them were born there, but they’ve made their home there, and it’s through them that we come to understand what’s special about it. The specialness about it is, similar to Grover’s Corners, an utter lack of specialness. It’s special because these people care about it, because Byrne cares about it.

As the film comes to an end, Byrne’s narrator explains in voiceover how you have to leave a place and come back in order to remember it. “I really enjoyed forgetting,” he says. When you first go somewhere, everything stands out. “The way people walk, the doorknobs, everything.” But then you get used to it, you don’t notice so much anymore. That’s what “Our Town’s” heroine finds out too late; when she goes to relive her happiest day on Earth all she can think about is how it’s impossible to grasp the context of life while you’re busy living it. “Does anybody ever realize life while they’re living it?” she asks the narrator. He tells her no, it’s something we can’t really do. We have to forget everything, or be denied access, in order to remember what holds meaning for us.

Next week: a woman of the west.