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I just learned this morning that someone I was close to for a time has died.  K. was thirty-nine, and died suddenly this past weekend.  We were friends for awhile, despite our radical differences in politics — she a staunch and vocal-about-it conservative, I a diehard argumentative Yankee liberal.  What we didn’t share in politics, we did share in our love of horses, and the frustration and joy of taking up riding and horse ownership in midlife. 

Because we shared that, and a similar obsessive drive to succeed at everything we took on, K. and I agreed early on not to talk politics.  Instead, we talked horses.  We helped one another overcome our fears of riding, delving into the world of sports psychology; we encouraged each other to master the athletic challenges riding poses; and, as horse people do, we spent a lot of time wandering through tack shops together, accumulating an enormous amount of horse stuff.  Somewhere, I know, there is a beautiful handmande flywhisk K. bought because, she laughingly said, she “needed” it. 

Eventually we went our separate ways and lost touch as people do.  I am saddened to know K. is gone.  And gone too soon.

These are the objects on the horizontal surfaces in my office at school:

• A yard gnome, gazing at the chair in which students sit throughout the day for conferences, paper talks, advising, chit chat, worrying.
• A stack of books from the library which I have not yet read.  They will be overdue in two weeks.
• A black and white photograph of my horse, Buddy, taken in the evening, the light low enough so that he is only a thoughtful silhouette, head bent to the hay on the floor of his stall.
• A cow lamp.  Or, more accurately, one of those glass lamps you are supposed to fill with pretty rocks and shells, but I have filled instead with a little herd of toy cows.  I have a lot of toy cows because, over the years, innumerable friends have given me toy cows for presents in honor of an essay I once published that began with this ridiculous sentence: “I know cows.” 
• A four inch high Christmas tree with no lights on it.
• A calculator, three quarters, a squishy nerfball version of the earth, two boxes of Crayola Crayons, a small pile of collected stones from Maine, Provincetown, Nantucket, and Mexico, and a bar of soap from Ireland.
• A toy model of a John Deere tractor + trailer.
• One hoop earring.  The other is long lost somewhere.  If you find it, slide it under my door, which is, at the moment I write this, shut, so I can write this blog.
• A large pink rock the size of an Idaho potato.  The rock comes from Newfoundland.
• Coffee.  There is always, and never enough, coffee.
• A postcard of Portland Head lighthouse.  Last year, I went to Maine with several of my students.  Two of them had never seen the ocean.
• The notebook for tonight’s class.  A stack of handouts on top of it.  A pencil that needs to be sharpened on top of those.  My reading glasses, balanced on the pencil.

I’ve been thinking a lot about documentary films in recent months.  As many of the readers of this blog know, I am at work on writing the script for a documentary film on the explosion of 1968 which devastated downtown Richmond, Indiana.  As I work deeper into this project, I am paying attention to the content and style of different documentary filmmakers to get a sense of where my style, still developing, fits in the the genre of documentary filmmaking.

The most obvious and wellknown documentary filmmaker is Michael Moore.  His style is in your face; he is routinely a part of his own film; the tone is impassioned and taunting, funny and contentious.  Even though I share his politics, and a grim loathing of a certain current administration, and I find Moore’s films entertaining, I do find myself irritated that he squanders his opportunities by flying a bit fast and loose with the chronology of his facts.  In Roger and Me, for example, Moore manipulated a sequence of events in Flint, Michigan to underscore his point that the extensive layoffs at the GM plant devasted the city.  An extended analysis of Moore’s film appears in the very good book Documentary Storytelling (Sheila Curran Bernard), referencing an article by Harlan Jacobson in the Nov/Dec 1989 issue of Film Comment.  The gist of the article and the analysis in Bernard’s book is that Moore ruined his story by, essentially, fabricating a new timeline.  And by doing so, he set up what looked like a causal sequence.  This thing led to that thing which led to the next which led to the end result: a town devasted by layoffs. 

That is, documentary friends: he lied.  Moore, of course, doesn’t think so.  “The movie,” he says, ”is about essentially what happened to [Flint] during the 1980’s.” 

The difference rests in that single word: “essentially.”  Essentially what happened.  The essence of what happened is, yes, Flint, Michigan, was devastated by a series of layoffs culminating in a net total of 32,000 workers from 1974 to 1986.  Its unemployment is staggeringly high.  Crime is the highest in the nation.  Foreclosures rampant.  Clearly, things are bad in Flint, and were in 1986, the year Moore focuses on.  Moore, however, presents the transformation of Flint as not a twelve year process beginning with the first layoffs in 1974, but rather focuses on 1986; he lines up events — the closing of 11 plants, the opening and closing of Auto World (an attraction meant to save the city), the visit of Ronald Reagan (a visit meant to boost morale in the city), the opening of the Water Street Pavilion (another site meant to save the city, one expensive and long void of tenants) — as though all of the events happened in close proximal chronology, one leading to the next and the next. 

Yes, all of these things happened.  But, no, they didn’t happen in the order that Moore presents them.  And no, they didn’t happen in the cause and effect sequence he presents them either.  Still…everything DID happen.  That’s Moore’s argument for calling what he does “documentary.” But, for me, he treads into a gray and murky area here.  When you start rearranging the order of events to make your own point – political or moral or aesthetic — you are, in my view, creating a fiction.  Yes, it may be true that you’re not inventing what happened.  But you are inventing the story of what happened. 

Documentary films are not about inventing a story.  They are about telling a story.  And the challenge is to get out of the way and figure out what the story really is.  And tell it clearly, and compellingly.  As I spend time listening to the memories people have of the explosion; as I learn the moment by moment chronology of what happened; as I piece together the fragments of information about what led up to the explosion, and what followed it; as I do all that I am finding a story of enormous complexity.  I may have come into the story with a particular point of view (this was the cause, this was to blame, these are the effects), but the more I learn the more I understand: telling a true story is more complicated that a singular point of view.  And a lot more interesting. 

*****

Tomorrow, HBO will air the documentary Thin at 9 p.m. EST.  Here’s a link for an extended preview: Thin