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I wanted to watch The Men Who Stare at Goats for one main reason. And if you guess because Ewan McGreggor is in it, you’re right. Kind of.
Mr. McGreggor certainly isn’t ugly, but his main attraction for me was that he played Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars. And The Men Who Stare at Goats is basically a two hour Star Wars joke.
And I’m okay with that, because I’m the kind of Star Wars fangirl who gets X-wings tattoos, dresses up like Mara Jade at Star Wars cons and covers her office in wall-to-wall posters (my favorites being a Celebration IV exclusive print of Vader killing the Emperor, a Japanese poster of R2-D2 jetpacking over a derivative of Hokusai’s famous “Great Wave off Kanagawa” painting and a map of the galaxy that came in one issue of Star Wars Insider many many moons ago).
After the movie (Men Who Stare at Goats, not Star Wars) ended, I had a feeling that it wasn’t really a very good movie, but I thought it was awesome anyway. The main problem I had with Goats is not that it’s one giant Star Wars joke (that part was awesome), but that the story never quite got off the ground.
I’m going to blame the complex narration and use of extensive flashbacks for that. Ewan McGreggor narrates the story from the present. He tells us how his wife left him and he went off to Iraq and met George Clooney’s character.
And then, throughout their journey, we get flashbacks to the 1980s when the army was playing around with making these psychic super warriors. Sometimes we get flashbacks within flashbacks. Eventually everything gets wrapped up, but the problem is that we’re following two, and sometimes three story lines, as the flashbacks comprise at least half of the movie.
McGreggor and Clooney do a lot of sitting around, which is when Clooney tells McGreggor his story. Even though we don’t see them sitting around a lot because of the flashbacks, it’s kind of tiring to have them sitting in the desert alone for so long. That being said, the flashbacks are done extremely well and are easy to follow.
In one sense too much is going on, and in another sense nothing is going on, and it creates frustration for the viewer. I do admire director Grant Heslov’s ability to navigate these multiple layers of narration, but I don’t think they quite work here.
Another problem is that this movie is based on a documentary (you can read about it on Wikipedia here, and I highly suggest checking out the links at the bottom), so it’s trying to impose a narrative structure on a story that doesn’t necessarily have any.
Again, the plot does accomplish what it sets out to do in satirizing the ridiculousness of the military and war in Iraq, but it still falls flat, perhaps because it’s trying to do too much. Or perhaps because it’s a comedy, so you can never be sure what’s included solely for comedic effect, or how much of the movie is based on the “truth.”
In the end, I think it’s worth watching for the acting (which is excellent), the Star Wars jokes and the layered narrative, but considering the title is The Men Who Stare at Goats, there were not enough goats!
No one likes being lied to. Especially by a memoirist. If even one event in a memoir is made up, it makes the rest of the story suspect. In autobiographical fiction, though, it’s okay if the author “lies” to us, because we go into the reading experience expecting, well, fiction. Not real events.
Frey falsified parts of his memoir on addiction.
A January 25th article in The New Yorker by Daniel Mendelsohn discusses the topic of falsified memoirs (ala James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces). Mendelsohn brings up the truth vs. Truth argument that Tim O’Brien addresses in depth in The Things They Carried. (Read my entry on The Things They Carried here.) He concludes that even though a falsified memoir might convey a Truth, the lie is not justified—the author could have written a novel to convey the same Truth and wouldn’t have had to betray her reader.
I agree with him. When writing nonfiction, we need to tell the truth, while at the same time expressing some Truth. In fiction, we are under no such constraints.
Mendelsohn briefly discusses the blurring between reality and fiction toward the end of the article, and brings up Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair as two journalistic examples. That part of the article ties nicely into my musings on the difference between reality and fiction, and also brings up some interesting problems.
Specifically, how far is too far? James Frey obviously crosses the line, but what about “reconstructed” dialogue in a memoir? Or what about those scenes that you can’t quite remember exactly, but you think it might have gone something like this? I think answering those questions could take up another post entirely, so I’ll save my thoughts on that for another time.
While blurring the line between reality and truth doesn’t necessarily make a novel or other work metafictional, I think that most metafiction speaks to a sort of reality-within-a-reality, usually for some specific purpose (like to decry war as Vonnegut does in Slaughterhouse-Five). In other words, it creates a layered reality to convey some Truth. In that way at least, the two topics are closely related and create an interesting dialogue.
Falsified memoirs have no place in that dialogue. Although Frey had to add something into his introduction about how parts of the book never happened, it’s still looked at like a memoir, where The Things They Carried never was and is still not, despite its autobiographical content.
In my mind, Frey missed a wonderful opportunity. Had he written autobiographical fiction instead of a “memoir,” he could have used to opportunity to say what he wanted and needed to say about addiction in a much more powerful—and genuine—manner. Same goes for any falsified memoir.
Now, I’m not saying all memoirists should suddenly switch to writing O’Brien-style autobiographical fiction, but I am saying that anyone who wants to play around with reality vs. Truth should read O’Brien, because as of yet I’ve found no more masterfully executed discussions on the topic.
Although Mendelsohn argues that the word “reality” is being degraded by things like reality TV, I think books like O’Brien’s strengthen it. By blurring the line between reality and truth, I think it makes us think about reality in terms of what actually happened and what didn’t—we separate events from how we feel about them, and this allows us to better analyze both the events and feelings, and hopefully grow as people.
Of course, that doesn’t mean memoirists should lie about what happened in their lives.
Journalists think highly of what they do. The average American does not.
In fact, only 29 percent of people believe that journalists report news stories accurately, according to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press’s annual Press Accuracy Rating. Worse, only 18 percent of the American population believes that the news media treats all sides fairly.
It’s no wonder no one cares about the demise of print media—no one thinks it’s any good (plus why pay when it’s all free online?). Newspaper circulation continues to fall, and in October the New York Times reported that it fell 10 percent nationally from 2008.
And, as Chris Anderson points out in his book Free: The Future of a Radical Price, ad space in a printed paper is more valuable than it is online simply because there’s only so much physical space, whereas online space is limitless. So online advertising isn’t really working out for newspapers, either. And we already know that print advertising will die with print newspapers.
With all these problems, what is the future of the Fourth Estate? Will poor-quality amateur blogger-journalists take over as the public’s primary source of news, potentially causing panic and the fall of democracy with faulty, poorly-reported stories (as many journalists fear)?
Will a few media moguls rise to the top and slowly squeeze the life out of the majority of unbiased, struggling newspapers? Or will newspapers find a business model that actually works?
As a journalist, I sincerely hope that the industry finds a viable, profitable way to survive that allows us to maintain the integrity we think so highly of. That is why I think journalists need to start a dialogue with their readers.
Enter metajournalism.
Journalism about journalism is nothing new, but it’s time to explore its potential as a conversational tool and an avenue for revitalization of a dying industry.
Without readers, journalism is pretty much pointless. And with readers quickly losing interest in the media, journalists need to come off their high horse and talk to the people for whom they write.
This should be fairly easy to do—readers can comment on stories at most online newspapers. But journalists, and by extension, editors and publishers, need to take the first step.
Articles like this one from Forbes address the media’s future. So does this one from the New York Times. These are good starts, especially the Forbes article.
While a good start, the news industry will have to take it a step further to find a new business model that works. So, journalists, talk to your readers. Write about what you do, and let the people that are writing your paychecks give you some ideas. I bet they’ve got some good ones.
