My first comment is that I totally understand the town’s frustration with 20/20. A similar incident happened with one of my students who killed her husband. She thought they were going to do a profile on her so people could understand better where she was coming from. More how she was not a threat to society, not how she was innocent. Then she was railroaded. They did a follow up interview a year later that was just going to be a five minute segment showing where she was. I advised her to use I much more. She would usually say, well, when someone yells at you, you get scared and don’t know what you are doing. In the second interview she said, I was scared, I thought he was going to kill me, I protected my soon. 20/20 did not air the follow-up. That was tangential.
But it does bring me to one of my main thoughts about the play and that was the obvious agenda that the writers were completely unwilling to stray from. Even the first little segment was completely unfair. Some cowboy comes out from the hospital and doesn’t want to be interviewed. That is obviously set up to show how much of a struggle it was for them to get people to talk, but the cowboy is given no context because they have no context. There’s a reason a lot of cowboys chose to be cowboys: cows don’t talk. To portray the man’s silence as anything other than a personal choice to not have his privacy invaded is taking the moment out of context and further their agenda which is the big problem they had with everyone who expressed any other opinion. The other moment where the agenda becomes very obvious is in the interview with McKinney. Greg keeps pushing him to say that they went after Matthew because Matthew was gay. Greg keeps acknowledging that it had something to do with the murder since it made him seem weak but that was obviously not enough for Greg. McKinney comes across as a completely unreliable person who has racist tendencies and is pretty overtly a psychopath. Why should his interviews ten years ago be held as completely trustworthy while the interviews he has been given in the past few years be totally false?
The problem is not with the play or the message. The problem is with the methodology. Instead of trying so hard to get McKinney to admit that he attacked Matthew because he was gay, the interviewer should have asked him why he didn’t remember anything from those months and weeks around the murder. That would have set up a great metaphor in comparison with the townspeople who are starting to believe that the murder was not a “hate crime” (which is a term I have a problem with but that is a different tangent). As time goes on, both the town’s and McKinney’s memory changes and fades and restructures. McKinney knows he’s not getting out of prison, he willingly admits that he has a problem with homosexuals, he gains nothing by changing his story when he tells it ten years later. I really liked the interviews with the folklorist who said that people want to control their story and their history. That’s a great statement and very true, but the writers apparently see no irony in the fact that they are writing another play about this incident and complaining about the way people of the town are structuring the story. The writers and interviewers are doing the exact same thing. They have a story that they have now become part of with the first play and the movie. They want to control that story and make sure their version is the one that survives. So they go about controlling the methodology and the tone to make sure their audience agrees. Part of that goes along with the controlling nature of the narrative. From a Foucauldian angle, narrative sets up the structure of its own use and makes sure that no one who takes part in the narrative can venture out of the structure. Even taking an opposing angle to the narrative, keeps the person within its control. Again, that becomes another tangent.
Cannon:
ReplyDeleteI appreciate your candid comments about the play and the methodology adopted by the company members who interviewed the residents of Laramie. Most of what I wanted to say in response to you blog, I said in class.
However, I did want to mention that while the idea of controlling memory or history is equally applicable to the townsfolk as it is to Tectonic, the motivation of documentary theatre should also be taken into account. Sarah pointed out in her blog post that the destruction of the fence is emblematic of the town's attempt to disavow the incident. The harm that can cause is evident in the repeated history of hate crimes in the nation. Tectonic's attmept is to contribute to the history of violence faced by LGBTQI populations as well as resistance to that violence.
Enjoyed reading your post, Cannon. We've touched upon this some in class, but everything has a purpose, an aim, a persuasive element, even if only to inform. To inform is to say that this information is more important than other information, in a way. There is bias, always already, in everything. That's the nature of language, that's the language of new media. That's the language of all mediation--bias. It's not possible to produce any documentary or project without bias. Now, given that, some bias is more overt than others, more ethical than others, more reasonable than others. Tapping into the folklore is a way to temper bias. If we share a mythology, we have a sort of enthymemic syllogistic form of accepted reasoning that we can build on, providing the appearance of less bias.
ReplyDeleteI read the McKinney interview completely differently than you do. I don't think Greg was trying to push Aaron into anything that he hadn't already said before. Aaron opened the door to it when he boasted about being the poster child for hate-crimes. Revisionist history is happening all the time. For example, I saw a play in the Czech Republic last summer that dealt with a piece of their history no one wants to talk about. The play was about a woman whose entire family was sold out by the townspeople not because they were Jews, but because they weren't Czechs. After the war, the woman tries to reclaim her family's property, but is chased off by the new government, who have taken over all property of Germans. Years later, after the fall of Communism, the woman once again tries to reclaim her property and all of the ugly history surrounding the incident comes out. While not a documentary work, per se, the piece still has a powerful impact as far as social justice theatre. When we went to Thereseienstadt, we heard the story of how Germans in the Czech Republic were rounded up after the war, locked into cells, and once typhoid broke out, left to die. Even now there is a group of Germans from the former Sudentenland who are working to get the Czech government to acknowledge what happened after the war. The Czech government is very strongly refusing. And so it goes on. Where does it stop? How do we stop it? Those are questions I think Tectonic is bringing to the audience in the two plays about Laramie.
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