Fabula Historia Audio Transcript

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Backstory: Robert and Paul are writing their second script together. The first was made into a successful film and received plenty of financial and critical success. The film was based on their own childhoods. They where neighbors and had very different parents, each with their own sets of challenges. The film plays with the drama of their lives and the feeling that the grass was always greener on the other side of the fence.

For their current project they want something more expansive, something that weaves together all these different stories. Both feel the limitations of their first film. It was so white and middle class and the dramatic elements felt confined to that somewhat secure space. They both want something more expansive and complex. Robert is drawn to expansive stories and is an admirer of Wes Anderson, Robert Altman and Paul Thomas Anderson. He is somewhat impatient though and wants to try for something bigger now with their second project. Paul is more sensitive to the challenges representation, but this leaves him more conflict. Inspired by a greater diversity of artists.

Robert: …but what about a movie like Brokeback Mountain. A Chinese director making a movie written by a white lady about gay cowboys played by straight guys. I don’t think it would be made today, but the world is a better place with that movie in it. With that story being told.

Paul: Yes, you keep bringing that up. It feels like an outlier and I don’t think it helps us figure out what to do next. Unless you are saying you want to do something like that?

Robert: No.. It so complicated. Maybe its fine it wouldn’t be made today. We would get lost in trying to think about who is speaking for who. I am just reaching for something… I want us to grow as writers. I want to put a bigger story in this next movie. We covered the ground around us… literally writing about our houses growing up and the spaces we knew.

Paul: Yes, you say this, but you are still being a bit abstract about it. What story do you want to tell that you feel you can’t? What is it that you feel is off limits?

Robert: I don’t know… like you where telling me about that Cree artist, something Monkman, who paints these massive European style paintings with these wild narratives but then he also does drag. What if we wanted to write a character like that? Are we allowed?

Paul: There is no actual cultural police… don’t be so dramatic.
Robert: I’m a writer. That is, in fact, my job.

Paul: Maybe if we want someone like that then we reach out to someone like that. Bring him to the table. Maybe we can think differently about how to write and maybe something different will come out of it.

Robert: I like what we are able to do together with words. What if it we lost something…

Paul: But what if we gained something… and the story was more complicated and expansive the way you wanted…
Do you remember that movie Dances with Wolves, that white hero Kevin Costner movie set in the civil war? Costner’s character is totally disillusioned by the violence of modernity, lost in the wild of America he encounters a Sioux community and it sets up this whole noble savage narrative… at the center of the story is love though (of course) and Costner falls for the character named Stands with Fist, played by Mary McDonnel. Probably for some fear of having real love across cultural lines they wrote McDonnels character as a white woman raised by Sioux community… such incredible contortions just to avoid interracial kissing! Imagine if they had brought indigenous voices to the writing table on that script and an indigenous actor to that role. What a more complex and interesting story it could have been. This is the thing to me… the world is richer with more stories and more voices so I don’t mind that it pushes us to make sure the right caretaker is there for the right story.

Robert: No one is really going to disagree with you about Dances with Wolves. I don’t want us to write 20th century white hero fiction. I am wondering about this imagined table that we are making places. Can’t something stand in for something else. I mean everything we put on the screen is a fiction. That is the point. It is a representation of a thing not the thing itself. This is what that pipe painting was all about… you know the one of the pipe that says this is not a pipe. I think I would go even further. All images are fictions pointing to other fictions… [pauses] I guess I wonder, maybe, it has tilted to far in one direction? That we are a little too obsessed with who the right caretaker is for a story? Maybe I don’t mean obsessed, but maybe we could just be less precious about it. Can’t stories just be stories…

Paul: We are writers. Stories are precious to us…. And I don’t think stories are ever just stories. There’s an alchelmy of bringing it to life not an abstract void it exists in. It comes from the right ideas taken up by the right person at the right time. Not all stories can be taken up by all people at any time… and in this time maybe people like us can’t just pick whatever story we think is interesting.

Robert: You know I am not saying we should be able to do whatever we want with any story. I think they are precious and that’s why I am feeling stuck here. I worry about the limits we are placing on our imaginations. Shouldn’t we be stretching it and extending it beyond the limits of our own experience and our own specific cultural heritage. I feel there is the narrowing toward the self. Like the only way a story can be told is from a first person perspective… there are more stories but on the whole it feels we might be building less shared worlds.

Paul: But where they ever really shared worlds? Isn’t that a bit of fiction? Writers of the past were building worlds where they decided who got to sit at the table and who got to play the parts…. Maybe what feels like a narrowing is just sharing authorship of actual shared worlds?

Robert: I can see what your saying, but don’t you think there is something here that is important to think about. These feelings can’t just be about lack of control. Culture isn’t some zero sum game. Nobody should have to loose for others to win right?

A server arrives at the table.

Server: do you need anything? (sarcastically) although I am not entirely sure I could get it for you anyway. I am not really a server. I just play this part…

(lingers in this awkward pause and Paul and Robert chuckle)

Server: I heard you talking about Magritte, you know, the pipe painter. He made another pipe painting 40 years after the first one. That first one was called The Treachery of Images… (pauses reflectively) that title… it was like he was mad at the relationship between art and reality. Like it broke his heart. But that other pipe painting he made later, he called it The Two Mysteries. There is a pipe in it but now its on an easel. It’s grounded somehow, but he seems less sure about what is real. Maybe thats what old age does to you… makes you less sure about reality… maybe people aren’t interested in that ‘cause no one ever talks about the other pipe paintings. Just the one that feels so sure there was a betrayal. Betrayal sticks with us. It cuts deeper than a lack of conviction.

End of snippet

You are distracted by something you see in the street. A boisterous group passes by. There are five or 6 young people all carrying signs. You guess they are on the way to a protest of some kind as they carry hand made signs. You can see one that says, “He does not represent us!”

Your attention returns to the table as the server returns. You cannot help but continue to listen in.

AUDIO SNIPPET 2

Server: Can I sit at your table?
Paul: Yes, of course, let me make some space for you.
Robbert: (Apprehensively) It’s not a very big table. It might be a bit awkward.
Server: You’re writers… maybe you can just write a bigger table.
Paul: (A bit embarrassed) I’m sure we can make it work… please… sit
She sits.
Server: You know, I don’t just play the role of your server. I play other roles as well. In another story, I am writing a thesis about art and politics and representation.
Paul: Are we in that story now too?
Robert: Do you want me to change and play another part?
Server: You can stay as you are if you want. I like the role you have been playing.
It’s that I want to tell you more about paintings.
Robert Interrupts
Robert: I’m Robert by the way.
Server: Oh.. Right… but i’m not sure it matters. I think you are just a stand in for an idea. You could have any other old white guy name… like David or Martin… or Paul.
Paul: That’s my name.
Server: Sure. That works.
Robert: What’s your name?
Server: I don’t have one yet. In your story, I haven’t gained enough dimension. I’m just a server, but I want to be more. Right now, I want to tell you about paintings. Because, I heard Paul mention Kent Monkman…
Robert: That was me. I’m Robert.

Server: Sure… Robert here mentioned Kent Monkman and I love his work and I think it is so important. I love what he does with landscape and the stories he puts in those landscape. We think of landscapes as just these pretty places but they are never just that. Back in 18th century England, during all the crazy changes happening around them from industrialization, artists like Thomas Gainsborough painted cows and fields. He was trying to create an image of a quaint farmer England that England could have in its imagination. This was the same in Canada. Those group of seven painters showing wild, untouched, romantic landscapes… this still stands in for what Canada is for many Canadians…even if it’s not how it is or maybe never was. There is the other Indigenous artist, Sonny Assu, a Kwakwaka’wakw from the West Coast. He made this amazing series called Interventions on the Imaginary. He layers all this indigenous sci-fi imagery on top of all these paintings that made up the settler imagination. Even the sympathetic voices of the likes of Emily Carr…

Paul: (Interrupts) You are quiet an interlocutor.

Robert: I am intrigued. You are very passionate about paintings. It’s the way we feel about stories.

Server: Yes, but its the same. That’s what I am trying to say. Everything is always standing in for something else and then placing that stand-in into the imagination of others. Everything is a fiction, a fabrication we are making… like crafting a parliament of representatives to deliberate in your imagination.
A pause.

Server: Although I notice the parliament in this scene is… kind of small. Two middle aged writers. One server with no name yet. Three white characters in a café having a conversation about who gets to speak for who. It’s a bit on the nose, isn’t it?

Paul: (uncomfortable) I mean… we are trying …

Server: It’s not your fault. You’re characters. You say the lines you are given. I’m talking about the one writing this. Ryan, the professor; he wanted there to be an Indigenous artist at this table. He thought about it a lot. Kent Monkman was supposed to be here. Sonny Assu. Someone from A Tribe Called Red. He couldn’t quite figure out how to do it without it feeling… arranged. Like we’d brought them in to make a point.

Robert: So instead…

Server: So instead he wrote me. Someone to call out what’s missing.

Robert: like the depth you’re missing… you don’t even have a name.

Server: Maybe he thinks it makes it easier for those eavesdropping to project their own ideas onto me. I guess they have to decide if this is openness or just another guy writing women without enough detail.

Paul: It would seem to me you have quite a lot of detail. Particularly for someone who just came to take our order.

Server: I know. (Jokingly) It’s surprising what kind of heavy lifting people in the background are doing. Speaking of which, I should get back to my role as a server….

You know you can see Sonny Assu’s work in a little gallery down the street. You should go check it out.

You take the cue from the server. You wander up the street to find the exhibition. You find what you assume is the show. A store front has vinyl lettering across the front. In big bold letters in a serious font is written : Stand In: an exploration of art and the politics of representation. You go through the door. It must have been a clothing chain of some kind in another life.

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