True Stories

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🎙️ EPISODE 628: 12.27.22 It's no surprise that one of David Byrne's recent ventures has been the website/project Reasons to Be Cheerful. The musician and artist is almost endlessly if not perpetual optimistic. In the face of such dark times, this is a choice. That is also the one major criticism of this entire m.o.: that it's ever a choice, for most of us anyhow. But this is also conceptually unpacked, to a degree: that the artifice we all build is just that. Fake, phony, manufactured. Everything is to a degree. You will leave True Stories — Byrne's unique and ONLY effort in the world of cinema — feeling good. It's been expertly written, designed and performed to make you feel this way. What you'll have to reckon with yourself is whether or not this feeling is "true" or even real at all.

A title card reveals that this is "A Film About a Bunch of People in Virgil Texas." And that IS true, insomuch as that is the movie's 'plot' in a way. Byrne plays an unnamed, cowboy-hat-wearing stranger who serves as the narrator and seemingly unbiased compass. We see him 'driving' a convertible in front of a green screen on a soundstage, and then we see him driving a convertible on the open roads. This divide is purposeful; the manufactured is just as real and just as beautiful as the natural if you look at it from the right angle.

The film is more cohesive than the "series of vignettes" log line would have you believe. It's buoyed by John Goodman in the role of Louis Fyne, a happy-go-lucky guy just looking for a wife. The long, Talking Heads music video departures are incredibly fun and the tunes are good, but they're also the main reason this doesn't feel like a 'real movie'. But it's all tantamount and part of the act in the end: what even is REAL? And who cares. The sesquicentennial of a single specific state is a good enough reason to throw a party and it's a good enough reason to make a film. As Spalding Gray put it above, we don't know the difference between working and not working anymore. Everything is less about "reason" and more about "results," or at least how, in the face of modernity, if we dig down deep, finding the good in things really is a choice after all.

CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 627 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 629 ⫸

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True Stories (full onscreen title: True Stories: A Film About a Bunch of People in Virgil Texas.) is a 1986 American musical satirical comedy film directed by David Byrne, who stars alongside John Goodman, Swoosie Kurtz, and Spalding Gray. The majority of the film's music is supplied by Talking Heads It was released on October 10, 1986.