Margot at the Wedding

Margot at the Wedding is a movie I watched while on my vacation. I don't know that I actually enjoyed this movie but I liked a few of the points it made and the way it connects to writing and Truth and connecting to intimate others.

I liked the scene especially well when Margot and her sister Pauline are in a hotel room. Margot who is a writer of books and magazine stories is sitting on the bed with her journal before her writing. Pauline accuses her of writing about her and the situation they are currently in. Apparently in the past Margot has written about Pauline's life and it ended up in tragedy. She rips the journal from Margot's hands and says, "The rights to this are not for sale."

I thought this made some great connections between writing biography, ethnography, autobiography and what are the ethical lines and limitations of writing about people we are intimately connected with. How as researchers should we be committed to ethically representing the people we are working with. I think we must be held to an utmost standard not of portraying accuracy, honesty, and the truth but of being fair, empathetic, and accountable. This means showing care and thinking about the way we
would like to be represented if the research were about us and even better talking about ourselves (the self) in the research so as to make one even more accountable to the process.

This also made me recall a conversation had in my qualitative methods II class about the woman who supposedly wrote a memoir about her life in a gang. It was later found that all of the things she wrote about were fabrications, that she had been dishonest about her past with just about everyone and written a book about it. I would never advocate that this is an ethical position to hold to premeditate fabrications and falsify stories but I also think we have to reconceptualize the Truth. Was it ethical-no but if it helped someone and served a larger purpose might the outcome be worth it? I don't know but these are questions I have to ask. Is the greater good of helping someone, calling people to action/social justice more important than complete and utter honesty which can never actually be achieved anyway? I think it might.

This reminds me of Testimonios written about mainly women in Central and South America. The women in these testimonies reveal their stories about having loved ones disappear in countries facing political turmoil. These women risk their lives to join activist groups in order to stand against the the government in solidarity. The testimonios are mainly written for an American audience so that they will be called to action to ask the U.S. government to send support to stop funding for corrupt governments that harm and torture Central and South American people. These testimonios are calls to action for people in the U.S. to realize what happens in other countries and how the U.S. contributes to these problems. However, what was later found was that the stories in the testimonios were sometimes part of a collective consciousness made because the society's of which these women took part were collective society's so what happened to a neighbor or relative felt like it was directly tied to the woman telling her story to the translator and using it though it were her own tragedy to tell-in a way it was. But is this being dishonest, using a clever strategy, or simply an act of story-telling? It is hard to say but I can't help but think that without these testimonios the words of these women might never be heard and if it can call one person's attentions (and it did because it drew mine)so even if it is not completely factual-it served a greater purpose.

This doesn't mean advocating lies or thinking it is ethical to falsify a complete story but in this sense the author of the gang memoir is villanized for not being truthful but stories like Into the Wild are valorized because they are supposed insights into the truth-but the story serves no purpose but to illustrate a white privileged kid deciding to give it all up to disconnect from society in the wilderness. What good does supposedly piecing his story together do for humanity? What does the attempt to retrace his steps, talk to people he knew, go to the place his body was found? This is not Truth, this is Krakauer's interpretation of truth as he figured it out. And he portrays McCandless as a hero and Krakauer is a hero for finding this uncovered story. Although I liked the movie, I think it failed to focus on the real culprit, mental and social dis-ease. No one knows what McCandless's story really is and the book even if it had been written by him himself would not be the accurate and real story behind his life.

So why do we value some stories, valorize them and glorify the writers and subjects and others we condemn and villianize. I understand the situations and circumstances are different-but not so much that no comparisons can be drawn. In the end I think it comes down to the bodies that are being represented and the narratives being told in each of these types of story. Into the Wild's main character is an upper-class white privileged kid from Virginia or something who goes Emory University and is on a quest "to Find Himself." This is a story I bet a lot of white middle class white men could relate to-not wanting to deal with life, wanting to be free from societal expectations etc and I say men not because women do not feel the same but the manifestations because of society tend to be different. Men are supposed to be removed nature (more feminine characteristic) and primal nature which is no longer socially acceptable o the ultimate release is for them to become in touch with these things. I know these are large sweeping generalizations but being raised by a step father who obviously wished for this life as well as an uncle who is still trying to live it I think it might be somewhat fair. In opposition In Love and Consequence is written by a white woman also middle class but supposedly about herself as a multi-racial Native American and white girl in and out of foster care. This is telling a harrowing tale of interacting with black people and dealing with gang violence. This is an unpleasant story to hear and tell and one that she should have probably prefaced as being a compilation of truth, fiction, and other people's stories but didn't. While the theory might not hold up in court I can't help but think it definitely has something to do with it. I am not on her side but I think things are always more complex then we would like to make them-boil everything down to black and white-Truth and lies. But everything is a representation and interpretation and those are all subjective. We can never get to the truth of experience no matter how hard we try so the point is to maybe think of the bigger picture, the purpose of the work. This is a challenge because most people in this society want real definitive answers or are only open to discourses of the unknown as they relate to Jesus and God. I would hope people would be open to empathy and accountability...I think I will be working on that for awhile


--
MARGOT AT THE WEDDING Trailer