Every mourner encounters a well-intentioned person who says,
“I’m sorry for your loss. At least you’ll always have your memories.”
I would like to give this person the benefit of the doubt that they only mean this as a facile platitude, but in fact, it is one of the cruelest things to say. Memories, when you are lucky enough to have pieced them together somehow, fade. They are ephemeral. They change and shift and sway and disappear. What is meant to be a comfort merely serves as a reminder of the new reality of a lifelong stream of micro-losses.
Loss. Grasping. Striving to understand. Sarah Polley captured memory better than any work I’ve ever encountered in “Stories We Tell.”
Ostensibly, the film is about her quest to find out if the father who raised her is her biological dad. But, as the title suggests, it’s about memory and family and how we manufacture ways to get through the day. It’s so honest. In detailing life’s messiness, it holds a mirror up to the viewer to examine our own lives. I also love how she never holds this mirror up to herself, even as the story centers on her very existence. This closeness and distance is something I also feel and I loved seeing her so skillfully and analytically handle the storytelling.
This film hit me hard. I didn’t expect it to. All of those perspective-changing works about memory and grief, from “A Year of Magical Thinking” to “The Tree of Life,” have left me cold. Sometimes I can see a flicker of recognition, some fleeting experience or thought that feels true to me. But that’s the best I’ve ever encountered. Honestly, I have been sort of encouraged by this dearth of depth. It’s kept my hubris alive. If even these talented folks can’t speak a truth that I see (and I know others must experience too), maybe there’s something still left to be uncovered? Maybe I could be the (a) person to uncover it.
But now, Sarah Polley has shown that it is possible to reveal some of these truths. And now I have a new inspiration. How can I work through the feelings this film has dredged up? How can I construct some concrete amalgamation of memory? How can I create a work that speaks to an audience, but also serves as a tremendous gift to the people I hold most dear?
Polley’s film is this incredible love letter to her father. Its saga lead to her father beginning to write again, a hope that her mother long held for him. His is one of the first stories in the film that, to me, demonstrated how adroitly Polley was able to portray the slippery role of memory.
He tells the story of seeing his wife sanding furniture in their garage. She had just undergone treatment for cancer and, it turned out, was weeks from death. He points to the story as an example of how sudden his wife’s death was. “Who sands furniture in their last weeks on earth?”
The narration does not answer.
The camera sits.
The audience is left to construct our own answer.
Who? A woman who has taken care of other people for her entire adult life and wants to have things as tidy as possible before she goes. That’s who. It makes perfect sense. But even decades later, he doesn’t see that. He can’t. It doesn’t fit the narrative that got him through that trying time. But Polley doesn’t lecture her father or badger him into understanding her perception of “how things really were.” She lets each of her and her mother’s loved ones speak, and lets juxtaposition and inference and humor do the work that interrogation cannot.
I’m in awe of how she gave her mother’s story that space. The contradictory and celebratory memories of her mother all sit together. Resisting the urge to remember the person as X single, fill-in-the-blank thing is hard. It kills me when people do that to my sister. Even knowing that it is natural, it stings. Polley is able to create a beautiful arrangement of memories of her mother.
For me, in the single instance, each individual aside about my sister feels like an erasure. An oversimplification. A time when the story loses a little bit more of the nuance that made her who she was. And, of course, part of that is borne out of anger and frustration at her absence. I want to know what she would be like now. I want to know what she would think are the most important features of her life. I want to know her. I want to know her, and not just my imperfect, every-day-more-out-of-date approximation of her. I want to know how to honor her in the way that isn’t just some self-indulgent, exhibitionist claptrap, but that captures her enthusiasm for social justice and creativity and candor.
But I also want to know how to define myself and my life in the positive. Not just in contrast to what’s missing. What I miss.
Polley closes the film by allowing both of her fathers to give their take on what it means to form and share one’s story. You can sense aspects of both of their explanations in her filmmaking approach, but without having to say a single word about it herself, it’s easy to tell whose perspective fundamentally shaped her own. It’s a deft move. It’s a kind conclusion in its love and care and clarity and confidence. It sets nature and nurture, the road traveled and the road left behind side by side. To sit. Together. And be. It’s breathtaking. It’s her. I love it.
Somehow my initial drafts of this post didn’t mention my own (deceased) father. In my unpacking of memory, I chose to leave a neatly packed, dusty box alone. But, wow, the road not traveled. I had an offhand conversation with my friend, clarifying the chronology of my early life while watching the pilot of “Switched at Birth,” which is very self consciously about the road not traveled. And I realized that within that was the conclusion I was struggling for. An immutable sense of self. A self. An entity. A personally defined, ongoing evolution of memory. It exists. It’s there, no matter the upbringing and intervening events. It’s nurtured and neutered and neglected. I can’t help but wrestle with a million “what ifs.” I know I’m still there, but where and how else might I be?
Implicit throughout Polley’s film is this “what if” struggle. The distance and dissonance between and within all of us, but also the capacity for reflection and connection within this infuriatingly fallible medium of memory. Polley was able to create that space for herself, her family, her viewers. I can only hope to be able to do the same.
Last modified on August 7, 2013
