Eating the Dinosaur Read online

  [I ask him if the expansion of This American Life to television— and the growth of the TAL brand in the mainstream culture— has made him a less happy person.]

  “Yes.”

  [I ask if he likes the idea of that information eventually appearing in a book. I ask if the public recognition of this realization will make him feel better.]

  “No, I won’t feel better about it. I’ll feel bad about it. But I’m trying to do right by the person who’s interviewing me.”

  4A I don’t agree with Ira Glass. I used to, but I don’t anymore. He makes a valid point, and I certainly understand why he would argue that it’s hypocritical for a journalist to decline answering another reporter’s question; the degree of empathy Glass feels toward rival interviewers indicates that he’s a giving person. But I never feel this way. I don’t feel it’s my obligation to respond to anything, and as a reporter, I never felt anyone else owed me a response. And yet I still provide answers to every question I encounter, even if I don’t know what I should say.

  Sometimes I openly lie.

  This morning, I was interviewed by a reporter from a magazine based in New York. He was asking me about a novel I’d written, specifically about one passage where a character says something negative about human nature. The reporter said to me, “This character sounds exactly like you speaking. That specific sentiment sounds like something you would say.” And he was correct. In this specific instance, the interior thoughts of the character were an exact reflection of my personal thoughts about the world at large. The reporter was totally right. But I refuted his suggestion. “No, that’s not true,” I said. “I don’t feel that way at all.”

  Now, why did I do this?

  When I wrote those words on my computer, my goal was for every reader to come to the same conclusion that this reporter did. My intention was that people would read this sentence and instantly recognize that the character was a proxy for my own worldview and that this narrative device would allow me to directly write about the way I felt. But I didn’t want to admit that. I didn’t want to say, “Yes, this is how I feel.” I just wanted people to suspect that this was true. So when I was asked if this sentence represented who I was, I said no. In other words, I gave an answer that completely undercut my own artistic intentions— and if asked this same question again, I would repeat the behavior. I feel no compulsion to do right by the people who interview me. In fact, I sometimes want to do wrong, even if the only person who suffers is myself.

  3A How skeptical are you about the things people tell you during interviews?

  Errol Morris: I’m skeptical about everything I hear. But I’m not in the business of deciding what is or isn’t true, or in figuring out which accounts are accurate and which are inaccurate. I’m in the business of creating a story, and that is something different. When I did The Thin Blue Line,5 there were all these separate first-person interviews that I eventually stitched together into one story line. I found all these so-called eyewitnesses who had testified at the trial, and I interviewed them one by one by one. I was principally interested in two questions. The first was: How reliable was their testimony in this capital murder case? The second was: Who in the hell is this person that I am talking to? If you have this presumption that every person sees the world in a different way, how do you capture that? What you’re trying to do with any interview is abstract the way a person sees the world.

  What’s more interesting to you: someone who lies consciously, someone who lies unconsciously, or someone who tells a relatively mundane version of the truth?

  EM: Conscious mendacity! Actually, that’s a very difficult question. The whole idea of lying as it applies to personhood is an important problem. I’ll give you an example: I read a piece about modern forms of lie detection—methods that go beyond the polygraph. The writer’s idea was that we can actually record activity inside the brain that proves who is or who isn’t lying. It suggests that the brain is some kind of ‘reality recorder’ and that we know when we are lying. But I think those kinds of lies represent a very small piece of the pie. I think the larger sect of liars are people who think they are telling the truth, but who really have no idea what the truth is. So the deeper question is, what’s more important: narrative consistency or truth? I think we’re always trying to create a consistent narrative for ourselves. I think truth always takes a backseat to narrative. Truth has to sit at the back of the bus.

  That’s interesting, but I disagree. I think truth tends to usurp narrative every single time. If it turned out that even one person in your nonfiction film Vernon, Florida had been a hired actor, your entire career would be called into question. Or look at someone like James Frey6: Here was a guy who wrote a book that everyone seemed to appreciate as a narrative construction—but the moment they realized it was fake, his talent as a stylist no longer mattered. The perception of its value was dependent on the veracity of the story.

  EM: When you talk about a James Frey–type of situation, you’re talking about a person who has been outed. That was more like, “We caught you! We caught you! And we as a society are going to make you pay for deceiving us!” But that’s an egregious example. Most lying is just an accepted part of the world … if you don’t want to know something, can you not know it? Can you convince yourself that you don’t know it? Can you actually not know it, in some real sense? Can you form a barrier to knowing things?

  Probably. But doesn’t that change when a conversation becomes “an interview”? Does the import of the truth change when the situation is specifically designed for the purposes of truth finding?

  EM: That’s a crazy idea. Why does an interview change anything? Have I sworn to tell the truth? Have I put my hand on a Bible?

  No, but the difference is distribution. If you were to make a film about me, I’m not just talking to you. I’m talking to a public audience.

  EM: But what if you have no idea what the truth is? What if you’re convinced that your lies are what really happened?

  I wouldn’t classify that as lying. I’d classify that as being wrong.

  EM: I’m a great believer in self-deception. If you asked me what makes the world go round, I would say self-deception. Self-deception allows us to create a consistent narrative for ourselves that we actually believe. I’m not saying that the truth doesn’t matter. It does. But self-deception is how we survive. I remember this crazy-ass journalist from Dallas who once interviewed me, and he asked if I Mirandized my documentary subjects before putting them on film. I was like, “What?” I should read my interview subjects their Miranda rights because their words might be used in the court of public opinion?

  Well, that is crazy. But tell me this—have you ever been in a situation where you were interviewing someone, and you knew the subject did not understand the consequences of what they were saying?

  EM: All the time!

  Is there an ethical problem with that?

  EM: Is there an ethical problem with the possibility of people not knowing what they’re saying? Or with why they’re saying it?

  No, a problem in the sense that a subject might not realize that this interview is going to galvanize how she’s perceived. Or a problem in the sense that someone might be talking to you without realizing the consequence of what he’s saying.

  EM: Well, it’s possible you’re assigning too much importance to yourself. [sarcastically] “Do these people not realize that this interview is going to transform how they are seen by others? Do they not realize it will transform how they see themselves?” If people were entirely reasonable, they would avoid all interviews, all the time. But they don’t.

  And why don’t they?

  EM: Because perhaps something interesting will transpire. They think, “Maybe this person will present me in a way that will be interesting. Maybe this person will present me in a way that I would like to be seen.”

  4B During most of the 1980s and much of the ’90s, Prince declined almost every interview request he received. On those
rare occasions he granted an interview, he always made a curious demand: The reporter could not use a tape recorder or take written notes. The reporter just had to memorize whatever Prince happened to be saying that day. At the time, it was assumed that Prince did this because he was beavershit crazy and always wanted to be in a position to retract whatever was written about him. However, his real motive was more reasonable and (kind of) brilliant: He wanted to force the reporter to reflect only the sense of the conversation, as opposed to the specific phrases he elected to use. He was not concerned about being misquoted; he was concerned about being quoted accurately. Prince believed that he could represent himself better as an abstraction—his words could not be taken out of context if there was no context. He could only be presented as the sum total of whatever was said, devoid of specifics.

  Do I grant interviews because I want to be presented in a way that will be interesting? Maybe. Except that the things that would be most interesting to other people might be potentially humiliating to me. Do I want to be presented in a way that I would like to be seen? Of course, but “the way I would like to be seen” would almost certainly be an inaccurate, delusional depiction of who I actually am. It strikes me that the two objectives mentioned by Morris are inherently contradictory: Presenting a subject in an interesting way inevitably means said subject is unable to control how that perception will be received. The interviewee is not able to compose the way they want to be seen. Here again, it becomes easy to see the media savvy of Prince. By making it impossible to quote him directly, he was able to satisfy both of Morris’s contradictory desires—he would always come across as interesting (in that the reporter would be forced to essentially fictionalize a narrative from a conversation that was almost impossible to reference), but he’d still be presented in the way he wanted to be seen (which is to say, enigmatically).

  It was a good idea.

  5 “If a question is interesting, it is very difficult to resist answering it, because you will usually find your own answer interesting to yourself. If you have any ego at all, or a desire to share your experience and thought processes, then you may also imagine your answer will be of interest to other people.” This is Chris Heath talking (or, more accurately, this is Chris Heath writing—I posed my questions to him via e-mail). Heath7 has done hundreds of deep celebrity profiles for GQ and Rolling Stone, first emerging as a journalistic superstar during that brief, bizarre stretch of the middle nineties when Details was the most interesting magazine in America. “But that lure and appeal would quickly break down in a real conversation without a second factor: the person asking the question must be interested in hearing the answer. There’s no single bigger reason why people answer questions. Here, of course, lies the biggest difference between a successful interviewer and an unsuccessful one: the successful one makes the interviewee feel as though he or she is interested in the answers. The unsuccessful interviewer—and I have sat in or listened to enough interviews to know, unfortunately, and disappointingly, how common they are—does not.”

  Taken at face value, Heath’s analysis is obvious, undeniable, and Glass-like—it’s hard to resist talking to someone who cares about what you are saying. It’s a seductive experience, even if you’re simply sitting next to someone at a dinner party who happens to be an especially intriguing bozo. But there’s a difference between being listened to by a stranger at a party and being listened to by Chris Heath, and everyone understands what that difference is: No matter how captivating Heath may seem, the conversation is happening for a practical, nonpersonal purpose. The banter may be pleasurable, but you’re not bantering for pleasure.

  Unless, of course, giving interviews to reporters is the closest you ever come to the kind of day-to-day dialogue normal people have all the time—and that’s often the case for the super-famous. One of the underappreciated complexities to success is that it makes every interpersonal conversation unbalanced; I assume the only people Jennifer Aniston can comfortably talk with about her career problems are Courteney Cox and Lisa Kudrow (to anyone else, her problems would seem like bragging). In all likelihood, interviews are the only situations when a woman like Aniston can openly talk about the central issues occupying her mind.

  “I detect that there’s a prevalent notion in the media that it’s next to impossible to interestingly interview a celebrity, because they do so many interviews that they’re drained and leeched dry of any interest or motivation,” writes Heath. “I have a feeling that the opposite is more often true. Celebrities do so many short, pointless, bad interviews—weeks of talking in which it must be impossible to maintain the delusion that one is being understood or accurately depicted in any way—that when they find themselves in a conversation in which, maybe subconsciously, they feel the possibility of being somewhat understood, and that the reality of their life will be somewhat realistically portrayed, the interview may begin to feel less like wasted time and more like an antidote to all that other wasted time. And so when asked a good question, they’ll answer.”

  But how does this apply to normal people? How does this affect people who didn’t marry Brad Pitt or popularize a type of haircut?

  “It’s an uncomfortable leap, but this question led me to consider how different (or similar) that motivation is to people’s desire to appear on Jerry Springer–type shows or in various reality TV situations,” Heath continued. “We are used to the idea of giving witness to one’s life as an important and noble counterpoint to being unheard, especially when applied to people in certain disadvantaged, oppressed or unacceptable situations. But in a slightly more pathological way, I’m not sure that we aren’t seeing the emergence of a society in which almost everyone who isn’t famous considers themselves cruelly and unfairly unheard. As though being famous, and the subject of wide attention, is considered to be a fulfilled human being’s natural state—and so, as a corollary, the cruelly unheard millions are perpetually primed and fired up to answer any and all questions in order to redress this awful imbalance.”

  There’s a lot of truth in that last bit. I fear that most contemporary people are answering questions not because they’re flattered by the attention; they’re answering questions because they feel as though they deserve to be asked. About everything. Their opinions are special, so they are entitled to a public forum. Their voice is supposed to be heard, lest their life become empty.

  This, in one paragraph (minus technology), explains the rise of New Media.

  4C Because this essay will appear in a book that I will have to promote through the media, reporters who interview me will ask questions about this essay. They will ask if I have come to understand why I (or anyone else) answer interview questions. I will initially say, “No.” But I will still guess at the explanation, and my verbalized guess will go something like this: People answer questions because it feels stranger to do the opposite. And the next time I interview someone, I will try to remember this.

  3B How different were your conversations with Robert McNamara when you weren’t filming him? Is he a different person when he’s not on camera? Are you a different person when you’re not interviewing or being interviewed?

  Errol Morris: That’s a whole set of questions. One of the things that really interests me is that filming people for a movie has become very crazy. I usually have a crew of thirty people in the studio. That created a big question during the making of The Thin Blue Line—can you really investigate something with a camera? Are you able to hear something you would normally miss in a normal conversation? Are people going to disclose something to a camera with a bunch of strangers in the room? The self-serving answer for someone in my position is, of course, “Yes.” I think that you can. I think something strange happens when you put a person in a formal interview setting and they realize they are expected to talk. They do talk. But why do people submit themselves to this? That’s more complex. It’s crazy. I mean, why am I talking to you right now?

  That’s precisely what I’m trying to figure out. With
someone like McNamara, I can imagine a motive—he’s a historic figure, and his identity is built around his life’s work and the consequence of that work. But what about those people you interviewed in that First Person series for the Independent Film Channel? Those were nonfamous private citizens. Publicity got them nothing. There was a person you interviewed in an episode of First Person —Rick Rosner8—whose personal story was that he purposely repeated his senior year in high school several times and then lost on the game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. For him, what is the value of being interviewed?

  EM: Well, Rick Rosner now tells other people that if they want to understand him, they should watch that one-hour program about his life that I made.

  Why do you think he feels that way?

  EM: I can’t speak for Rick Rosner, but I can kind of imagine why he would like it. I imagine that he is a pretty complicated character who doesn’t understand himself that well. He’s in the grip of all this stuff that he cannot control. So the interview allows him to scrutinize himself in a different way. There are two ways to look at this. There are two different models. The first model is that we all have this black box inside ourselves that is filled with our secrets, and we would never want to allow any interviewer to open that box. But the second model is that even we don’t know what’s inside that black box, and being interviewed allows us to open it and sort through the contents.