Everything is Story

Here's another "Musing on Editing" where I write about editing, storytelling, and psychology.

I've found that making documentaries is good practice for understanding that there is no reality disconnected from the observer. As documentarians we see this in action all the time in our work, with the potential for crafting disparate stories from the same starting point. We might even create multiple perspectives within the same piece, like "Thin Blue Line."

Chicken or egg, I think this ability to entertain multiple perspectives is a through line amongst the people who make documentaries their life's work. Maybe that's what I like about them so much! Taken to its logical conclusion, we can see how our experience of life is all a story we tell ourselves.

Here's a simple example of that: you come home; there’s stuff strewn all over. It's a mess. Your kids are sitting around doing nothing. They are lazy. They don't respect you as a human being because they've left this huge mess. Where did you go wrong that your kids are such slobs and so inconsiderate? The meanings pile up in our monkey minds.

Those are all stories. The only things you could call objective reality is that there is stuff on the floor in the living room, and your kids are sitting on the couch. Everything else is a story that you're making up.

Even the idea that the house is a mess is just a value judgement. Some people might call it a mess; some people might say, god, your house is amazing. So comfortable and lived in!

If I was making a documentary about your parenting failures, I'd get a lot of footage of all the crap around the house and, you know, the shoes in the hall, and then the kids sitting there playing their video games. I'd frame them just so, and the closeups of the objects would maybe be low angles so they looked big and looming.

And in the edit room, because I'm trying to tell a story about why your kids are slobs, I'd focus on those elements and I'd cut them in a way that would make it seem like a hellscape of domesticity with really scary music and the shoes on the floor and the kids on their devices and playing their video games like zombies.

And you come in and you're like, doesn't anyone care about me? Where did I go wrong? And we've used this landscape of action (the images) to create this whole landscape of consciousness (see my post of last week) that holds the meaning about how your kids are slobs, and there's this other layer of meaning that it's your fault, that it's your husband's fault, or there's something wrong with them or there's something wrong with capitalism, or whatever your story is about why this has happened.

But the only thing that's true is that there's shoes in the middle of the living room (we could even argue about whether that's true!) Everything else is a story.

Seeing that in action every day in the edit room for 25 years has, for me, contributed to a practice of awareness that helps me not get caught up in my own stories. It helps me to see them for what they are, and to try to see reality as empty of meaning. It helps me tease apart the raw information captured by my mind's camera, and the meaning that I'm editing that "footage" into.

Not that I don't still get bummed out sometimes because of some crappy narrative I've got bouncing around in my brain. I try to see the separation between the landscape of action (the footage, the shoes on the floor, the thing someone said, the tendrils of life’s happenings) and the landscape of consciousness which is the meaning I give to it, the frames I choose, the music I set the scene to.

What I love about editing is that journey of taking the raw material of the footage and infusing it with meaning using all the tools of the craft of editing. It's an added bonus that that process reveals to me my mind as a busy editor as well.

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