by Don Hall

I’ve often said that the scariest thing to ever come out of my mother’s mouth was the declaration “Let’s go on an adventure!”

For my mother an adventure must include a lack of preparation, potential for danger, and a sense of I can’t believe we just survived that! She once decided she wanted to do a charcoal sketching of a gravestone from the grave of one of our Appalachian Baptist fire-and-brimstone preacher ancestors. My dad drove her up into the mountains and they started seeing patches of purple paint on trees and rocks.

Turned out that was the locals’ way of telling outsiders they'd get shot if they trespassed. My dad clutched his pistol the rest of the way.

Mom got her charcoal sketch. I can’t believe we just survived that!

When I was a kid and we lived in Arizona, mom decided we were going on adventure. My little sister, mom, and I loaded up in her brown Gremlin, a bag of sandwiches, some sodas, and all of our swimming gear and headed out for an afternoon at Lake Pleasant.

All was copacetic until she thought she saw a shortcut to the lake. It was not a shortcut. It was simply desert. It started out as a bit of a dirt path that sort of petered out about an hour into the drive. We were driving in the open desert in the vehicle equivalent to a Pinto.

Of course we blew a tire. Of course we didn't have a spare.

Being a melodramatic kid, I went into a full-blown faux-survivalist panic. After a few minutes of wailing about our imminent demise I set out to figure how to get water out of cactus, the thorny testaments to the heartiness of desert foliage fending off my un-callused hands and delivering exactly no water.

This being decades before smartphones, we were stuck. We had no clue where we were in terms of the comforts of civilization and while mom put on a brave face (and occasionally got the giggles at my histrionics) our fate was sealed. Unless someone miraculously drove into the middle of the desert to save us, we were doomed.

And then the miracle occurred. A beat-up red Ford pickup truck coming from the other direction popped up on the horizon. I shrieked in relief; mom flagged the truck down.

We were about a mile from a highway but we couldn't know that. The driver of the pickup was taking a shortcut from the highway.

Here's where the story gets odd. To this day, my mother's version of this adventure and mine are identical. Word for word the same until we get to the driver of the Ford. On my life, I swear it was an older Native American man who stopped, hitched up the Gremlin to his vehicle, and towed us the mile to the highway and on to a gas station. 

My mother will go to her grave insisting it was a family of four Mormons.

What?!

We’ve had family arguments about this story. Both my mother and I are intractable in our insistence of our specific endings of either Native American man or family of Mormons. We both were there. We both can see ourselves in the tale. The endings are as different as could be.

There is conclusive scientific research that demonstrates how the memory of an event subtly changes the actual memory as it is retold. The more you tell the story, the more it transforms into something similar but wholly different in the margins.

If my mother and I can have such divergent differences within a memory of an event we both shared, how many splinters are there in a collective re-telling of a larger event encompassing many more tellers? How many completely incompatible versions of the attacks on New York on September 11, 2001 are there? How many versions that don’t quite line up with one another are there of the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941?

Moving forward and backward in history, if we are to accept (and I do) that our memories are more Silly Putty than Lego Bricks, how much does film, television, books, and social media come into play in the constant morphing of objective truth to the collection of subjective memories and finally commonly accepted reality?

There is conclusive scientific research that demonstrates how the memory of an event subtly changes the actual memory as it is retold.

Back in the olden days when one could watch something horribly incorrect in the political sense without it becoming a ringing endorsement of your personal "brand" or a scathing indictment on who you are as a fellow human, I went to a screening of Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. It was at an esoteric video shop/screening theater on Fullerton Avenue in Chicago called Facets Multimedia and there were six or seven others in attendance. I was the only white person in the room.

Historically, Griffith's opus is significant in several ways. 

First, it was among the earliest epic uses of film. Released in 1915, it was the first blockbuster Hollywood hit. It was the longest and most-profitable film then produced and the most artistically advanced film of its day. It secured both the future of feature-length films and the reception of film as a serious medium.

Second, it was the first modern popular culture example of an artistic achievement attempting to force a certain perspective on the larger culture (the idea that the KKK were the heroes of the Civil War) it was initially released with the title "The Clansmen" and reframed the war, Reconstruction, and white hooded sheets in tandem with lynchings as the preferred story of American history.

Third, while propaganda has been around since men could talk and write, it was the most pervasive use of a medium that communicated on a newfound mass level to promote a horrifying ideology and was embraced by President Woodrow Wilson as a personal favorite.

Following the three-hour screening, there was a sense of discomfort as the lights came back up. My guess at the time it was the other viewers in the room wondering if I, the sole white person in the room, was as offended by the revised perspective the film espoused as the rest in the small cadre. I suppose I wasn't as offended because I wasn't black and I knew what I was getting into when buying my ticket. I can imagine seeing the film without some context would be like a slap in the face.

One of the things I learned doing stage combat around the same time was that a slap in the face never hurt as much as you'd think. It wasn't the pain of the blow but the surprise of it that gave it impact. Going in cold to see the KKK presented as the true patriots wouldn't hurt but the surprise might be a shock.

In a very different way but in the same vein, I remember being the only white face in a crowded theater in Fayetteville, Arkansas at the opening night of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. The looks of inquisition for my reaction to the film from the predominantly black faces followed me out into the lobby and into the parking lot.

I read recently that one of the reasons the scars of that Civil War in America have never fully healed is that we’ve never, as a nation, agreed on a single narrative of why we fought the goddamned thing. The subjectivity of truth in the re-telling of that dark period is confounding and subsequent attempts to force one perspective or the other or multiple angles on the causes of the War of the States has only confused the issue. Thus the recent beheadings of statues glorifying Southern generals and the re-naming parties of public schools to eliminate anyone associated with slavery.

I understand and empathize with this impulse to reverse the whitewash of history from our streets and schools. So much of our literature and symbols in real life have been created with, maybe not a D. W. Griffith subjectivity, a revisionist historical perspective that paints over the ugliest parts of our history to re-tell the narrative and erase those most subjugated by it. I expect over-correction (like the New York Times 1619 Project which casts our history as steeped in nothing but racism and slavery without acknowledging the contributions set apart from those stains) and, after reading that San Francisco schools are eliminating Abraham Lincoln's name, I decided to re-watch Spielberg's Lincoln.

I don't know if it was actually Lincoln or screenwriter Tony Kushner who came up with the following analogy but I found it instructive in the push to reframe the story today.

A compass, I learnt when I was surveying, it'll... it'll point you True North from where you're standing, but it's got no advice about the swamps and deserts and chasms that you'll encounter along the way.

If in pursuit of your destination, you plunge ahead, heedless of obstacles, and achieve nothing more than to sink in a swamp... What's the use of knowing True North?

The film paints the fight for the 13th Amendment as a dark political game, cajoling and persuading the legislators of the day to codify in the Constitution a formal revocation and rebuke to the forced enslavement of other human beings. It also portrays Lincoln as a deeply pragmatic leader. The speech is one he gives to Thaddeus Stevens, a zealous abolitionist, who rightly sees true north but, up to that point, would rather be righteous than successful in abolishing slavery.

Both men are long dead so the question of whether both men would tell the same story, in their re-telling of those pivotal moments leading up to the vote, or if their stories would radically diverge, is wholly academic. That’s where the trappings of art collide with authenticity. This is the version Spielberg and Kushner decided upon and it will be the version millions who watch the film and decide to simply accept it as the one true version.

This is not to say there is no objective truth. It is to suggest that our inability to separate fact from our subjective fictions makes us pretty fucking lousy arbiters of that fact.

On the other hand, we have celebrated author Mark Manson, whose book Everything is F•cked: A Book About Hope is being banned in Russia by Putin because it speaks directly to atrocities committed by Stalin. Putin is looking to re-write Stalin's history. 

There is a big difference between revising a history shown to diminish the effects of overt racists in one country and purging a country’s history of established monstrosities but the mechanism remains the same: reframe the story and tell it enough times that the meaning changes over time. Keep pushing the new narrative (right or wrong) until the soft memory of an entire nation bends to the will of the teller.

That’s all history is, after all. A slew of stories we tell over and over to indoctrinate a sense of national pride. It grows more perilous when those revising the stories weren’t present. The source of the tales becomes less reliable and the reframe more suspect. When the source is a film or video of an event, we feel as though we’ve experienced it but our perspective is entirely subverted by what the camera shows us and the narrative promoted when we watch it.

One of the techniques that Griffith practically invented was the camera’s use to tell the story from his view. Frame things in a certain way, in a certain order, and our very eyes are deceived, our minds accept the deception, and we believe.

In 1950, Akira Kurosawa gave the world the reigning example of individualized subjective point of view. Rashomon shows us three different perspectives on one specific event. The film makes the point so clearly that the term used popularly to label the he said/she said/they said dilemma is a rashomon.

This is not to say there is no objective truth. It is to suggest that our inability to separate fact from our subjective fictions makes us pretty fucking lousy arbiters of that fact. Show me someone absolutely 100% certain of the sort of events they've only seen on an iPhone video moderated by Faceborg and spun by both the media and some random stranger and I'll show you someone deluded and quite probably dead wrong.

Even when we're there to witness events in person we get it wrong so the concept of getting it right through the mediation and manipulation of amateur videographers and activist pushing a narrative is nothing short of lunatic fringe.

Bizarrely, we all know this to be true.

We know that social media is almost entirely unreliable. We know that film is a highly manipulative art form. We know that Robert Downey, Jr. never flew in a suit of armor, that Keanu Reeves is not Neo, that as much as he embodies who I hope Abraham Lincoln was like, Daniel Day Lewis is an actor and couldn't possibly know what the man was actually like in person.

We know this to be true but we need to be right. We need to believe and so we take that leap of faith, that gut level adherence to what makes some sort of sense in the story and run with it. More so, if the fiction supports things we already have chosen to believe in, we are adding it to the arsenal of defenses against any other sort of view of our story.

We know there's more to the story of the Antifa takeover of Seattle. We know there's more to the January 6th breach of the Capitol. We know there are more sides to the story of Michael Brown. We know that with everyone filmed in a Walmart screaming about her right to forego a mask there is something else before and after that moment that may demonize her just a bit less.

We know but we don't care. Context and considering the framing takes too much work. Too much time. In an existence flooded with too much information, too many stories, too much video, too many opinions, it's just fucking easier to settle on the story that suits you and roll with that.

That's why—no matter what my mother says—it was definitely not a family of Mormons and I'll go to my grave with that.