From The Dusty Pile – True Stories

From The Dusty Pile is a collection of posts about media that has sat on the shelves in our home not watched, listened-to, or read for many years, but have reemerged with some type of reaction (hopefully joy).

Between my junior and senior years in college, I worked an internship at the college theater and took a couple fun, albeit fairly easy, classes. While not immersed in these relatively easy endeavours, there were dozens of ways I found to entertain myself in the desolate, warm college town. Amongst the less remarkable, yet fantastically enjoyable, doings was the discovery of the movie True Stories, a bizarre mockumentary written by the Talking Heads’ David Byrne about a small town, Virgil, Texas, celebrating its sesquicentennial. The film followed the actions of many individuals in this small town, most notably Louis Fyne, played by a young John Goodman, who was searching for a wife in the small town filled with rather peculiar people. I rented the movie every weekend, and many weeknights atop of that, and probably watched it twenty times over the summer, taking in more of the film’s wackiness with each viewing.

While the movie featured a soundtrack of songs from the rapidly diminishing Talking Heads, the real prize of this spectacle was David Byrne’s creative vision given a live action medium for the world. Between Byrne’s 10-gallon hat wearing narration as a visitor to the town where he provided philosophical insights to the human actions around him, the town moved a number of storylines forward with each person traveling down a road paved by their own uniqueness. At some point, everybody laid asphalt for the desperate Louis Fyne until his goal was reached, marrying a sheltered, wealthy lady who never got out of bed (she was so rich, she didn’t have to) after viewing the bachelor perform a heart touching plea for love at a televised local talent show.

For whatever joy or lack thereof that the Talking Heads’ music might have brought anybody to that point in time (I have to say, I was never really a fan until many years later), Byrne used True Stories to show the world that he was simply a step beyond just about everybody when it came to realizing an artistic vision. Mediocre pop songs like “Wild Wild Life” and “Love For Sale” were hardly a fitting soundtrack to the world Byrne created in Virgil, yet they fit the movie perfectly when the time came for their presentation. “Dream Operator” and “City of Dreams” set a remarkable mood for the small town shopping mall fashion show and ending credits respectively, inevitably reawakening the earworms I thought had died nearly twenty years ago.

With a bit of nostalgia, I bought a DVD of True Stories when I found it in a cheap bin a number of years ago. Wiping the dust off of it and putting it into the player after all this time made me laugh nearly as hard as I did while sitting in a crummy little college apartment. The movie is dated with references to emerging yet vague technologies, but it was probably dated even when I first watched it and it was hardly a distraction now. What is undoubtedly not dated is Byrne’s sense of humor; it may never truly be matched again.