📰 Inneresting #258 - Only the truth?
What does dramatizing real events do that can't be done with a documentary or the primary sources?
This week's newsletter grows out of a report where Kristin M. Hall talks with the people of Dayton, Tennessee about their play trying to correct the depiction of their town from Inherit the Wind. Using the real court transcripts from the Scopes trial to show the nuance of the arguments, the play shows that the townspeople were not a monolithic, evolution-denying mob.
Larry Jones, who plays William Jennings Bryan in the play, points to how “[Inherit the Wind] was taking creative liberties to make the trial a metaphor for something else captivating the nation’s attention at the time: McCarthyism.”
Aaron Sorkin, discussing The Trial of the Chicago 7, expresses the work of adapting real life as a distinction between journalistic accuracy and the truth of the moment. As an example, he explains how Bobby Seale being bound and gagged in the courtroom as it happened in reality would have undercut the tone of the story and the audience’s focus:
Going back a few hundred years to another courtroom, consider how both Carl Dryer and Robert Bresson used source texts to reconstruct the trial of Joan of Arc.
Jay Jacobson looks at Dreyer’s 1928 silent depiction, which threw out its planned source material and instead hired a historian and built the scenario around exact quotes from the 15th century transcripts. Michael McDunnah takes a deep dive into the film, bringing in the heroine’s history, Dryer’s cinematic technique, and the film’s battle with censors. Jessica Schneider compares Dryer’s film with Robert Bresson’s take on the trial. Both films pulled from the same historical court documents, but produced very different interpretations of the protagonist.
In a case using more recent events, Mike Worby offers a primer on the real-life story behind Compliance. Writer and Director Craig Zobel breaks down a scene and the influence of the Milgram experiments on authority on shaping this story into a disturbingly believable retelling of true events. Ian Buckwalter questions if giving viewers an omniscient, slightly fictionalized version of events is the right way to tackle this story:
Making the viewer privy to all sides does heighten the tension, but it also offers a certain distance. It's too easy to watch what's going on and think, "Well, I would certainly never fall for that trick or do any of these awful things.
I'll leave the last word on this for now to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance:
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Previously on Inneresting…
In case you missed it, last issue’s most clicked link, Joe Bunting offers up examples of 42 different tones of writing voice as a helpful taxonomy.
What else is inneresting?
- Jared Yates Sexton takes Hulk Hogan's death as an opportunity to reflect on why we look to heroes, and what happens when we attach ourselves to frauds and monsters.
- You might look at the Coldplay Kiss Cam memes and laugh, but Arwa Mahdawi wants you to consider that it wouldn't have been possible without the majority of us willingly signing over our privacy to a plethora of tech platforms.
- Nate Rogers asks if Neil Young was digital music’s Cassandra, and the Pono could have been a valued digital media player instead of a Toblerone-shaped punchline:
“But I’ve started to wonder if [….] the strained perception of Pono actually set the conversation back in the mid-2010s, allowing Spotify to get an authoritative hold on the global music ecosystem without any prioritization of sound quality. Given Spotify’s track record of diminishing the value of music in exchange for boosting its omnipresence [….] it seems noteworthy that they have consistently been among the worst major streaming platforms when it comes to audio quality.”
And that’s what’s inneresting this week!
Inneresting is edited by Chris Csont, with contributions from readers like you and the entire Quote-Unquote team.
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🗣 Have ideas for future topics (or just want to say hello)? Reach out to Chris via email at inneresting@johnaugust.com, Bluesky @ccsont.bsky.social, or Mastodon @ccsont@mastodon.art.
