Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Game change

Every experience is refracted by the senses, augmented by past experience and rendered in it’s telling. We rarely get a glimpse of events as they occur. Interpretation happens way to fast. Consequently, even first-hand accounts come mixed with the observers point-of-view. I’ve come to accept this as human nature and just be mindful of the process. 
 I’m reading about the filming of a biography on Sarah Palin. Actress Julianne Moore says “We researched and sourced this as well as we could, but every experience is perceived through somebody’s worldview. You could do a ‘Rashomon’ kind of thing with this story and come out with a different version every single time. Is it the truth? Yeah, but the storyteller’s truth.” Reproducing actual dialogue is another trick. According to Moore: “As important as it was for me to nail down Palin’s great northern accent, with its sing-song musicality, I also had to master the rhythm of her phrasing, which is kind of baroque. She pauses at odd intervals between phrases and sometimes emphasizes prepositions, rather than verb-phrases, like “I need to make a decision” rather than “I need to make a decision.” They depict Palin as a caring mother and an inspiration. Moore said she felt she understood the tremendous stress Palin must have been under serving as governor and the mother of five children, including a pregnant teenage daughter and a son headed to war. “Then she is thrust on the national stage and subsequently asked not to be herself, to do it somebody else's way ..imagine how hard would that be?” Even so, Palin and her team have lambasted the movie as a “sick fiction.”

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