Striptease
So while thinking about narratives, I got to marvelling again about this great TV show called Strip-tease.
Now, I realise that trying to describe a TV programme is about as interesting as telling someone your dreams – that it’s a had-to-be-there kind of experience. But, well… tant pis.
First produced in 1985 by Belgium’s RTBF, then taken over in 1992 by France 3, each episode of Strip-tease is a series of documentaries without commentary (ranging in length from 15 minutes to three whole shows). The crew barges into somebody’s life, follows them around for a week, a month, a year or two, then shows us what they saw. A forerunner to Reality TV, bereft of concocted scenarios – and more likely to star housefraus in cleaning smocks and old men in their undershirts than supple young wannabes.
We’ve seen Belgian members of Parliament on a disastrous visit to North Korea, Legionnaires fighting over their medals, and a man who is building a spacecraft in anticipation of the day that the extra-terrestrials come to fetch him, while his 75-year old mother brings sandwiches to the workshop and gets weepy confessing how much she’ll miss him when he’s gone.
We’ve seen a woman who, fifteen years earlier, had given birth to a daughter who was the fruit of a one-night stand with an American on holiday in France. The past 15 years have been spent feeding off the certainty that he’s big time musician, just waiting for them to come knocking. So the mother has been saving money for a trip to the States, and putting the rest into singing lessons for her daughter.
Then they’re off to the old US of A to track the man down, giddy with the knowledge that he’s going to make the girl a star.
Through cheap motels and sleazy bars, she follows up leads that have long gone cold, and every night spoons her daughter sequined dreams of bright lights and fortune. In rare moment alone, the daughter confesses that she’d really just like to meet him. That’s all.
One month later, and he’s nowhere to be found. The sole high point is the owner of a sleazy nightclub who takes pity on them and, on their last evening in town, allows the daughter – for whom the spell is now fully broken – to mount the stage and sing off tune to the scattering of sloshed down and out patrons, now talking a little louder. Her mother trembles at the thrill of it, and hoots between sobs of pride. The next day they head back to France, mater vowing to begin saving for their return trip.
And here (in French only), slightly less of a wallop but very very funny: a man face to face with his very first computer, his know-it-all friend, cranky mother and the bliss of French customer service.
So what I like most about these short invasions of privacy is their construction, their seemingly artless pace. While there is occasionally a whiff of bathetic, in most cases they are careful not to ridicule their subjects, surprise us with a detail – sometimes only a look or a gesture – that brings them fully to life, elicits compassion and wipes that smirk off your face.
They are perfect narratives, and tell us more about human nature (both the watcher and the watched) in 10 short minutes than in many a long-winded tale.
They inform me about how stories that seek to paint reality should go. They begin when the characters have reached a certain crux, a peak or nadir, follow their handling of it and, generally, like with life, end with no clean resolution.
A long snapshot of a moment when all systems were go, and our smooth or inept handling of that moment. Making us wonder whether pivotal moments in our lives, moments that could have changed the entire course of things, have not passed us by because we were too dumb to notice.
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