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International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology, 9:162–166, 2014

Copyright © The International Association for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology


ISSN: 1555-1024 print / 1940-9141 online
DOI: 10.1080/15551024.2014.884526

Review of “The Stories We Tell”


Joye Weisel-Barth, Ph.D., Psy.D.

Keywords: artifice and authenticity; family secrets; family systems; narrative

B ecause I’m interested in narrative in all its forms and with all its quirks, my
favorite movie this year is Sarah Polley’s The Stories We Tell (2012). Polley is one
helluva storyteller, so good that her apparently simple initial story magically
joins with other stories and then morphs into something that is unexpected, mysterious,
and deeply affecting. While this is ostensibly a documentary, in fact it becomes an act of
imagination, an act of personal resolution and love. The film raises many relevant ques-
tions for psychoanalysts. Where are the lines between facts and creative reconstructions?
When does a recitation of facts or a group of observations become a coherent, created
story? What makes a created story true? Where is “truth”—and who holds it—in the
collective stories we tell? Whose stories get privileged? What is the relationship between
a direct, naive narrative, and a story that is shaped by the creative vision and intellect
of an auteur? These questions, raised in the film, are similar to the questions I ask when
working with a family system.
Watching The Stories We Tell, like working with a family, is a bit like watching an
amoeba in motion and in division: The apparently simple organism does not have a fixed
shape; its boundaries are in constant expansion and contraction; it can envelop other
organisms in a kind of seamless incorporative movement; and it can also divide itself
into multiple organisms. Where exactly is the amoeba? That this film assumes this kind
of sinuous and slippery process and asks these kinds of questions is quite a trick given
that at the outset it seems perfectly straightforward.
At the beginning of the film, Sarah Polley gathers her father, four siblings, and close
family friends to create a memory film about her mother Diane. Twenty years earlier
when Sarah, the baby in the family, was 11, Diane died of cancer. Now as an adult,

Joye Weisel-Barth, Ph.D., Psy.D., is a Senior Instructor, Training Analyst, and Supervisor at the Institute
of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles, and Book Review Editor for the International Journal of
Psychoanalytic Self Psychology.
This article has been NetLinked. Please visit www.iapsp.org/netlink to view or post comments or questions
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Review of “The Stories We Tell” 163

Polley convenes this company presumably to deepen her understanding of her mother.
However unique and attractive the family members, however healthy and pleasant the
family as a whole, and however luminous the mother, the film nevertheless promises to
be a backward-looking piece of nostalgia. As it unfolds, however, and as it reveals family
secrets and deceits and depths of feeling, it creates for the family and for us a rich, new
story filled with surprising understandings and complicated webs of connections.
Even at the beginning, though, it is clear that this is also a film about film-
making. Unlike most documentaries, this one intentionally betrays all the trappings
of movie making—we’re constantly confronting cameras, sets, lights, wires, editing
paraphernalia, and so on—and all the participants exhibit or observe or joke about
their self-consciousness in performing for the camera: “How’s this angle?” “How’re my
breasts?” and the like. A continuing theme in the movie is the persistence of perfor-
mance and artifice in human relations. In the mother Diane we see the pleasures and
defensive functions of a great performer, but in some of the other family members we
witness—through Polley’s “interrogation method”—the pain of reaching underneath
the performance to tap genuine emotion. At the end of the film Polley’s father—who
achieves genuine eloquence in the process of reflectively refashioning his family’s story—
accuses Sarah of being a “vicious director.” She responds, “You told me I had to break
you down.”
There is a clichéd notion that if you ask members of a group about almost any-
thing, you will get many different, contradictory stories. This is the “Rashomon effect.”
Polley immediately upsets this expectation. In the initial telling of the family story
there is mostly consistent agreement among the participants about who Diane was.
Actress, singer, television personality, casting agent, wife, and mom, Diane was a beau-
tiful, vibrant, exuberant, and charismatic woman, an extreme extrovert who charmed
every audience she encountered. So perpetually active and interactive was Diane that
one friend says of her, “She was so out there that she seemed to have nothing inside.”
Living in a cultured but conventional world, Diane challenged conventions and
struggled to maximize her life options. We learn later that she defended against the pain
of losing two children in her first divorce and the disillusionment of a second disappoint-
ing marriage with relentless busyness, casual sex, and also a momentous affair. Michael,
her creatively gifted husband, is introverted, heady, unambitious, and sexually restrained.
He seems depressed in a good-humored, self-effacing, and ironic way, as different from
Diane as a person can be. In the family there is again general agreement that Michael
and Diane made for an unlikely and mostly unsuitable pair.
The older children remember Diane as fun, “the incarnation of pure joy,” and an
energetic caretaker; and her contemporaries view her as full of life, goofy, a “good time
Charley.” Many old super eight movies support the impression of a gorgeous, smiling
woman involved in lots of frenetic activity. There is also agreement that she loved her
children intensely. Whenever there are differences in perspectives among the partici-
pants, they are subtle and nuanced. For example, only one child, Mark, views Diane’s
liveliness as sometimes loud and intrusive; and a few of the commentators also sug-
gest that behind her “razzle dazzle,” “what you see is what you get” spontaneity—which
everyone remarks on—Diane may also have been a woman of secrets.
164 Joye Weisel-Barth

An on-going family joke, meant to poke fun and tease, was that Sarah didn’t look
like her dad and so must have issued from an illicit affair. “Who’s your father?” was the
running dinner table gag. The second retelling of Diane’s story begins with the revelation,
discovered in the process of making the movie, that the joke was true. With the discovery
of Sarah’s paternity, the plot thickens and becomes complex. Whereas Diane is the main
character in the first telling of the family history, there are now several protagonists in this
second story. Everyone is now critically implicated and/or impacted: Harry, the biological
father; Michael, the psychological father; all the children; and, of course, Sarah herself,
who must negotiate a transformation of identity: Startling new personal truths, a brand
new second family, and her unspoken but dramatized—in the film—conflict of being
caught between two fathers. It is at this point that the narrative becomes tangled and
messy and quite fascinating. No longer a simple memory piece about a fixed past, it is
now burdened by discovery, disclosure, and intense and conflicted feelings from many
quarters in real time.
The film begins with old family photos and movies of Diane and all the people
in her world. One feels glad that the family seemed to film every important moment
of its history because the home movies provide verification for and add depth to the
spoken narratives. As the movie moves into its second phase, in addition to lots more
fuzzy movie clips that illustrate the narrative, there are now reenactments of significant
present events. For example, accompanying Sarah’s voice-over narrative, there is a film
clip of her casually meeting her mother’s friend Harry and learning that he is probably
her biological father. It is only on reflection that we realize that the film clip, made with
two cameras, is certainly a restaging of the actual event. Toward the end of the film there
is also a scene, a moment of shock, in which we see Sarah conferring with her “dead
mother.” In that confusing instant we understand that this woman is a fake Diane, an
actress who has played the mother in many of the “home movies.” We then calculate that
at least half of the supposedly old super eight films of Diane are actually reenactments
with actors playing the parts of Diane, Harry, and Michael.
Beyond feeling “had,” the discovery that the documentary has been rigged gen-
erates a complicated understanding. Until this moment I have naively thought that I
was assembling the pieces of the story on my own: that is, as in any good documen-
tary I assumed that facts were organizing my private narrative, leading me to construct
a plausible and coherent and evidence based story. But in an instant I now realize that
Sarah’s intelligence, imagination, and vision has largely shaped my emerging story about
her family. What I know and will take away will not be “the truth;” it will be the truths
that Sarah has provided and shaped for me and that I have accepted.
Suddenly, a latent subplot takes center stage, although it is never explicitly
acknowledged. The subplot involves Sarah’s competing loyalties to Harry and Michael.
After the honeymoon phase with Harry following their great discovery, a time of mutual
excitement and curiosity, Sarah becomes very concerned about and protective of her
father Michael’s feelings. Can he survive knowing of Diane’s affair and of her secrecy
and dishonesty about Sarah’s origins? And what will all this mean for his relationship
with Sarah?
Review of “The Stories We Tell” 165

Because of her concern for Michael, Sarah questions Harry about his wish to pub-
lish his own version of the affair. She argues with him and suggests that his motives are
egoistic and insensitive to her family of origin. And in one clip she shows Harry to be the
most callow character in the film. In that clip Harry claims ownership of the story and
of its truth. His claim seems self centered and niggardly in the context of our growing
acquaintance with the generosity of all the other family members. In contrast to Harry,
while each family member is deeply implicated in and personally affected by the story,
each also holds a wider view of the family in mind and relates to all the others’ experi-
ences with care, empathy, and respect. For example, Johanna tells us with consideration
and concern for her siblings that learning of their mother’s treachery didn’t really affect
the children—except, she says with a dawning awareness and ironic surprise, all the girls
got divorced. Mark, on the other hand, she observes, had a new baby and clung tightly
to his marriage for personal anchorage.
Sarah resolves her conflict between Harry and Michael by choosing Michael and
her first family. Indeed, her choice is at the heart of the big story in the movie. Absent
any explicit narrative, she conveys her choice of Michael through her choices as direc-
tor of the film: Through what she selects and emphasizes, what she skims over, what
she deletes in her organization of material and sequences, and in the final shape of
the film.
Sarah traces the repercussions from the revelation of her birth mainly within her
family system—she closes ranks, so to speak—and in the end she privileges Michael’s
generous, forgiving, and loving story as the most important and informing one in the
film. There are two stunning shots of Sarah at her mixing table, directing Michael and
looking thoughtful as he speaks of his tender but complicated feelings for her. Michael
ends his narrative with the birth of a new Polley and a vision of the family’s continuance
into the future. We never hear the story that Harry has written.
And it is in her choices that Polley expresses the major theme and values of the
film. Important stories are collective and inclusive, she seems to say; they emerge from
one’s family context where each participant has a stake and a say. From the cacophony
of multiple voices and our respective imaginations we shape our experience and fash-
ion our tales. The resulting created stories help us to survive and resolve life’s assaults
and dilemmas; they put into perspective what is salient and what doesn’t matter. And
mutually sharing our stories helps to soften the most brutal of life’s blows.
At the end of the film, in an apparent ironic afterthought, Polley reveals that her
mother had also been casually unfaithful with another man at the time of Sarah’s con-
ception. But by now the revelation has little weight and no sting. Diane’s impulsive acts,
performed in order to make her life work, no longer matter. In the course of the film the
past has settled where it belongs—in the past. Important now are the loving connections
in the present that will extend into the future.
People regulate human difficulties and intense emotions in many different ways:
By digging and planting in the dirt, shooting heroin, making love, writing poetry, racing
cars, or seeing a psychoanalyst. Sara Polley does it by listening to stories, putting her own
gloss on those stories, and cobbling them together dramatically in her movies. In the case
166 Joye Weisel-Barth

of “The Stories We Tell” she tells a wonderful yarn about family secrets, responsibilities,
connections, love, and forgiveness.

Reference
Polley, S. (writer/director). (2012), The Stories We Tell [Motion picture]. Montreal: National Film Board of
Canada.

Joye Weisel-Barth, Ph.D., Psy.D.


4826 Andasol Ave.
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