Middle America may well be making a comeback through the medium of mainstream movies and fashionable urban ways after more than two decades of being shunned - virtually scorned - by the country's cultural elite. One tangible sign of something of a return to traditional values has been the current interest in regional food from the South and the Southwest served in restaurants decorated like truckstop cafes. Another, and a rather more significant one, is the film, True Stories, by Talking Heads' David Byrne. The film sets out to rediscover, in its own highly individual way, the Great Lost Majority.
Byrne is dealing with, as he puts it, "people who seem to have found some kind of ethical center. They might be floundering around a little bit, but it's a noble kind of floundering." David Byrne has made a whole career out of being unpredictable. He is, in fact, as unpredictable, well, as only an intellectual rock star with the widest possible range of interests turned serious can be.
Even in the punk context of Byrne's earliest club performances in the Seventies, his songs written for his group The Talking Heads were already considered as too eclectic and simply too melodious to fit into any passing concept of New Wave or No Wave.
Avant-Garde Legacy
Byrne might be said to have found his latest persona when he composed the score for choreographer Twyla Tharp's The Catherine Wheel. From the world of the dance avant-garde, he took a sense of minimal effect, observed how props could be used in inventive ways, and found the freedom to act uninhibitedly silly if need be. The 1984 national tour of Talking Heads matched the foreboding quality of his early lyrics but added a vivid stage imagery. That particular tour was filmed by Jonathan Demme as Stop Making Sense and propelled him into the mainstream. Later that same year, Demme cast Byrne in a non-singing role in How to Survive the Family Tree, an hour-long film yet to be telecast by PBS. Still in 1984, people fortunate enough to be in and around Minneapolis attended the first production of the Knee Plays, a three-hour interlude in theater artist Robert Wilson's ongoing theatrical marathon the CIVIL warS. Byrne had written a richly referential score for it, which is performed on stage. Byrne's music combines elements ranging from New Orleans marches to early jazz to gospel songs to passages sounding like a glorious amalgam of Richard Wagner, John Philip Sousa, and Charles Ives. An inevitable cross-pollination was underway. The two men currently have several joint works in various stages of development.
Shortly after the production of the Knee Plays, Byrne turned to film directing. First, he experimented by directing two of his own music videos, then he made the feature length True Stories, which was distributed by Warner Brothers. The film was released to enthusiastic reviews. Byrne himself was featured in nearly every national American magazine, winding upon the cover of Time, the ultimate accolade in its own way for an artist.
"If you can think if it, if you can imagine it, it exists somewhere," says Byrne, in his introduction to the published screenplay of True Stories, written by himself together with Stephen Tobolowsky and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Beth Henley. He had created Virgil, Texas, the scene of True Stories,
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