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Related: 75+ Portland Weekend Events, Parties & Free Tickets | February 4-7

Posted by Jeff Guay

True Stories is a surreal sociological musical — or a magical-realist anthropological music video — in which David Byrne floats about a fictional town called Virgil, Texas, wearing a cowboy hat and bolo tie. Byrne, who wrote and directed the film, was artistically ahead of his time with this 1986 cult classic — but hasn't he always been ahead of his time? Here he boldly breaks and expands cinematic convention and stretches the concept of genre to its limits, but to suggest that True Stories is artsy-fartsy indie-film stuff would be like calling

The Talking Heads music ‘esoteric.' In fact, the film is hilarious in a perfectly dead-pan `sort of way, with Byrne playing a mysterious but gregarious visitor to a small Texas town — the kind of place where people wear leisure suits with golf shirts and Velcro-sneakers, a place that operates around its shopping mall and silicon-microchip factory. He speaks mostly to the audience, delivering insights on contemporary American life and dismissing insight just the same. On the subject of highways, for instance, he mentions that "some would call them the cathedrals of our time. Not me." The film also features John Goodman, in one of his first prominent roles, playing Louis Fyne, a kind hearted bachelor looking for love in all the wrong places. In many ways, the film is about people like Louis, trying to find love in a factory or at a karaoke bar, people with real human emotions leading a "scientific lifestyle." As one woman, a gossipy assembly line worker, puts it, "I like a hairy man. Jesus was hairy."

But Byrne is also interested in the transformation of the American landscape. He begins the film with a brief history of Texas — from the time it was covered in water, then populated by dinosaurs, then fought over by Indian tribes, Spanish colonists, Texans and the American government. He sees America as a dynamic, fluid being that is growing and changing, and finds in the fictional town of Virgil a place that embodies the change of the 1980's. He's not necessarily concerned with political or economic transformations, but how the changing social climate affects people's interactions with themselves and with each other. As he strolls through a shopping mall, for instance, he notices that "shopping malls have replaced the town square as the center of many American cities. Shopping itself has become the activity that brings people together. In here, music is always playing. What time is it? No time to look back."

Saturday February 6th @ 7PM
Whitsell Auditorium
1219 SW Park Avenue
Portland, OR 97205