Now is the Time to Revisit “A Completely Cool, Multipurpose Movie”

“What do cars have to do with books, you might ask?”

David Byrne has been a pop icon for quite some time now.  He’s most notably a fabulous musician.  Over the past year, he’s been touring the country to promote the album Everything that Happens will Happen Today, his recent collaboration with Brian Eno.

Think back and you’ll find that Byrne is very much a long-term, multipurpose human, an avant-garde writer, artist and director.  We mustn’t forget about Byrne’s most important contribution to 80s cinema, True Stories.  Check out Byrne on the Celebrity Friends application for more information on the many artistic Byrne projects that have transpired over the years.  You’ll be surprised by his range, his silliness, his genius.. and his oversized suit-wearing capabilities.

And perhaps now is the time to take a look back at the classics.  Vintage Byrne is still vital film entertainment.  The 80s Byrne classic True Stories, dubbed “A Completely Cool, Multipurpose Movie” is as relevant now as it ever was.  You’ll marvel at the music (the time-warp, the familiarity, the awesome karaoke prospects of “Wild Wild Life”).  Queue it up, and feast on the delicious pop fanatic dream world of Virgil, Texas.  Take a tour with Byrne as your guide.  The Talking Heads provide the score.

True Stories was originally released in 1986.  It was written by Byrne, Stephen Tobolowsky, Beth Henley, and directed by Byrne.  Supposedly inspired by grocery store tabloid headlines, the film follows Byrne as he drives through small-town Texas in a big red car, expressionless face shadowed under the rim of a giant cowboy hat.  His voice is monotone, soothing, coolly enamored with the wide expanse of middle American nothingness. He enters Texas like a kid riding a red blur in slow-mo.  His narrative spans the drag for stray thoughts, subtly, slyly illuminated in some marginal reality, similar to ours, but slightly askew and neatly off the cuff.

Byrne takes to the road littered with strip malls, voodoo love shacks, karaoke-infused “wild lives,” evangelistic pop imagery.  A “green” family is outfitted in leaves for a mall fashion show.  The town’s local gossip-gal speaks earnestly about her tail, her alien abductions, and her fling with the real Rambo.  John Goodman is looking for love.  Spalding Gray works magic with a spinning lobster, and a sassy Swoosie Kurtz is fed by robots because she never leaves her bed. This of course, is just the prelude to another Talking Heads song. 

The iconic image of an 80s Byrne in a big suit is strangely representative of the feeling of True Stories.  The landscape is muted, ill-suited to reality, larger-than-life, shrouded in song, magical.  Nowadays, it’s essential that we ask the important questions, and if you’ve ever wondered why you run out of Kleenex, paper towels and toilet paper at the same time and considered a possible nation-wide conspiracy, Byrne may just have the answer.  Or perhaps he just asks the same questions, but he does it in harmony with full choir accompaniment.