Is It Time To Re-Evaluate How We Work In This Industry?

Bingeworthy sits down with Jess Shane to discuss her piece on BBC's Lights Out "Accounts and Accountability"

Every now and then, with eyes open, good luck and good fortune, you stumble across something that makes you pause, turn your head slightly sideways, distort your mouth, squint one eye, and then say to yourself: Hmm.

That was my experience after I listened to a recent work by Jess Shane for the BBC’s program Lights Out.

Jess wanted to explore the connection between stories (accounts), what they are worth, and to whom…and then who is accountable for them once these stories are shared.

Her questions sounded a bit academic, so instead, she devised a street-facing way to approach this question.

She wrote an ad, posted it on Craigslist in the media /tv/radio jobs section, and asked the blunt question: Who wants to be the star of a documentary project?

And then she offered to pay the selected participants $50 for their time.

Hundreds responded with interest. Jess followed up with 50 folks and then invited 10 to sit down and share their story (and collect $50 on the way out).

Jess wasn’t in it to dupe anyone into sharing their most dangerous secret and run away with it.

Instead, she opened with a tone that could only be described as radical honesty.

• Did you read the release?

• Do you have any questions?

• If you tell me your story, you need to know that I will own it after.
  Do you still want to tell me your story?

• What do you think will be the effect, or the outcome, of sharing this very personal moment with me?

• What are you hoping to get out of it?

Part experiment, part meta-documentary, part industry gut-check, Accounts and Accountability is ahead of the pace in the world of storytelling, story making and story-curating.

And whether or not you agree with everything here, if you work in this world of storytelling, I’m calling this piece core curriculum.

Because to succeed in the future, as we walk forward into our old landscapes, perform those same old tasks, and do work in the tried and true ways…at some point, some of these practices need to be examined with a decolonial mindset.

Accounts and Accountability is walking on that road, in that direction.

To dive into the heart of all non-fiction storytelling, what lies at the heart of narrative audio storytelling—sitting down with strangers to get them to share their story—I decided to sit down with Jess to learn more about this experiment.

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The following is an excerpt from a sit-down interview with Jess Shane in Toronto. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Samantha Hodder: I listened to your show on BBC Lights Out…tell me where the idea came from. Actually, where did that start?

Jess Shane: I’ve been really interested in the power dynamics between documentary makers and subjects and the ethics of personal stories as commodities for a really long time; I actually have a [new] series coming out [later this year] that sort of deals with similar ideas [on a different network]. This is kind of like the first episode.

Maybe this is spoiler alert, but the first documentary I ever made for the CBC was about a teenage gymnast. I went into this field with this idea that helping people to tell their stories was good for the world, and good for people [and that I could] make a contribution that would be positive for the people involved and could help people change their minds and changing the world through empathy. All the cliches you hear about…

I sent [the show] to the teenager before it came out, she [said] “I hate this; you've betrayed me.”

Someone not liking the documentary you've made about them is not necessarily an ethical conundrum….however, I never really have thought of myself as a journalist. I never went to journalism school. When she [told me that she] didn't like it, it really stopped me in my tracks and made me think: “Okay, well, what am I doing?”

The base medium for so much of my work [are] these experiences that people have had that are often foundational experiences. 

I went on to work in this industry for many years, and at various times I've worked on shows where it really feels like a colonialist project of taking stories from individuals in the context of like where they arise, and then bringing them into a new environment that [in some way] profits me and the network.

Well, what, what about the person? 

And so [my show] Accounts and Accountability sort of was a bit of a tongue in cheek way of investigating some of these questions.

I think that part of the trouble starts because you think that you're entering into some kind of fair exchange, not to mention the fact that the concept of exchange in the first place is like a capitalist, you know, construction that obfuscates violence…

People sign up thinking that they're going to get exposure, that they're going to get therapy, that they're going to be famous, that they're maybe going to, I don't know, have all these myths associated with the joys of telling your story that are the same myths that got me interested in this industry in the first place.

There's a storytelling boom…every marketing [campaign], every product, is being sold through a personal story. And I think that there's a lot of a lot of this mythos is causing people to not really think about think through the dangers.

You get consent on a release form, but it's not really grounded in unpacking those myths. It’s not [meant] to correct anything, right? It’s kind of like uncovering some of the blackheads that are there that we're choosing not to deal with.

SH: So if it's a Mythbusters experience, you're busting the myths of documentary and you're busting it open…which of the myths were confirmed and which of the myths were denied? 

Which were kind of exposed as true and which were perpetrated willingly and knowingly?

JS: Well, I mean, one person did tell me that she felt kind of blindsided and she was like, you know, you might want have wanted to give people a better heads up that this is what you were going to do.

But I did write what I was doing in the in the ad. The [ad] said like: Do you want to be the star of a documentary? Come tell your story for a documentary about the documentary industry.”

SH: Right. And where did you post this ad?

Jess: I posted the ad on Craigslist, and on some casting call pages on Facebook. But mostly on Craigslist.

[The woman who felt blind-sided] said: I guess if you had told me then I wouldn't we wouldn't have been able to have this conversation. She was a sweetheart. She had experienced a lot of violence in her life.

SH: You called it an audition, right? You asked for stories, and then said you'll pay for the story, and you offered them a chance at being a star?

JS: Yeah.

SH: Which is, I guess, going into that psychology of someone who wants to share their story. So what part about that ended up being true? In what part of it confirmed your own bias going in?

JS: Well, I think that all of the things that I thought were true, [the one thing was that] people hadn't thought through what this was going to mean for them and their life. They had certain ideas that were not confirmed at all…certain ideas that they could make a difference in the world through this story without really having a good understanding of where this would go, or how it would work once it was out in the world.

People [were] thinking that it was going to make them make them feel ‘seen,’ or that telling me their story was inherently therapeutic. [Some] people thought that I wanted them to ham it up.

I think like it confirmed my suspicion that [for] the reasons people want to share their stories, and [that they] sign the release form without asking too many questions.

What the process [also] showed me was that if I really wanted to do informed consent this is not how I would do it… that's why this show has a kind of a cheeky premise.

SH: [This story is going to speak to] anyone who's worked in documentary…the release form…that's often my least favorite moment [of production]. You have to put the release form in front of someone and say, okay, are you ready to sign this? Ugh. But you turned that into part of the story. So let's talk about that.

JS: Well, how do you normally do it with a release form? Do you get them to sign the release form first or after?

SH: That's a good question. I think it depends. I've done it both ways. [I’ve also had the experience where] I had done many, many long, long, long interviews, and then I’m still trying to get them to sign the release form because they didn’t sign it right away! So it turns into a discussion and a negotiation. The objective is always to get it first. But that's not always the way it happens, in my experience.

JS: Totally. I think that the release form is fraught and we treat it as protocol. The release form is a way of taking the risk on the documentary maker and the network and putting it onto the subject. 

So any risk that you take on for appearing in my documentary, that's on you, and [yet] we act like you have the choice to sign. But it's kind of like a double bind because the subject loses either way. 

They're giving up a right, and we're acting like it's an agreement.

The notion of exchange [is] inherently fraught because it equates to things through like a legal proceeding that is not necessarily fair or moral. 

If you're having sex, you know, you don't just get consent once. It's like rolling consent, but the release form doesn't work that way.

So, again, this is sort of a performative project [Accounts and Accountability] and I wasn’t trying to answer any questions, I wanted to illustrate that.

I got people to sign the [release] right away. And I said “let me know if you have any questions”…but of course they don’t have any questions. Because they are entering into a dynamic where I have knowledge. 

I will say that a lot of these ideas are totally in debt to my friend Jordan Lord [their film “Shared Resources” at MoMA a few years ago]. They’re an amazing documentary filmmaker and thinker who's in turn indebted to sort of like a long history of disability studies that talks about these ideas of exchange.

Jordan Lord's film [was one of the] most brilliant film I've ever seen.

[It’s] about Jordan's family's relationship with debt; it's about the debt between parents and children, between documentary and subjects; between the debtor and the debtee, and how those situations manifest. 

There's a pivotal part in that film, which is sort of Jordan attempts to get their parents to sign or to work on a basically an anti-release…[they] took a standard release and reversed it.

[They talk about a] contract that says “I am indebted to you, and you are indebted to me, and we are responsible for each other.”

SH: How has the experience of making this documentary changed how you will make documentaries [in the future?]

How you will do interviews with subjects, and how you will craft your stories going forward? 

And I'm thinking specifically about the release right now…this is an interesting idea about the consensual release, but then there’s the law.

I can't even imagine how that would work in the law. So what have you done with the release from this project going forward?

JS: Well, I'm working on a series right now and I can't really talk about what I've done with the release because it's sort of part of the project…so stay tuned  for that series!

But I think that what I have been grappling with within myself is that I don't want to make stories about people's lives like as the center of the of the story anymore. I'm not interested in the personal experience as the framework and foundation for the media products that I create.

SH: So what's the new focus? How do you tell a story that's not a personal story? How do you get people engaged in it?

JS: Well, there's I think there are all sorts of ways. And I think that the construction of story, as we understand it through this lens of the hero's journey: person encounters an obstacle and either overcomes it, or doesn't, is, you know, something that we now understand as ‘natural.’

But as soon as you focus on the personal story, you are prioritizing a person over their environment, feelings over critique, personal over political.

I'm not a journalist. I don't know exactly what this means for me, but I do think that it's important to note that we understand story in the specific way that needs to hook the viewer's attention again, which is very divisive and uses the story and the individual as a way of capturing the attention of the masses.

But a story can take so many forms, [for example] a poem or a collage. There's lots of ways to engage people without the central character.

SH: True, it's convenient. But you know, there's thousands and thousands of years of archetypes building and story to tell us that that works. So it's I think we're at a period of disruption in it for sure, which is interesting.

In this newsletter, I only focus on narrative storytelling, [that are] serialized, told by a person, told by an author. I'll listen to all genres; but it has to be it has to be consequential. It has to be sequential. It has to go somewhere. It has to do something.

So it has to rest on a laurel that keeps people's attention. And most often that's a personal history. It's interesting to think about extracting some other elements of it.

JS: What if an institution is the center? Serial season three [did this]. The main character was the courthouse. I think that's really brilliant. It's [a sort of] systems storytelling concept.

SH: When I think about the different series that I've listened to…the first one I did was Mother Country Radicals. This is the life story of being told of the son of two of the most notable radical student leftists. But he really does this job of telling a personal story that's mixed with a political history

[When I interviewed] Falen Johnson [from the podcast Buffy], I was really struck by how she tells the story of Buffy Sainte-Marie, but she does it in a way that also tells a history. And there's a politic and there's a decolonization that's happening in the middle of the story, because of the way she centered the story.

So maybe you can de-center it. [The story is] about Buffy, but it’s about other things as well.

JS: I have so much to say about this…the “hook” that I used in my story is the same that Falen used in the Buffy series….come for the story…but then, actually once you're there, you're trapped and you're now listening! [I’m going to also tell you] a story about decolonization. Lay the bait!

SH: It's a bait and bait and switch! 

JS: I don’t know if it’s totally a bait and switch, but it doesn't matter. I think that the problem is not inherently the personal story being used as a tool.

The problem I have is when the personal story is the be all, end all, and the person who tells the story has no agency over what happens to that product, how it's used, what the angle is [that’s where the problems can lie]. And I think that a lot of media—as documentary expands—because it's cheaper to make than fiction is. They make the story the be all end all because it’s lazy and it’s cheap.

And so the personal traumas of people's lives become the central meat of the thing. It's like using the emotional roller coaster ride of people's pain as other people's pleasure.

SH: It sounded [in your piece] that a lot of people showed up wanting to talk about “stuff.”

The first [story] early in the show, someone says, “Okay, we're just going to test the mic,” and then he asks the first question: “What did you have for breakfast?” And she answers: “I'm here to talk about a traumatic event.”

And it was like, wow, he was asking if it was Cheerios or Toast? It's almost like the subjects were going in this interview ready to unload [something].

JS: I think that our media landscape has often trained people to think that their trauma is a means of accessing some kind of value.

….

I let them go off a little bit. I kind of like let them do the thing that they had planned.

But then I interrupted it pretty quickly.

Once I got once they got their initial burst of air out of their off their chest or whatever, I was like, okay, well, now we're going to pivot and do what I want to do, which is talk about why, why you're sharing this story.

SH: So you let them share the story and then you came and they shared it X number of minutes. And then you said, okay, now let's talk about why you walked through the door?

Is that where you went with it?

JS: Kind of. I was like, okay, so you've shared the story.

It's in my recorder.

I own it. You signed my release form.

Let's talk about what this means. What are the implications of this? What did you think you were going to get out of this?

And what might you have wanted to know going into it? And what you would have wanted me to know, given what I'm telling you that I know about?