What Remains of Edith Finch Might Just Penetrate Culture.
What Remains of Edith Finch explores the power of narrative in a way I’ve never personally encountered. I’ve read plenty of Gabriel García Márquez, whose work explores the way narrative impacts the lives of people.
I’ve read plenty of Jorge Luis Borges who explores narrative in a literal way by ruminating upon the power of books both as a form and in their function. Borges is the cheeky one of the two.
I’ve read a few Mark Z. Danielewski books which tackle this exploration even more literally that Borges by manipulating the physical layout of the pages to invite the reader into the spatial world of the text.
But What Remains of Edith Finch pushes all these tactics further. What Remains of Edith Finch shows us that narrative can define and manipulate simultaneously, that story isn’t a matter of fact but rather a matter of understanding. And while facts may help us understand, facts alone are weak. Their power comes from how they are presented.
This is why we have lawyers, afterall. This is why we have news anchors. This is why we have documentaries. Facts alone are weak. Facts change nothing. Facts need narrative.
This realization hit me hard recently when listening to an interview on NPR. The subject, Daniel J. Jones, who was the lead investigator for the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program, said the following in defense of a movie called “The Report” with dramatizes the report and its investigation of US government sanctioned torture:
Mary Louise Kelly: What I’m hearing from you sounds like there’s still some unfinished business from where you sit.
Daniel J. Jones: Well, of course it was gratifying to get a portion of this [report] released publicly in December of 2014. And we were front page of newspapers around the world for 24 to 48 hours. But given the news cycle and then it’s gone, and what you really need is narrative and storytelling to penetrate culture. And I hope that this film is a piece of that.
“What you really need is narrative and storytelling to penetrate culture.”
This view, used to justify the existence of this single film, instead justifies every “based on true events,” “based on a real story,” biopic style movie ever created.
While What Remains of Edith Finch might not aim to penetrate culture, its precision is enough to infect and to get me thinking, which who knows, may one day fester enough to spread.
Gross.
