I'm a former journalist myself, and at one time in my checkered past I've also spent twelve years writing history for a living, so I've had a lot of experience evaluating sources, and I'm pretty confident of my own ability to assess their reliability.
Well, then you know that sources are fallible. For example, if you were covering the Bush administration as a journalist, or writing about it as a historian, would you base your conclusions on a quote from Dick Cheney, figuring that as the ultimate insider he must know what he's talking about?
OK, I know that's not a fair comparison, and I really don't want to compare Ang and Larry and Diana to Dick Cheney or imply that they harbor some sort of insidious agenda or are deliberately hiding or bending the truth.
On the contrary, they're honest and well-meaning and sincere and brilliant. And I guess if Ang or Diana or someone made some public statement that dramatically contradicted something I've believed all along -- if they said, "No, the story does not take place in Wyoming, it's actually set in New Jersey" -- it would give me pause. (By the same token, if they found out that a significant portion of the audience assumed the story WAS set in New Jersey -- that is, if lots of people interpreted something far differently from how it was intended -- it should give
them pause. Perhaps they didn't send the message they meant to send. And if some people wind up thinking it is New Jersey and others think it's Wyoming, maybe it's the result of a deliberate decision by the filmmakers to leave certain issues unresolved and allow viewers to draw their own conclusions.)
But my point is that I also know how interviews go, even under the best of circumstances. People are talking off the top of their head, they're spending a minute or two, a sentence or two, under pressure of an interview, describing something they themselves may have given months and months of thought to in making the movie. And those of us here have given months and months of thought to these things. Hell, I spend way more time on a single post -- shaping my thoughts, making sure my words are clear -- than they do in those interview responses. So if I see a quote in movieweb.com or cinemalogue.com, unless it really throws me for a loop and dramatically calls into question everything I thought I once believed, I take it with a grain of salt. Those quotes can be interesting, but I don't regard them as sacred texts.
But in fact, the statements quoted in Diane's links DON'T drastically contradict anything I already thought. Ang says one of the men is less adventurous and goes through self-denial? Well, duh! Diana says Ennis breaks up with Cassie because he realizes it's Jack he truly loves? Um, I guess I always thought that was pretty much the whole point of that pie scene. I might not describe it in exactly those words, but close enough -- whatever minor differences do exist between our descriptions can be chalked up to the factors I was talking about: either the limitations of celebrity interviews, the space that exists between the imaginations of artist and audience, or both.
