Storytelling

Todd Solondz has an aptitude for making his viewers feel totally uneasy. Aside from his particularly risky topics, Storytelling takes chances. It contains two separate short stories, entitled "Fiction" and "Non-fiction," with no blatantly obvious connections between the two. One correlation is that both parts of the film look at the telling of stories, issues with rape, and most, if not all, of Solondz's characters are facing serious inner demons while struggling to make it in the real world.

Solondz asks a question in both films: what is rape? There are so many definitions of the word; it must be left to interpretation. Some may argue that rape is the act of forcing one to engage in a sexual activity. While this is true, others say that rape can be defined as the violent and destructive treatment of an individual, which does not always include a sexual act. There is no right answer, but either way the word is looked at, both occur in Storytelling. Although there are many disagreements as to what type of rape she faces, Vi, the main character in "Fiction," gets raped in the film. While Vi did consent to having sex with her professor, she did not consent to being treated the way that she was. She was completely demoralized and abused when Mr. Scott demanded her to strip down and bend over. Although the professor never threatened to harm her if she did not do what he wanted her to do, he did psychologically rape her; he took advantage of the fact that she would not want to seem racist and he knew that she would not say no to him. While she did have many opportunities to leave and get out of the situation, Vi probably felt that letting Mr. Scott have his way with her would increase her chances of being dubbed a decent writer. In "Non-fiction," Mikey asks Consuelo, the maid, what rape is. She does not want to frighten him and give him the brutal definition, so she says that it is when "you love someone, but they don't love you back". Mikey, being young and naпve, takes this quite literally and applies it to himself. He believes that his father does not love him and the only way he knows to get somebody to do something that they may not want to do is by hypnotizing them. He does not physically rape his father in a sexual manner, but he does, however, mentally rape him by making him do things that he would not do under normal circumstances.

The first story makes people uncomfortable for many reasons. A white college student has an explicit sexual encounter with her black professor. When Vi turns her experiences into a short story for an English course, the class reacts with responses that Solondz himself has definitely heard about his own work. The story raises many questions: When can we believe what we hear or see? When does an unbelievable story actually hold a hint of truth? Professor Scott says that "Once you start to write something down, it all becomes fiction." While the professor's remark about writing fiction is accurate, it is also completely ironic. For the first time, Vi produces what she believes to be a good piece of work and tells the complete truth, and nobody believes it. Even Mr. Scott, who knows exactly what Vi is talking about, pretends that the story is unbelievable. It is for this reason that many victims of horrible crimes do not come forward and tell their stories; nobody will believe them. We, as humans, have been taught to believe only half of what we hear and all of what we see; however, what if we don't see something happen? The class finds nothing wrong with Marcus's story about something that is obviously not true, but hates Vi's story about something that is brutally honest.

The second half of Storytelling is much less risquй. Scooby, an unmotivated, lazy, loser high school student meets Toby, an adult who has yet to find his purpose in life, who is hoping to make a documentary film about being a teenager. It is obvious that Toby has hit rock bottom and is trying to go