What do you do when your source … well, stops cooperating?
Although the ethics of a story is quite important, it’s worth noting the things that “S-Town” gets right. A lot of it is story mechanics. Here are my favorite examples:
1. Brian Reed’s narration. It’s halting, non-judgmental and he frames the story using a clock and time to tie this story together. (John B. was, among many things, a clockmaker.) Reed’s level delivery throughout, mixed with John’s own words, along with snippets of the various characters here, creates layer after layer of just straight up good story. Reed’s metronomic delivery and McLemore’s freewheeling observations frame this story out well. One such piece of audio that sticks with you is John’s rant against this upcoming generation, which ends with the line: “Mr. Putin, do us a favor and drop a bomb on us.” A little too close to home to laugh about, right? But it looks like John knew some things the rest of us didn’t know yet.
2. Reed encounters Tyler, who was a good friend to John, and he is actively pursuing this gold and fortune John is claimed to have had hidden on his property. He also meets Rita, John’s cousin who swoops in from nowhere when John dies to take over the property, which puts she and Tyler at odds. Both claim to genuinely love John, but both are also looking into this gold situation. (Listen. You don’t claim moral high ground and then want to remove the potentially gold nipple rings from a man’s dead body. Like, what. WHAT.) Anyway, in the last episode, Reed tells Tyler that he probably shouldn’t tell him if he finds anything. Tyler is trespassing on private property — whatever he finds, it’s a crime that he was there. Tyler acknowledges this, saying he’s worried he had already said too much, and then Reed says that Tyler asked to go off the record, and they do. And you never hear about it again. Great touch.
3. Uncle Jimmy. He’s Tyler’s uncle with the brain damage. I feel like if you want to figure out what happened, just let him blurt. Is it just coincidence that whenever Tyler talks about John B., the cousin keeps blurting “Money!” in the background? I think not! Just sayin’.
4. It’s a good social commentary, too. Reed, a New York City-dweller and one half of an interracial marriage, interviews Ken, of KKK Construction. It’s named for he and his sons, whose names all begin with K. Or does it? Reed inquires and Ken, well, he responds: “You must be one of those left-wing liberals we upset in the last election,” he says in a satisfied tone. Incidentally, when I heard this, it made me wonder if this was the Civil War all over again – in the minds of some, anyway.
At some point, that’s the question the producers and reporter involved with “S-town” had to tackle. It’s their resolution that gives me some unease. It’s hard to recommend this podcast, because I have questions about this very point. I was telling my husband about it, and at first, I said, “Yeah, it’s a great story, but I just …” and then finally, after five minutes, I said, “Maybe you shouldn’t listen to it. He had already walked away at that point. Anyway,
SPOILERS BELOW.
“S-Town” is a podcast from the creators of “Serial,” and introduces (to me, anyway) Brian Reed, a reporter who is contacted by John B. McLemore, who hates his small town of Woodstock, Ala., so much that he calls it S-Town. That doesn’t mean “small-town,” either. So Reed, despite never finding any record about this death, not even an obit, decides to go down and met McLemore, probably because he is a super eccentric dude. Anyway, it turns out the murder never happened, and once Reed reveals this — near the end of the first episode, I was disappointed. Great, I thought, so now we’re changing the story plot in the middle of the story. This never ends well!
However, it was a pleasure to listen to this podcast. It’s like a novel, a beautifully crafted story that needs to be digested. It just so happens I had just finished reading “We Were the Mulvaneys” by Joyce Carol Oates, which is similar to “S-Town” in that it is a sweeping piece of literature that goes in so many unexpected places and still manages to stick the landing. But still, the narration and delivery was so beautiful that it manages to take you through discovering that there is no murder, to finding out that there was instead a suicide — John B.’s — to a tale of potentially buried treasure, to fighting among friends and family about that treasure to questions about whether it was really a suicide to a deep dive into John B.’s struggles to find love as a gay man in the South and ending right at the beginning, literally where he was born, and farther back than that.
So great story, great subject, great production, culturally and socially relevant — all A’s so far. I was OK with this story even after I found out John B. was dead. I wasn’t OK when Reed starts delving into John’s personal life — seeking out friends and potential lovers, including one guy whose wife is lingering nearby. I don’t care if he’s unidentified. It’s too far. John B. McLemore is/was not a public figure.
So what do you do when your source is no longer available to you? There’s no murder, and it’s unclear what exactly Reed was going to do with that non-story before McLemore’s suicide. And a quick aside on the murder issue. Am I the only one who thinks it’s a bit odd that a reporter, having found no evidence of a murder (and there would be something. There would be an obit. A parent wondering where his child is. Something.) just jumps on a plane on the word of a man with no evidence? In podcast-time, it seemed to take Brian less than an episode to figure out there was no murder. John was a pretty smart guy and he probably could have done that, too. I think there is a decent chance that John knew there was no murder and I’m going to guess that Brian had at least an idea. But what’s the motivation for John? Just to make a new friend? To get his own name out there? That seems unlikely, but this murder story was a non-story so fast that this doesn’t make sense. But anyway. End of aside.
But Reed and his producers decided to push ahead with the life of this man, and they did it well. It just doesn’t pass the ethical smell test. Reed didn’t have McLemore’s permission to go find out who he was sleeping with, or to pick at the scabs of old friendships that went bad for him. It’s good story, but do we need to know it? Do we need to pursue the corners of a dead man’s life to understand life in the South? Did we need that aspect to understand the brilliance, compassion and complication that was John B.? It was more fascinating to understand that he had helped establish the very town he hated and also about his own family origin. So, you could stick with that — the overview of who he was, with the aid of friends, family and some of his writings.
The other option is to drop the story. Or make it one episode on “This American Life.” In traditional media, there’s almost no doubt that an editor would have told Reed to reconsider. She would have asked him, “OK, what’s your story?” Reed would have likely said, “Well, he’s sorta weird …” But that’s traditional media. This is podcasting. It’s a brave new world. The makers of “S-Town” are pitching this as the novelization of podcasting. That would be great, except for one small detail. Novels are fiction pieces. Making a real person’s life a novel is a problem because he’s real, no matter how pretty it sounds. You cross quite a line when you, the reporter, decide for yourself what’s appropriate property to cover when a dead man is unable to push back. “S-town” is a fine body of work on the surface, but I hope it’s not replicated the way “Serial” was.