Editor’s Note: The following contains spoilers for the film, Vengeance.
B.J. Novak’s directorial debutVengeancesees storytelling as the lifeblood of America. The idea that everyone has a story to tell is true but tired, a theory that has been affirmed many times over. But as the possibility of interconnectivity increases, the dream that others might actually listen to what you have to say inches closer to the chance to grasp the megaphone. Novak doesn’t dismiss these dreamers as delusional, nor does he uphold them as commendable. It is human nature to want to be heard, and no incentive or deterrent will alter that. Instead,Vengeancerattles around and spits out near unsolvable enigmas about storytelling, not giving the audience any solutions to its questions but providing them with conundrums to consider after the credits roll.Vengeance’s plot and the characters that shoulder it progress in ways that highlight many rifts between the ideology and reality of storytelling.
Most of the characters inVengeancewant to tell their own stories. Novak’s Ben Manalowitz, however, is not one of them. He is a hollow shell of a person, someone who is content with his tendency to drift in and out of life without leaving any footprints. Instead, what theNew Yorkerwriter (notNew York Magazine, as he repeatedly attempts to clarify) turned podcaster wants is a story to tell. He doesn’t have a story of his own, but his success as a writer has given him the impression, a correct impression at that, that people will listen to him if he can just find something to say.
Ben’s hollowness is out in full force when one night he receives a phone call informing him that a girl he hooked up with some time ago, Abilene Shaw (Lio Tipton), is dead. Her family was led to believe that the two had a substantial relationship, and they request that he travel to their rural Texas town for the funeral. Ben’s first reaction is one of hesitancy rather than compassion. Abilene was just a pit stop in his life, one of the aforementioned moments that he prefers to let slide off his conscience rather than assign it any value.
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Even when Ben does decide to fly out to Abilene’s service, it’s out of perceived obligation rather than respect or concern. It’s not so much a cruel attitude as it is the product of a cruel philosophy. Although he will eventually see her as a missed connection, an anchor that could have tethered him to something worthwhile, she is initially the byproduct of a lifestyle he doesn’t yet see the holes in. Her only importance in Ben’s eyes comes when her brother Ty (Boyd Holbrook) says her name in association with the word “story.”
Ty suggests that Ben stay with the Shaw family and help them find Abilene’s murderer, a person they claim exists based on a gut feeling that butts heads with the official cause of death labeled as a drug overdose. Ben sees lightning in a bottle when Ty implies that a story could be molded out of the impending DIY investigation, so he sticks around to turn what he sees as carnival-esque into a something he can present to the world he knows. As he probes the tiny Texas town and the people who inhabit it, he finds that Abilene was also one of the dreamers who wished to have her voice heard, her storytelling vice being music. When scrolling thorough the text conversations he had with her, Ben comes across numerous songs that she sent him the links to, asking him to give them a listen. Of course he did not, and we can see the regret in his eyes as he continues scanning the messages on his phone.
The only reason he initially became interested in her story was because he could use it for himself, and only when it’s too late does he realize that she offered something worth listening to. There was cynicism in Ben’s way of thinking, but he wasn’t the only one in that state of mind. Abilene used Ben in a story of her own, just as willing to write the writer off as inconsequential aside from his function as a fictional boyfriend for her family to latch onto. As the film unfolds, the most conflicted characters are the ones who want their stories to be heard, but are so enamored with their own voice that they end up completely ignoring the stories of everyone else. How can your story be heard in a sea of so many others? How can you listen to all the stories that deserve to heard, especially when you feel the need to write your own? It’s a paradoxical cycle of human interaction, where voices that deserve attentive ears inevitably end up getting lost in the wind.
The character with the most insight into the way humans listen to each other isAshton Kutcher’s Quinten Sellers, a beguiling northerner hoping to mine the stories of these unheard Texans through his sore thumb of a music studio. He correctly identifies Ben as someone who listens to what he calls “playlist music,” a never-ending list of songs tailored to specific tastes. It’s an endless loop of reaffirmation that plays the songs Ben knows he likes but never challenges him with a voice that could show him something new, something that someone like Abilene could have given him. His sojourn with the Shaw family is the first time Ben’s upper-class liberal life in New York has taken him to Texas, and the first time he’s ever considered that such different people might offer an interesting take on life that he can’t derive from aggravatingly trite conversations at rooftop parties withJohn Mayer.
The types of stories Ben wants to tell are ones that try to find universal truths, fables that convey some sort of cosmic interpretation of the world that nobody else had considered. And while that notion is stale, it’s a concept that checks out. For someone like Ben, whose life unfurled in a way that made him much more interested in the philosophical than the tangible, the types of stories that would interest him are the ones that place his understanding of the world in conversation with everyone else’s. They are also the type of stories the fanbase he’s established wants to hear. He’s become the playlist, repeating the same types of stories about the same types of people, feeding an audience who is more interested in being satisfied than engaged.
The people he meets in Texas don’t have the same aspirations with their stories. They are more interested in telling their own reality, conveying the stories that define who they are. Stories like the history of Texas, the magic of Whataburger, the boy from their town who’s the quarterback at Texas Tech. They aren’t particularly interesting stories, especially to Ben, but the people telling them are more engaging than anyone he’s ever met. The only reason he was finally able to truly hear the tales these Texans had to tell was because he couldn’t sculpt their narratives to fit his own. His unanticipated interest in the stories of others forces him to reckon with his own storytelling practices. How can a story’s message connect to the whole world when the people who live in it are so different? And if you tell the stories of the idiosyncratic, how can you make the people who don’t function on the same wavelength tune in? Ben realizes that the stories of the people he had previously written off as dull are the only ones that he can extract something meaningful from, but they’re the exact tales that get excluded as the playlist plays on and on without ever shuffling.
As Ben gets to know the Texan community he’s decided to tell the story of, and his podcast gains more and more traction with those producing and editing it back home, another debacle begins to ruffle his feathers. The Shaw family progressively opens up to him. They accept him into their house, divulge vulnerabilities, share passions, and interact with Ben in ways that illuminate him to their complexity. But when he speaks with his producer Eloise (Issa Rae) on the phone, he gets the sense that those he’s come to know in the flesh are interpreted by the outsiders as just characters. Eloise is more concerned with how the story plays out than how reality does. The listeners want a story that is streamlined for discussion, resulting in vital aspects of how reality is transpiring being left on the chopping block. It’s vital that everyone has a voice, but it results in listeners superimposing their own opinion onto people they only know through their earbuds. As the discussion will inevitably rage on, the character of each person is diluted into just slices of their existence. Secondhand stories end up carrying more weight than experiences, and the discussion revolves around retelling rather than reality. Stories are the ways people share themselves with the world, but people end up getting diminished by everyone who can only know them as mere impersonations.
It’s pretty clear that Ben Manaolwitz is an autobiographical stand-in in certain aspects (a quick Google search of Novak’s real name should quell any doubts).Vengeancecan get distracted and out of sorts at times, but it always comes back to Novak grappling with these numerous storytelling conundrums that must be plaguing his brain. It’s not always easy to justify the pursuit of self-expression when one truly feels the limit of their influence, as it seems Novak does. He understands how important storytelling is, as well as the dream that you may one day get the world to listen to you, but he finds it hard to rationalize it when the reality isn’t ever as idealistic as one might hope. The asymmetry in which voices end up amplified, the realization of how many stories go unheard, the lack of autonomy you end up having over your own tale. Novak never tries to reassure the audience that the fallacies of storytelling will be just in due time. But maybe by illustrating the complexities of the whole ordeal, he helps us realize that everybody’s story is worth something, even if we don’t feel like we’re the ears it was intended to be heard by.
