Good storytelling is essential to the survival of any culture. But are we engaged with good stories as well as we should be?
I remember seeing Good Night, and Good Luck in theaters and feeling the impact of the film's closing speech. Right away, I felt that director George Clooney was doing something interesting with his choice to bookend the film with a real speech from Edward R. Murrow (who the film is about). Was he holding up a mirror to cinema and our culture's view of movies?
To further explore this idea, I thought I'd revisit the movie and create a video essay that offers up my interpretation of what the real lesson of Good Night, and Good Luck is for all of us, storytellers and audience members alike. At the heart of this video essay are essential ideas that inform why I became a storyteller and why I helped create Stories by the River.
Check out this short video essay below and let me know what you think of my interpretation.
While I've written in the past about appropriate forms of escapism, I do feel the weight of Murrow's words and Clooney's apparent call to more thoughtful engagement with cinema. In fact, being more thoughtfully engaged with life in general seems to be the ultimate call to action when combining Murrow's words about television news and Clooney's implications of what cinema is becoming. "Just once in awhile let us exalt the importance of ideas and information," Murrow said.
