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.And not just to other people, but to themselves.Just yesterday, I was being interviewed by a reporter from the New York Observer, and we were talking about whether or not people have privileged access to their own minds.Privileged access?EM: My mind resides somewhere inside of myself.That being the case, one would assume I have privileged access to it.In theory, I should be able to ask myself questions and get different answers than I would from other people, such as you.But I’m not sure we truly have privileged access to our own minds.I don’t think we have any idea who we are.I think we’re engaged in a constant battle to figure out who we are.I sometimes think of interviews as some oddball human relationship that’s taking place in a laboratory setting.I often feel like a primatologist.Do you feel like you know the people that you interview? Because I feel as though I never do.It seems like a totally fake relationship.EM: I don’t feel like I know myself, let alone the people I interview.I might actually know the people I interview better than I know myself.A friend of mine once said that you can never trust a person who doesn’t talk much, because how else do you know what they’re thinking? Just by the act of being willing to talk about oneself, the person is revealing something about who they are.But what is the talker’s motive? Why did you decide to talk to the New York Observer? Why are you talking to me right now?EM: Well, okay.Let’s use the example of Robert McNamara.2 Why does McNamara feel the need to talk to me—or to anyone—at this point in his life? Because there’s a very strong human desire to do so.It might be to get approval from someone, even if that person is just me.It might even be to get a sense of condemnation from people.Maybe it’s just programmed into us as people.McNamara also had this weird “approach-avoidance” thing: He agreed to do the interview because he assumed I was part of the promotion of his [then new] book.3 I called him around the same time his book was coming out, and he thought it was just part of that whole deal.When he realized it was not, he became apprehensive and said he didn’t think he was going to do it.But then he did, and it went on for well over a year.In fact, I continued to interview him for a long time after that movie was finished, just because I found it very interesting.But why did McNamara keep talking?EM: He said he enjoyed talking to me.That was his explanation.2A While working for newspapers during the 1990s, I imagined that being interviewed by other reporters would be fun.I assumed answering questions would be easier than asking them.This proved completely untrue.The process of being interviewed is much more stressful than the process of interrogating someone.If you make a mistake while you’re interviewing someone else, there is no penalty (beyond the fact that it will be harder to write a complete story).But if you make a mistake while being interviewed—if you admit something you’d prefer to keep secret, or if you flippantly answer a legitimately serious question, or if you thoughtlessly disparage a peer you barely know, or if you answer the phone while on drugs—that mistake will inevitably become the focus of whatever is written.As a reporter, you live for those anecdotal mistakes.Mistakes are how you isolate hidden truths.But as a person, anecdotal mistakes define the experience of being misunderstood; anecdotal mistakes are used to make metaphors that explain the motives of a person who is sort of like you, but not really.4 “The people who come on This American Life have often never heard of our show, or have never even heard of NPR, so they have no idea what the conversation is going to be.It’s very abstract.And we’re on the frontier of doing journalism that’s so personal, no normal journalist would even consider it.That’s part of it.It’s hard to resist whenever someone really wants to listen to you.That’s a very rare thing in most of our lives.I’m a pretty talky person who deals with lots of sensitive people every single day, but if someone really listens to me and cares about what I say for ten minutes in the course of a day—that’s a lot.Some days that doesn’t happen at all.”[These are the words of Ira Glass, host of This American Life, the tent-pole program for most National Public Radio stations.It was later turned into a television show for Showtime.Glass has an immediately recognizable interviewing style: amicable, intellectual, nerdy, and sincere.]“Sometimes I will be talking to journalism students and they will ask how I get people to open up to me, and the answer is that I’m legitimately curious about what those people are saying.I honestly care about the stories they are telling.That’s a force that talks to the deepest part of us.There is something that happens during therapy when the therapy session is going well: If someone is talking to a therapist about something unresolved—something they don’t understand—and they suddenly start talking about it, it just flows out in this highly narrative, highly detailed form.Most people are not articulate about everything in their life, but they are articulate about the things they’re still figuring out.”[What makes Glass and TAL successful is the instantaneously emotive quality of the work—the stories told on the show are typically minor moments in people’s lives, but they hinge on how those seemingly minor moments are transformative.The smallest human details are amplified to demonstrate realizations about what it means to feel profound things.I ask Glass why his interview subjects trust him, particularly since their stories will inevitably be used on a radio show, mostly for the entertainment of people they’ll never meet.]“They can tell by my questions that I’m really, really interested and really, really thinking about what they’re saying, in a way that only happens in nature when you’re falling in love with someone.When else does that experience happen? If you’re falling in love with someone, you have conversations where you’re truly revealing yourself.I think small intimacy that doesn’t extend beyond a single conversation is still intimacy.Even if the basis behind that conversation is purely commercial, there can be moments of real connection with another person.In an interview, we have the apparatus of what generates intimacy—asking someone to bare himself or herself [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]