Fear and Loathing in Alabama

A picture is worth a thousand words: but Agee will give you those thousand words anyway

The subject is wildly different, and so is the motivation and source of worry and fear, but the manic lyricism and often excruciatingly evocative description of Agee's writing reminded me more than anything of articles I've read by Hunter S. Thompson, working some decades later. Both writers—journalists, in theory—seemed to have their styles emerge out of desperation more than anything else, borne of an inability to maintain the fiction of objective distance, to relate an experience as if from a detached, omniscient perspective, as if they could know all of the events, connections, and motivations, as if the observer could avoid impacting the observed.

Both were concerned with truth and communicating experience, but though their writings bear many similarities, their approaches were radically different. Thompson would blend outrageous and picaresque fictions with actual reporting, (arguably) achieving what director Werner Herzog calls “ecstatic truth”: “Fact creates norms, and truth illumination. . . . There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.” Agee, on the other hand—along with Walker Evans, his partner-photographer—tries not to invent or fictionalize at all: for him, the distinction is not between “fact” and “truth” as different concepts, but is instead one of degree: telling the “truth” means giving every fact; everything he experiences must be included, breaking from journalistic tradition by recording his inner feelings, desires and associations.

Evans' hands-off approach to his photography reflects this as well; the families may do what they want, wash up, pose, anything, not only out of respect for them, his subjects, but for us, his audience. He did not want to deceive the families by taking their photos in secret, but he also did not want to deceive the audience by posing them himself or requiring that they pretend he was not there. In the photographs, the subjects acknowledge the photographer, and so the audience must as well. This is also reflected in how the photos were presented without captions. This demonstrated—as well as could be demonstrated—how Evans and Agee saw those people: looking back at them aware of their presence, with no pithy quip or heart-wrenching slogan dangled beneath them.

The fundamental tie that I see linking Agee's and Evans' work with HST's—and Herzog's documentaries—is that all of them recoiled from the presumption that the documentarians or journalists could somehow separate themselves from their subjects, that their perceptions could be somehow divorced from their own experiences and reactions, and still retain truth.