AVC: In the film, you guys are on the road for a month. How was everyone able to take that much time off of work?
BT: People bunched together vacation allowances. At least one lady put back a semester at school and took another job and then quit it. So lots of people made adjustments in their lives to take that month off. Did you notice that as the trip west unfolds, that more and more people were joining us? Some people couldn't take the whole month. By the time we got to Disneyland, we had more than 40 voices. We have lots of volunteerism—in that sense, it's like a church. Our legal structure is like a little theater company, nonprofit corporation, but there are surprising resemblances to a traditional church, where people sing in choirs and they rehearse once a week like we do and they don't get paid.
AVC: Is Bill Talen separate from Reverend Billy, or have the lines been blurred?
BT: No, I am Reverend Billy. It's fine, there's no crisis there. Sometimes I say, "I play a character named Reverend Billy," but that's not quite true. That's me.
AVC: So maybe Reverend Billy is just an exaggerated version of you?
BT: Yes, and like anyone, I have exaggerations in other directions as well. But it's a formal appropriation of the costume and gestures of the heart of American religious fundamentalism. So there's a design there, there's a motive in appropriating that character. Back in the San Francisco period when I was experimenting with different approaches, the character was at some distance from me. I thought of myself as a parodist, and now it's become, especially after 9/11, I became more of a pastor. People who were living basically post-religious lives, perhaps had not been in a church or a mosque or a synagogue since they were young, but after 9/11 wanted to have a pastor in the community—I would just listen and make suggestions about coping and just reflect on 9/11, what had happened. At that point, I became Reverend Billy. I became fused with the character. Since then, I've married people, buried people. You're standing there hugging the parents of someone who passed away or something—pastoring is not easy. It's surprisingly powerful.
AVC: Are you ordained?
BT: It's important that Reverend Billy not be ordained. I read these reviews and they say, "Perhaps Reverend Billy is not a Christian, but Christ is speaking through him." It's like, "What?!" I'm not a Christian, but I feel the creative force of life, like we all do. I shy away from committing to a single denomination or a single church; I also shy away from the possibility of fundamentalism. I really don't want to go around acting as if I know the answers to someone's question, "What is life?" I don't know what life is. In the question "What is life?" is my faith—that is my faith. As soon as people say, "My faith is the absolute truth, my faith is the answer to the question 'What is life?'"—that person is a fundamentalist, and that person will eventually hurt someone else. This is a process we really have to look at now, because we live in a Christian nation and we can't seem to stop killing people. That fearfulness is not really looked into in our culture. We don't think enough about that possibility that somehow there's something here that is systemically wrong. So we say we're trying to save Christmas from the "shopocalypse" in this film. As we say in our film, Christmas should shake us up; Christ is supposed to turn everything upside down. I believe that we must be shaken now. I believe that we have to go back to loving that unknown, loving the unanswerable question of life.
AVC: There's a scene in the movie where your wife is clearly losing hope with regard to getting your message across, which presumably happens occasionally. When you start feeling disillusioned, how do you get back on track?
BT: It comes down to gospel music. It comes down to a community of people that love each other and sing well together, and that is a hell of a good idea for an activist. I don't know why more people haven't thought of it, but Savitri and I are lifted along by this singing community. Singing, itself, seems to make them happy. They sing my lyrics, which are not always happy lyrics. [Laughs.] They sing in a happy way, generally—they lift the spirits of the people around them. Certainly they lift mine.
AVC: One of the things discussed in the film is that corporations are killing small-town America, yet it's those residents' decision to shop at Wal-Mart that is putting the mom-and-pop stores out of business. Having traveled across the country, do you really get the sense that there's a possibility for change?
BT: We absolutely feel that there is an international movement against consumerism. People are returning to their towns, people are returning to the main streets in their neighborhoods, they're turning their back on the advertising in great numbers, and we get huge amounts of e-mails indicating this. People are discovering ways to develop local food, local textiles, they're finding a way to make services not involve corporations that are in the distance. The food sector that is growing fastest in the United States is farmers' markets. The reception the film is getting shows to us that we are being carried along in a huge wave, and have a responsibility to people to try to inspire them and go to their communities and help them defend against supermalls. We try to keep information coming through our website, which gets 100,000 hits a day now. It's really warm outside and it's late in the fall—global warming is hitting us really hard; we're still involved in permanent wars around the world; we have murderous police departments, racist police departments. We have all sorts of problems here. You can get hit by hopelessness very easily. But people are affecting change, they feel the possibility of change as we get to the end of the George Bush era—it's in the air. As we say in the church, "Changelujah!"
AVC: At the same time, in the film it looked like a lot of your audience members are young, hip kids. Do you feel as though a lot of the time you're preaching to the converted?
BT: "Preaching to the converted" is a cover-up for such a complicated event. For instance, you might have people that agree with you: "Yeah, this is getting out of hand. Consumerism is a totalizing affair that controls our lives. We're buying things, we're in debt, we're standing in line, we're sitting in traffic jams, we're working two jobs." Yeah, people will agree, so maybe they're converted in that sense, but after encountering the activist showpeople, maybe they will do something about it. So the degrees of conversion are critical. What about converting to activism? Right now, we have to all be activists. We are coming out of a long period of time in which we've been slumbering. As the Reverend says: "America: Are you people or are you sheeple?" [Laughs.] That's a Morgan Spurlock line, he wrote that. [Laughs.] I think we're encountering that in our audiences. People are e-mailing us and saying, "I saw you at the performance in Columbus, Ohio, and I am now shedding myself of my extra things on eBay, dropping them off at thrift stores. I'm going through changes here personally and I'm joining the local transportation-alternative groups." We're getting a lot of that. So raising someone that always agrees with you to the point of being an activist is a critical step.
« Previous | 1 | 2
- Comments