RP: Interview after an odd morning
Date: 7 August 2005
Characters: Rita Skeeter, Lucy Diggory
Location: Museum
Status: Private
Summary: Rita drops by the museum for the interview she didn't quite get last time.
Completion: Incomplete
( The walk to the museum was strange )
Characters: Rita Skeeter, Lucy Diggory
Location: Museum
Status: Private
Summary: Rita drops by the museum for the interview she didn't quite get last time.
Completion: Incomplete
( The walk to the museum was strange )
She'd wondered if it was going to be difficult to find Lucy Diggory or not. As it happened, it wasn't, but the woman didn't look in any mood to be interrupted.
Well. This was going to be a challenge. She'd have to tread carefully if she wanted to get anything out of this one, especially since the subject of the interview was likely to get her on the defensive.
She approached slowly, but her heels echoed loudly on the floor, so Lucy would certainly know she was coming. She stopped beside the woman, an acceptable distance away and slightly behind, so she could get a good view of the now coloured but as yet unmoving mural.
It was beautiful, in a way, but difficult to look at, as it had been when it was still a sketch. She had to fight down the anger that immediately came forward, at how a woman like this who hadn't even been in England for the war dared to drag up people's pain with such a vivid painting. It wouldn't do to let that take over. Detachment was they key.
"When I'm having trouble with something I've been focussing energy on for a long time, I often find a break beneficial. If you're frustrated with it, maybe taking yourself away for a time will help the solution come to you."
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"Or it will distract me more." But she lowered her wand and brush and waited. It seemed that she wouldn't get out of town without an interview after all.
"What did you want, Rita?"
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Rita almost chuckled. The abruptness was very unSlytherin, but easy enough to deal with. Perhaps living with a Huffle... well, whatever house Amos Diggory had been in had blunted Lucy's edges a bit.
"Well," she said, "I was rather hoping you might have time for a word today. The latest edition of the Prophet is nearly done, but I'd like to have something about this, and you, included in there. It was certainly a topic of controversy on the open night, and we never did get to finish our conversation. Let me buy you lunch, perhaps? The Five Alarm isn't far from here."
Food for conversation was always a good one, although Rita had no idea whether Lucy would take her up on it or not. Either way, the offer usually helped.
This bluntness business was easy, sometimes. At last Lucy didn't dance around the topic at hand like so many other Slytherins Rita knew.
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"And I'm not hungry. But if you'd like a cup of morning tea, I'll tell Cedric to go and do something else for a while and we can use his office. Although if you'd rather ask questions about the mural, that might better be done here."
Setting down the brush, she tucked her wand back in her royal purple robes and waited.
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Rita couldn't help a smile. "Touché. I'm not sure, though, that many of younger ones in town would be entirely aware of your tendency to shock people. Between Hogwarts and the war, I'm not sure they'd have had much time for art appreciation."
Lucy, she noticed, was wearing purple again like she had been on the open night held in her honour. It suited her, and it was nice to see people in town with a bit of a sense of colour.
"There's no need to disturb Cedric," she said. "Here will be fine, if you're happy with it, but perhaps..." She turned. This particular spot would be acceptable, but right before the mural would be fairly in the way if people arrived to look around. There was a spot off to the side that would be less exposed, though, and Rita conjured some chairs. "Here?"
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This was offered, however, in offhand relevance as Lucy was not terribly interested in an argument about the importance of art in the scheme of things. Her attention was half on Rita, half on the problems with waking her painting.
She followed Rita towards the conjured chairs and took one, settling back and waiting, curious as to where the other woman would take this. She had no particular interest in deception, but she preferred to respond rather than to lead in situations like this. She did, however, have a few requirements for interviews. "No Quick Quotes Quill. I don't allow them. You'll do it manually or not at all. And no questions about my personal life. I won't answer. We're here to discuss my art, not me. If I tell you something, you may use it, but don't attempt to trick me out of information I don't give. I've been doing this a long time."
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Rita couldn't help but frown when Lucy named her first term. That would be a bit of a problem. She was already pulling the quill and notebook from her bag. "I'm afraid I don't have any regular ink to to use this with," she said. "But perhaps you don't know how a quick-quotes like this works. They're not standard dictoquill by any means, but they're rather connected to the people that use them. What they write has a lot to do with intention. I don't work in sensationalised journalism any more, and I have no interest in the new Prophet being unreliable, so it won't misconstrue your quotes or make up horrible lies about you." There was no table, but they didn't really need one. The air beside them would do just as well. "I can put it here, though, if you like, so you can see what's being taken down and the notes it's making."
She suspended the notebook with a hover charm, but waited for Lucy's response before setting up the quill. "And of course - I was only expecting to talk to you about your work. I presume work and life intertwine at some point, but it's up to you what you decide to share."
She stopped short of saying that she'd been doing this for a long time as well, and that with two apparently equally matched women like them, it was hardly fair to call good questions trickery. They were both adults and they were both Slytherins - if Rita's reporting techniques proved a match for Lucy's... whatever it was, and she found herself giving away more than she'd intended, then that was skill, not trickery.
She twirled the feather in her hand and waited for the permission she hoped she'd get. Taking notes by hand was awfully tiresome.
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She considered. "All right, you may use the quill so long as I may see what it's recording."
And she waited to see what Rita wanted to know.
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"I didn't own the old Prophet," Rita said. There were several defences she could have made against Lucy's next comment, but some of them were too personal, and the rest were mere excuses. I was a gossip writer, part of the job description is being creative with facts. In the years leading up to the war, the Ministry was virtually in control of editorial. Both statements would have been true, but she didn't want to insult her subject's intelligence before the interview even started. The real truth was that she'd quite enjoyed ripping people apart for entertainment value until her office and home had burned along with her delusion of safety, and that hardly needed to be said.
Once she had permission, she sucked on the end of the quill for a moment before sitting it to hover over the pages of her notebook.
"Well," she said, "Let's start with your intentions in creating the piece. What drove you to want to create it, and what do you hope audiences will get out of it?"
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"Cedric asked," she said in reply to the first question. It was intentionally blunt and deflective. "At the root of it, that is why I came back to do this. My son asked. He thought the wall looked blank, he couldn't afford to commission an artist, so he imposed on his mother." That his mother happened to be an internationally recognized artist didn't need to be stated.
"But I think you want to know why beyond the pragmatic matters." She stopped and looked up at the ceiling, thinking. "As an artist, I paint what draws emotion from me. I lost my father in the first rise of Voldemort, and nearly lost my son in the second. I did lose my home." She thought about some of the objections and accusations that she had fielded at the reception or in the last month since, but decided not to address them. "I know that some would ask, 'What have you lost to speak of this?' or 'What have you suffered?' but it seems to me that when we go down that road of 'my suffering is worse than yours' we will always find somebody whose suffering was worse than ours ... in part because we rarely know the full extent of another's pain if we do not live their lives.
"Other motivations involve a desire to branch out into something new. In the past, I've painted mythic scenes. If we continue to do only what we've done, we never grow as an artist. This represents my first large foray into a non-mythic subject. This seemed appropriate, even if to some it does not. There are cries that it is 'too soon,' but it would always be 'too soon' for someone. This mural" -- she glanced over at it -- "is not about Voldemort, or even about the war. It is about surviving, and remembering. When interpreting wizarding art, one must always consider the final panel.
"As for what audiences get out of it?" She shook her head. "I can't determine that, Rita. No artist can -- nor should. I may tell a story, I may even have a point. But in the end, I do not stand at the shoulder of those viewing it and dictate how they will see, what they will see. The painting is a delicate hermaneutic between the artist and the viewer, none too different from the written word, really." She smiled faintly at Rita. The canvass -- or the text -- always stands between us and our audience. When we release it, we release custody of it. It becomes something beyond us that contains us."
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Rita herself had been one of the people who had thought - or even spoken about, although not to Lucy - the fact that it was very soon, and wondering what the woman had lost. She found she understood losing a home, and the point about whose loss was greater was a good one, but still...
She wouldn't question that first. After all, she wasn't writing this article to answer her own questions but rather to address several of the ones she'd heard since the opening.
"How much did your background in painting mythic scenes come into play when you painted this? Obviously, you've taken a broad approach to the subject of war, even though certain battles are depicted. How important were the factual details of the battles to you? Were you interested in them - did you talk to people who had been involved in them as part of your process - or were you more interested in the way things like battles exist in the minds of people who weren't present, as story and myth?"
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"Yes, I did speak to some who were at the battles, albeit not all of them in person. Cedric, of course, was at Diagon Alley, and another couple fled from Hogsmeade and wound up in Canada.
"But what led to this change from my previous subjects, what interested me in 'modern myths,' if you will, was watching the Muggle reaction to the event of 9/11 -- a terrorist attack on U.S. soil. I'm sure many witches and wizards haven't heard of it as it didn't affect them directly, but neither Canada nor the States are quite like Britain. It's much harder to live separately, and events in the Muggle world bump up constantly against the Wizarding. The Yanks do things differently.
"In any case, what intrigued me was the nearly instantaneous mythologizing of that tragedy. I'm not certain the Brits reacted quite the same to the London Tube bombings last month, but I suspect that owes to the tendency of Americans to exaggerate things. Nonetheless, at the root of it, we're not that different.
"You see, part of the problem -- and I've said this before when talking about my fondness for myth -- is that the term 'myth' itself has been bastardized. When we say something is a 'myth' in common parlance, we mean it's untrue -- a lie. But that isn't, actually, the definition of a myth. Myths are the stories that a culture tells itself about itself. If you want truly to understand a people, don't study their history, study their myths. What happened on 9/11 -- the history -- became less important than what people believed had happened -- the myth. The Tube Bombings may turn out the same.
"Perhaps the best illustration of what I mean are the stories that arose concerning the one U.S. airplane of the hijacked four that did not strike its target but crashed into a field instead. Popular belief is that a select group of passengers on the airplane -- alerted to what was happening by their little electronic devices -- decided to take the plane back from the people who'd hijacked it and chose to crash it rather than to become an instrument of death for greater numbers. It's very noble. It may even be what happened. But all we know for certain is that they were going to try to overwhelm the hijackers. We have no actual idea what happened on that plane. Were they heroes who gave their lives to save others? Or did their attempt fail completely and the plane crashed for other reasons? People want to believe they were heroes, and that belief -- that myth -- has become far more powerful than all the doubts expressed by more cautious sorts.
"It is myth that moves people, Rita. History is a tale in caution. Myth is inspiration -- for good or ill. Yes, technically, myths may be 'untrue' -- or at least unsubstantiated. But in them, you find the things a culture values. In the story of the plane? Courage despite overwhelming odds. Self-sacrifice for the greater good. The refusal to sit back and take something meekly. Those are all values that Americans prize, I've found.
"So when I deal in 'myth,' I'm not interested in untruth, but in meaning. What meaning do we find in things?"
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She spoke well, Rita would certainly give her that. And she made valid points about her intent and process. Rita had heard of the terrorist attacks, of course, both in the Americas and in London, but she didn't know as much about them as Lucy seemed to. Still, she wasn't sure she was entirely comfortable with the way Lucy was speaking about the war in these terms.
"That's an interesting example you've chosen in the plane and the myth surrounding it. That particular story seems to be... very contained, if you will - with no one knowing what really happened. It seems, often, that what defines the most pervasive mythological stories is access of experience, or lackthereof. Voldemort's first defeat, to use an example from our world, and what happened that night. You've chosen to depict that, and it could certainly be called a modern myth, but one could argue that the biggest reason for it becoming one is the fact that people don't actually know what happened there - we know the basics, of course, but not how Potter survived or why, or what happened to Voldemort after the curse backfired. Some of the other scenes, though - the battle of Hogwarts, the destruction of Diagon Alley - how mythological do you think they can become, when so many people were there to witness them?
"My first reaction to seeing the Hogwarts panel was 'that's not how it was', or rather not how it was reported to me by people who had been there. And that seemed a common reaction. Quite a few people who were present at some of the battles you depicted found the images quite confronting; perhaps even romanticising. How much do you think your own distance from the war affected your understanding of the stories as myths? And what would you say to those who accuse the piece of romanticising death?"
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