If There’s Truth in Cinema, It’s Sideways

Ilana Masad interviews Katharine Coldiron about her new collection of essays, “Out There in the Dark.”

By Ilana MasadJune 18, 2025

• Memoir & Essay

• Fiction

“I FEEL THAT WE HAVE NOT YET truly reckoned with how entwined with media our (humans’, but especially Americans’) emotional lives became by the end of the 20th century,” writes Katharine Coldiron in the author’s note of her new book, Out There in the Dark. Coldiron’s fifth full-length book is her own approach to such a reckoning. Blending fiction, criticism, and memoir to great effect, Out There explores heady ideas—the nature of truth, the mythologized West, ambition—all while grounding them in the author’s experiences, in film history, and in imagined scenes that give voice to what might have been. In “Charlie Don’t Surf,” Coldiron ties her father’s silence around his wartime service in the navy to the famous napalm monologue in Apocalypse Now (1979), as well as to the bittersweet moment captured in the Pulitzer Prize–winning 1973 photograph Burst of Joy. In “The Girl on the Bike,” she describes the dimension-spanning present in which the actors playing the von Trapp children in The Sound of Music (1965) walk down the stairs of their house again and again and again, never needing to show audiences their actual journey out of Austria. And in “This Father Film,” she explores an alternate history in which Citizen Kane (1941) was directed by Louise Brooks, opening the door to what film would have been like had the medium not cohered around the straight, white, male—and monied—gaze.

Coldiron has a deep and specific knowledge of Hollywood history, of how movies did and do get made, as well as of the language and grammar of film. (She is also blessed with the ability to convey these matters to a layperson like me.) Yet what sets her apart is her intimate understanding—on full display in Out There in the Dark—of how film touches us, how the medium has served as an increasingly vital and prevalent backdrop to modern experience. I spoke to Coldiron over Google Meet in May, while she was wrapping up her time as an artist in residence at Lucid Art Foundation. Our conversation centered on questions about blending fact and fiction, as well as how she copes with loving an art form that requires her, at times, to occupy a lens besides her own.

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ILANA MASAD: Let’s start with the basics—how did this book come to be?

KATHARINE COLDIRON: I started work on it when I was in grad school in the mid-2010s. I had the idea to crash together a couple of different topics and make a braided essay. At the same time, I had been reading John Haskell’s I Am Not Jackson Pollock, which is a collection of stories that fictionalize specific moments in film and cultural history—for instance, he invents a behind-the-scenes moment in [the 1958 Orson Welles film] Touch of Evil. I didn’t know you could do that. And as soon as I learned you could do that, I thought, well, I’ve got to do that.

The first piece that I wrote was “Underside.” I was thinking about the difference between what Kathy Ireland looks like when you see a photograph of her and what she sounds like and what she looks like when she’s walking [whether on-screen or off-]. I was surprised when I heard her voice, very surprised—she sounds like a squeeze toy. (It made me think that maybe God has a scale of some kind on which he balances what gifts are given to people.)

I was thinking about that, and femininity, and also about what people are thinking when they’re making art—even to the point of what they’re thinking when they’re accepting an Oscar. So, I looped in Meryl Streep [in a scene where she’s accepting an Academy Award], and then added in what I’m thinking when I’m absorbing art. Once I had done all that, I had a kind of blueprint for the rest of the essays that I wanted to write and—encouraged by my mentors at CSU Northridge to go even further in terms of bending genre and writing about what I loved, what mattered to me—they developed in complexity over time.

What did your process of writing fiction about real people look like?

I started thinking about what I wanted to know about a personality when I was watching them in a movie. For instance, I really wanted to know what Robert Duvall was thinking when he did his “I love the smell of Napalm in the morning” monologue [in Apocalypse Now]. I decided I would make up what they were thinking; in some cases, I used [industry] legends. I mean, the story in the book about Debbie Reynolds and Fred Astaire meeting on the set of Singin’ in the Rain is apocryphal, probably. But could be true. So, I thought I would just sort of invent it as if it were true.

I felt a little bit guilty assigning ideas to people, but these are public figures—and I know that what I’m saying about them is not deliberately insulting or harmful. If they got in touch with me and said, “I’m horrified that you think that, and I didn’t enjoy this,” then I would be like, okay, I’ll pull the essay. But I seriously doubt that will happen.

In your author’s note, you reference Plato’s allegory of the cave, writing that “cinema-goers enter the cave willingly, with full knowledge that the screen is not reality.” As I read the book—which is concerned in many ways with the complexities of truth, fact, and fiction—I kept thinking about how movies are so openly engineered and we, the audience, are so in on that. I wondered whether, in that way, film is the most truthful medium of our time.

I think that there can be great truth in stuff that’s obvious fiction. It would be a little bit convenient for me to say that I think film is the most truthful medium of our time because it’s the one that I’m most devoted to. I think maybe that crown belongs to Tumblr. I mean, I say that as a joke, but I’m willing to back it up: I think people are their most passionate selves on Tumblr. But I do think film can be very revealing of the society that produces it.

How then might you characterize film’s relationship to truth?

I think I wrote the book to answer that question. Different films tell different truths, right? Biopics of famous people, for instance, are convenient: they aggrandize their subjects. But I think that a lionizing biopic offers a window into the society that creates it: if we’re going to put J. Edgar Hoover on a pedestal after all these years, why are we doing that? What are we leaving out of his story in the movie? I think if there’s truth in cinema, it’s sideways.

I wonder about the audience’s relationship to that slantedness: with a book, for instance, so much of the labor that goes into it is often invisible to the audience. My sense is that even someone who knows nothing about film, on the other hand, knows at least from the credits that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of people involved in making it. Which makes me think we’re more aware of film’s constructedness—and so recognize the truth that it tells in a different way.

I’m not sure I agree with you—because most people don’t watch the credits. You and I both live in Los Angeles, where people stay through the credits, but in most places they don’t. I’ve talked to people who don’t really understand how films are made, that they’re collaborative, and people don’t really understand whose vision a film is. I don’t think that the machinery of cinema wants the public to know how it operates, and because of that, I don’t think there’s any real relationship between the reality of the film’s making and the finished product. Those things are divorced, often in hilarious ways.

An example that springs to mind for me is Deep Blue Sea, which is a fantastic shark movie. But the set was infested with crickets, which means that none of the dialogue that was recorded there was usable—the entire film is ADR-ed [dubbed with Automated Dialogue Replacement]. And the whole cast was driven crazy, having to deal with these crickets day and night; I’m sure everyone was really sick of it by the time the movie was finished. No one could possibly know that just from watching it … that’s a way in which I’d guess the experience of making the film is very distinct from the finished product.

In your piece “Bright White American Smile,” you wrestle with your own truth-telling and fictions in the book. It’s not until the brief notes section at the end of the book, though, that you say that the fictional scenes you put real people in aren’t based on actual anecdotes, unless stated otherwise. I’m curious why you decided to include this at the end—rather than, say, in the author’s note at the beginning. Did your relationship to what it means to write the truth change while putting this book together?

The answer to the second question is no. And the answer to your first question is a craft one: I wrote the author’s note years after I finished the manuscript, because I got the advice from a rejecting press that the book was too much of a plunge into cold water and folks needed an introduction. So, I wrote one.

I also didn’t want to hammer readers over the head with: This is fiction! These parts are fiction! I think it’d be hard for anyone to reach the conclusion that I know what Robert Duvall was thinking in 1978, and I also didn’t want to be like, “I absolve myself of legal liability for imagining what Robert Duvall is thinking in 1978.” That ruins the spell a little bit. The only time that I feel like I have to point it out is when I’m trying to make a point about the artifice of writing itself.

In the essay “This Father Film,” you discuss the ambition of something like Citizen Kane and the arrogance necessary to make it. You write that you personally fear being or acting arrogant—and yet you also admit that making art is an inherently arrogant act. Where do you draw the line between ambition and arrogance as a writer?

That’s a very tricky question. Those qualities are very close together in some pursuits and very far apart in other pursuits, and my relationship to ambition has changed a lot since I wrote that essay. I think that ambition is about wanting and striving, and arrogance is about assuming. They may look the same in some places and in some contexts, but that’s the fundamental difference: trying versus assuming. Assumptions will kill you.

Do you recognize the difference between ambition and arrogance in art when you’re reading or watching it?

If the art is pulled off well enough, I don’t think you can see the difference. Take Joanna Newsom’s album Ys: I remember, at the time it was released, a reviewer said something about how this would be the most pretentious album anyone has ever made, except that she fucking pulls it off. She’s got the chops behind it to make it work. I think that that’s the case for a lot of art that strives, that’s ambitious.

If I were a different person, if I had different opinions about Citizen Kane, then I would say it’s a very ambitious and very arrogant work of art—but it pulls it off. All of the technical stuff is in place; there’s no way that I can say that movie is a failure. An even better example is Orson Welles’s late documentary-hybrid, F for Fake. That movie is so ambitious; it tries so hard. It’s crazy—and he pulls it right off. He’s so capable, and that movie is so complete.

I think that you can be Spielberg and you can be ambitious without being arrogant, and you can pull off an entire lifetime’s worth of extraordinary craft. Or, you can be Welles and you can make five movies, all of which swing for the stars and only some of which succeed. Those are two different ways to build a career.

In a few essays, you express this discomfort that you have with white, wealthy men and the spaces that nurture their arrogance, and their self-satisfaction, and their belief in their own importance. But the film industry is so full of men like that. How do you square the reality of men’s power and position in cinema alongside the pleasure and nuance and thought it gives you?

Mainly [using] feminist film criticism—if I’ve got Laura Mulvey in my pocket, I’m fine. The other, truer answer is that there are a lot of male filmmakers who like women and see women as people. And that means that, throughout the history of Hollywood film, there have been many movies that treated women as people—maybe not as subjects, but still as people.

There are lots of filmmakers who aren’t making films primarily for a male audience; that’s been true back to the 1900s. Those films are usually the ones that give me the most pleasure. And even highly masculinist filmmakers like Michael Mann and David Fincher have such extraordinary craft that I find enormous pleasure in watching what they’re doing. Even if they’re speaking a language that I don’t perfectly understand, I can still see that what they’re doing is not only expert but also pleasurable.

Finally: Laura Mulvey again. Film teaches you to watch as a white man. The history of American cinema does that. As long as you put yourself in that mindset, you can enjoy just about anything.

What do you lose or gain by putting yourself in that mindset—or choosing not to?

Well, what you lose is yourself, and that’s unfortunate. Sometimes it’s worth it, that trade—to lose yourself for a couple hours so you can enjoy yourself at the movies. But what you gain with a more discerning eye, especially a feminist eye, is seeing the underneath of everything; seeing how it all works, and how the patriarchy has influenced everything when it comes to cinema, and how that influence has shifted over the decades.

I mean, when talkies were first being made, there was this whole subset of films called “women’s pictures.” Then, it was mostly women who went to the movies (men were working), so a lot of early film has women as subjects. And then after the Hays Code was introduced in the 1930s, nothing for 30 years—except Mildred Pierce. How women’s influence on film has moved around over the history of Hollywood cinema continues to interest me whether or not I’m in the primary mode of cinema, which is watching with a straight, white male gaze.

Were women involved in those women’s pictures?

Oh my gosh, yes! Yeah. One of the pioneers of American silent film was a woman, Alice Guy-Blaché. She was written out of history books for several decades, and now they’re doing really careful rediscovery of her work. A bunch of other early filmmakers were women, like Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino. They don’t get talked about except in textbooks, but that is changing too.

What happened was what always happens in every profession. When it’s new, women get into it because men don’t think it’s going to be anything—and then when it starts to make money, men swoop in and take it away. That’s exactly what happened with cinema.

The book isn’t really about this, but would you share a bit about your relationship to Los Angeles?

It would be difficult to overstate the importance of Los Angeles to me, both as the heart of commercial American film and as the place where I found home after never feeling a sense of it for the first 30 years of my life. But you’re right: that’s not really what this book is about. It’s also not the only place in the world where movies are made—and it hasn’t been the heart of artistic cinema for 50 years.

Aside from normal things like weird geography and sheer size, two things really surprised me about this place. One was how many people live here who are completely indifferent to “the business,” and the other is how lucky they don’t know they are. The last place I lived before L.A. was the DC Metro Area, and the prevailing meaning of life there is politics. If you made your meaning from entertainment, you were shallow. (This was the vibe, never a direct accusation.) As soon as I moved here, I felt a profound relaxing: what mattered to me was what mattered to this city, and I never had to feel like what I loved was unimportant ever again.

There’s also a level of geeking out that never really goes away. My favorite place in town is the courtyard at [Grauman’s] Chinese Theatre. Yeah, Hollywood Boulevard is inherently annoying, as are tourists, but I could stand there and read the concrete, touch the handprints, for hours. The aura of Los Angeles—even when it’s self-congratulatory or has obvious downsides—has never lost its romance for me, in 13 years. I hope it never does.

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Katharine Coldiron is the author of Ceremonials (2020), a novella inspired by Florence + the Machine, and Junk Film: Why Bad Movies Matter (2023), a collection of essays about bad movies. Her essays and criticism have appeared in Ms., Conjunctions, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, and many other places. You can find her on Twitter.

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Featured image: Photo of Katharine Coldiron by Michael Chylinski.