Storytelling and Archival Material in The Trouble with Merle

Between 2000 and 2002, I researched, wrote, and directed a television documentary about Merle Oberon, the Hollywood star of the 1930s and '40s. The film, The Trouble with Merle, explores various competing stories and claims made by different groups for Oberon's ethnicity and nationality: that she was either born in India of Anglo-Indian ancestry or that she was Tasmanian-born of Chinese ancestry. In the process of uncovering these stories, the film reflects on celebrity and memory, and the way racism can shape a life.

Merle Oberon's provenance and early life story have been a matter of some contention among those interested enough to discuss such things—particularly in Australia, where numerous individuals have claimed a family relationship to her. In the course of researching The Trouble with Merle, I uncovered different accounts of Oberon's early years and nationality, family histories that led me from Australia to the United States, India, and Canada. As a filmmaker interested in storytelling, picking through these narratives offered an opportunity to consider their cultural function and specifically, given that my film was about a historical figure, how both nonfiction and fiction archival film material might be used in the film along a spectrum from the evidential or empirical to the expressive. One challenge was to develop a structure for the film that might allow the telling of these different "Merle" stories while at the same time providing some insight into the pleasures of storytelling itself, and into the way a set of questions about race, class, and celebrity attached to the "idea" of Oberon. I envisaged a film that could contribute to a discussion that illuminated the tension that often exists between empirical notions of historical evidence and the significance of oral histories and myth in people's lives. And, of course, the film's title, The Trouble with Merle, is intended to suggest this very tension.