Fly on the Wall

So here’s another metaphor (idiom?) that bugs me. At a  conference the accomplished, talented photojournalists talk about how they approach their subjects. They talk about how they want to fade into the background in order to capture candid moments. They want to be “like a fly on the wall.”

"La Dolce Vita" on a laptop

Their intent is good. The photographer doesn’t want to direct, pose or influence the story. They want to photograph reality as it happens. But the fly on the wall is such a bad metaphor.

Chopping Onions and Weak Metaphors

Just finished making Mexican food for dinner and chopped lots of veggies, including some onion. Sliced a big yellow onion from top to bottom and you know what? In the middle, it was just as onion-ish as it was on the outside.

Which makes me think of a metaphor about storytelling I’ve heard dozens of times. It goes like this; the artist/journalist/filmmaker explores stories deeply. Their approach, they say, is like peeling an onion, revealing more layers until they finally get to the heart of the onion. The really earnest ones note that –like peeling an onion — sometimes, a few tears are shed.

What bothers me is that this is such a poor metaphor for someone to use who is trying to teach storytelling. I love onions and cook with them often. And every time I take the knife to an onion, the center is the same as the outside. More layers of the same thing. And a story with more and more layers of the same thing is not profound. It’s just redundant.