Lee And The Value Of Different Points Of View

Spoiler Alert – This post will talk about Lee, and it WILL contain spoilers. If you haven’t yet watched this movie based on the life of Lee Miller, you might wish to skip this post.

I recently watched the movie, Lee, which covers a portion of the life of Lee Miller, a fashion model turned WWII correspondent for Vogue.

The subject matter is challenging but it is well crafted and I’m glad I watched it.

Because it shows WWII from a female perspective.

And there aren’t many movies like that.

Lee Miller, being a woman reporting for a magazine with a mostly female readership, often focused on the horrors war inflicted on women.

And there were horrors. Plenty of them.

Those horrors were brought about by the ‘bad guys’, yes, but also by the ‘good guys’ and not many people talk about that unfortunately common aspect of war. Liberated women were expected to be ‘grateful’, even though their suffering, at least in the short run, was often equivalent under both leaderships.

(The filter of the camera lens puts some distance between us and the terrors. That allowed me to better cope with the revelations.)

Telling a known story from a different point of view can change it.

Completely.

If you’re stuck in your storytelling, try changing the point of view.

And if you can, watch Lee to see how that is done well.