The State of Things

"Stories only exist in stories. Whereas life goes by in the course of time without the need to turn out stories." The line, delivered about a quarter of the way into the film, serves as a summary of the entirety of the film. The placement of this line, given during a toast by Friedrich Munro, comes at a perfect point in the film. The story of the first half hour of the film is of these characters working towards creating a story of a post apocalyptic sort of scenario. The crew then reaches a point where they run out of film and must go on a hiatus until they are able to acquire more film. It is at this point in the story that the toast is given, which is then followed by a large chunk of the film that embodies that latter half of the quote, "...life goes by in the course of time without the need to turn out stories". For the vast remainder of the film we are shown the crew members essentially just living. They are not going through any activities that are particularly "story-worthy"; drinking at the bar, talking non-sense, practicing instruments, recording audio diaries. Some of these things could have been aimed to be more "story-worthy" but they were quite obviously not made so to further drive the meaning behind the mentioned quote.

Attention is brought back to this quote about an hour later, showing the scrap of paper that a woman had jotted down the quote on being used as a book mark. It is only after this moment that another story picks up again and Friedrich Munro decides to make an active effort to figure out why his film is being kept at a halt. Once this decision is made, the film turns into a mystery/suspense story of money and bounties and killings.