AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society
Number 493, April 4, 2010
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WHEN DO LIES ADD UP TO
THE TRUTH? IN FICTION
Storytellers must arrange lies so
convincingly we believe in every moment
By John Greenwald
The Sunday of the big vote in the U.S. House of Representative on the health reform bill, I browsed among the cable news channels. After a while, the proceedings got boring, what with all the repetitive arguments and counter-arguments, charges and counter-charges, the exaggerations, hyperbole, lies, half-truths, misstatements and mendacity.
So I surfed, eventually landing on Turner Classic Movies' presentation of the 1950 classic comedy, also about Washington, "Born Yesterday." For a 60-year-old film, it had a few oddly prescient, curiously relevant moments.
In "Born Yesterday," a New Jersey scrap dealer, played by Broderick Crawford at his most nasty and irredeemable, comes to D.C. to win government contracts. He'll browbeat, bully and even bribe lawmakers to get the deals he wants.
Near the film's end, when his plans start falling apart, Crawford's lawyer explains that most officials in Washington are decent, honest people who try to do what's best for the American people.
The moment this little speech was over, I found myself laughing out loud. If this scene were to play in a movie theater today, there would be guffaws throughout the auditorium. Audiences might have believed such idealistic sentiments in 1950, but in 2010, these ideas would be considered a pack of lies.
That one scene in one movie revealed just how large the distance had grown between our idea of public truth-telling in 1950 and in 2010: big enough to accommodate the Tea Party movement. Perhaps senators and representatives were as honest as the 1950-era lawyer said they were; certainly audiences then believed they were. Today, Americans view Congress as a collection of politically, financially and morally corrupt scoundrels. Just watch cable news and Comedy Central.
That Sunday moment also suggested a larger question: Are we surrounded by liars?
Hollywood has made a few movies about lying and liars. In "Liar Liar" (1997), Jim Carrey plays a lawyer who wakes up one morning unable to lie. Carrey demonstrated well the intense internal conflict of someone who, more than anything, wants to lie, but physically cannot.
More recently, Ricky Gervais starred in, co-wrote and co-directed "The Invention of Lying" (2009), a clever little comedy about a world where no one lies, where everyone, and everything, tells the truth. For example, retirement homes are called "A Sad Place Where Homeless Old People Come to Die." Summing up this world, film critic Roger Ebert wrote, "I wonder if politics are even possible."
In the film, Gervais is trying to comfort his dying mother. Almost out of the blue, he finds himself telling her that death doesn't mean nothingness but a magnificent afterlife instead. Given that she and everyone else believe him, soon his entire town wants to know more. So Gervais invents other fictions, especially one about the "Man in the Sky," who's in charge of everything in the world -- and who will be with them after death, making them happy. (One of writer Gervais' points is that lying gets complicated.)
We are, of course, surrounded by lies. White lies, black lies, red lies and blue lies. We tell lies to protect people's feelings, to advance our own interests and the interests of others. My favorite everyday lie is the weight loss TV commercial that says, after all its phenomenal success stories, "Results Not Typical."
The biggest lies of all, the ones that mean the most to us, that warm, comfort, entertain and inspire us, is fiction itself. From movies, to novels to paintings, from sitcoms to Shakespeare, from the Marx brothers to "Death of a Salesman," these are the lies that become the daily truths of our existence. We can't live without them. Billion-dollar industries rest on them.
The irony is that the storytellers who invent the lies of fiction also have to be sure they tell the truth. That's not an oxymoron. Fiction writers have to arrange their lies to seem truthful -- including the most fanciful ones, say in the Harry Potter films or "Avatar" (2009). Indeed, fiction's best lies reveal deeper, perhaps the deepest, truths.
I'm sure there are films that have greatly moved you, that have struck you so deeply they have never left you. That's the great challenge for storytellers -- to arrange characters that have never existed, speaking dialogue that has never been uttered, in situations that have never happened, all in a way that's completely believable.
You go into a movie knowing it's fiction, but within the first few minutes, you've been sucked into believing every frame of it. To work, this suspension of disbelief has to be exceptionally well executed. Viewers can't be rolling their eyes in disbelief over what's on the screen. No "Born Yesterday" moments, even after 60 years.
When I was a newspaper and magazine editor, I told my writers that facts are easy but truth is hard. In journalism, we can agree on the facts, but the underlying truths are problematic. Are writers arranging their facts to favor one point of view or another? Is the glass half full, half empty, or just broken?
In a world of lies, storytellers have to make up their facts and then shape them convincingly. That's a job I wouldn't wish even upon politicians.
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Readers can e-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.net.
Copyright 2010 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved
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