Post #161: Fact and Fiction

17 Nov. 2024

     The way facts and fictions flow together so very freely in the human mind is nothing new or distinctive to our age. Books and newspapers were notorious for it long before the reign of the moving images began, and not only that: ever since human beings have been gossiping around campfires and watering holes (for as long as there have been human beings as we know them), it has been exceedingly difficult to separate out the strands of verisimilitude from those of fabrication, with a vast gray area in between, where interpretation treads a thin line between plausibility and reckless conjecture.

     It may even be true that the fiction—the embellished (or unduly simplified) version of the story—has always felt more real and true to hearers, because the power of narrative will often carry everything before it. Only tell the tale well enough and it may be believed more readily than the most scrupulously factual account. Appealing myth, even outright fantasy, beats mundane reality quite easily, provided it is presented in reasonably believable period costume with a few compelling props into the bargain.

     At the same time, because fictions do so easily becomes more real to us than the facts—especially when our productions now play before audiences in the millions and billions—there is a new kind of responsibility that cannot be brushed aside by claiming artistic privilege or the unrestrained license of the entertainer. If Queen Victoria is far more present to our age on Netflix than anywhere else, then the makers of quasi-history have a public duty to get the story right, insofar as they are able, and to be cautious about whatever flights of fancy they build in, because the viewers will not be able to distinguish them as such.

     If the subjects of such quasi-histories are still alive today, it heightens the obligation, and if they are objects of ongoing controversy, so much more still. The dead should not be misrepresented or maligned because they cannot defend themselves anymore, but at least they have passed beyond the reach of our current dramas, though their reputations have not (a serious claim on our restraint). Those who are still very much involved in our current affairs also have a right to be depicted accurately, within a certain margin of error, and not to have their worst moments dragged on the screen with the worst possible constructions put on them, especially if the evidence is questionable. It is bad enough what actors on the public stage must put up with in the limelight; let their personal lives, at least, be treated with a measure of that decency which we would all demand of one another as a matter of course as private individuals.

     It is a long-standing doctrine of law, in the US at least, that public figures forgo much of their right to privacy. But what the law says and what one should feel in duty bound to do (or not to do) are two very different things. One might argue that those who are not themselves very scrupulous, or perhaps not so at all, when it comes to misrepresenting others, have thereby forsaken any claim on our forbearance. I am not so sure about that. The demand that you treat others the way you would expect to be treated by them yourself is not conditional on reciprocity. Their wrongs are theirs to answer for; yours are yours.

     I am quite willing to believe that the makers of Victoria and The Crown, and a few other comparable productions in recent years (involving apprentices and such), were animated not only by the wish to tell a good yarn, to entertain and reap the rewards, but also to do their subjects justice, as best they could. Even Oliver Stone’s highly problematic classic, JFK, did not deliberately set out, I would imagine, to misrepresent anything, but only to publicize sincerely held concerns. I am not the judge of these artists and their work, let alone their conscience; I enjoyed their shows too, and I found it charming to see Victoria and Melbourne depicted as if they were practically lovers, and other such fanciful touches elsewhere. Sometimes a brush with fiction brings events to life in a way that a more literal telling would fail to do. Such stylized elements can work more like highlights than distortions, and I cannot tell anyone where the line runs that separates artistic creativity from historical and political irresponsibility. I can only insist that there is such a line, somewhere, and that it needs to be heeded.

     Let no one say that dubious factoids do not matter on screen, or that they will not leave any deep impressions. It puzzled me for many years how Lee Harvey Oswald could possibly have shot JFK if the FBI’s best marksmen could not replicate the speed of his reloading. In a discussion it might occur to someone, as it did to me at last, that this was Oswald’s own rifle and that he was under the influence of what must have been an extraordinary adrenaline rush. I also recall, more than thirty years later, the deep-state operative on the park bench who, half-way across the globe at the time of the assassination, supposedly read about it in the newspaper before it happened: something to do with the time difference, I now suspect, but that is not how I remember the scene being conveyed in the film. Mix together enough such fast and loose plays with the facts, and you may contribute materially to the idea that your own nation’s underbelly is so reptilian that government agents had a hand in assassinating their own president. Stir the pot a little more and before long someone may preach that we are governed by aliens or reptiles in human shape, and instead of being led away in a straight-jacket, he may be invited to the White House one day. In that direction lies madness, so beware what you do to stoke the fires of collective insanity.

     That the world as we experience it is a kind of projection (Vorstellung, as Schopenhauer put it), I wouldn’t deny. But this projection is by no means arbitrary; it can be done in a few ways whereby our sanity is maintained, and in many more whereby it is desperately undermined. Let it be done right, and there will be shared parameters that we can congregate around—epistemological pillars that keep the roof from falling on our heads, which is what happens when the thing is not done right. We have a responsibility, all of us, to do what we can to maintain and strengthen, protect and uphold those pillars, especially at a time when they are under assault on all sides. I can tell no one what to do exactly, nor what his or her precise part should be in this vital undertaking. All I can say is that to undermine or otherwise weaken the pillars, whether by neglect or by deliberate design, at such a time of crisis as ours when it comes to our ability to make collective sense of the world, is dangerous in the extreme and nothing short of unconscionable.