New ‘true story’ site raises questions about truth in movies

JUST in time for Oscar season, the data journalists at Information is Beautiful have launched a new portal, Based on a True True Story? that allows users to check how accurate recent Oscar-bait has been.

The site has already inspired headlines about the accuracy of, say, Ava DuVernay’s Selma relative to the Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game. But as we head into another awards contest where accuracy is just one of the things that will get litigated by this year’s contenders, it would be better if Based on a True True Story? inspired a conversation about what Hollywood’s relationship to history is supposed to be, and what fact-checking of pop culture ought to be trying to discern.

There’s an inherent interest in knowing more about the story behind a pop culture story and understanding what minor changes filmmakers made to fit the sharp edges of fact into the jagged contours of fiction. But interesting isn’t inherently the same thing as meaningful.

For one example, let’s take a jaunt through the site’s assessment of The Big Short, Adam McKay’s terrific 2015 movie about the financial crisis. On the highest “Pedantry level”, “Only the absolute truth”, the movie clocks in at 78.5 percent true.

But what does that actually mean? The story of how Michael Burry (Christian Bale) lost his eye and how he told people about it, rates as false. So is the death of Mark Baum’s (Steve Carell) brother; Steve Eisman, on whom the Baum character is based, lost his infant son and asked this detail be changed. A crocodile lounging in the pool of an abandoned Miami house is fiction. Some characters are invented to give voice to prevailing ideas. Another character’s mother recommended he try lithium, not Prozac.

Maybe that adds up to 21.5percent of the movie being minor falsehoods. But if that’s a fair-sized percentage, it’s hard to make the case these fictionalisations add up to anything terribly meaningful.

In fact, the site doesn’t reckon with criticisms of The Big Short’s interpretation of the financial crisis. That’s where fact-checking might be consequential: Audiences will leave the theatre with different conclusions and in favour of different remedies if they think Wall Street is stupid, from if they believe the financial industry to be incurably criminal.

The same thing is true for the site’s fact-check of Spotlight, where it acknowledges the fact-checkers can’t know if the Boston Globe got cake for departing editors or what certain people felt after certain conversations or that some exchanges took place on the phone rather than the golf course.

The most stringent assessment of The Imitation Game, by contrast, gets closer to the point: In examining how the movie inflated Turing’s genius and eccentricity, and in implying that Turing betrayed his country, the site argues The Imitation Game is not just oversimplifying history but leading audiences to the incorrect conclusions about history, from Cold War spying to British attitudes about homosexuality.

The point is not whether a movie about history simplified history.

A two-hour movie about the financial crisis, or even a 10-hour Netflix season about several eventful years in Queen Elizabeth II’s life, is always going to simplify history. Even if you recreate events in real time, someone’s inflection is always going to be different in a way that sends meaning cascading in an unintentional direction.

Rather, we should be talking about the magnitude of what pop culture distorts, and in which directions those changes lead us.

We should read movies in the cinematic and fictional languages in which they’re written. (Not cutting away to a scene of Margot Robbie in a bathtub explaining that torture is bad a la The Big Short does not mean that Zero Dark Thirty endorsed torture as effective.)

And we should respond to the arguments movies are making about politics and history, rather than expecting art to be dumbly subservient to politics and history, as if politics and history are stable, uncontested fields with higher standing than art. – The Washington Post