KEITH C. BURRIS EXAMINES CINEMA’S RELATIONSHIP TO TRUTH
The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie.” So wrote the indispensable Walker Percy in “The Moviegoer.” Me too.
But for me, going to a movie means going to a theater, buying a Coke and popcorn or a hot dog, watching 40 minutes of previews, having the experience of the lights coming down, watching the film with others — strangers — and staying to the end of the credits. That’s when the lights come back up and the world is no longer held at bay.
Going to the movies means the whole experience — the gestalt, if you’ll pardon the expression. I think I have finally convinced my youngest son, a videographer and documentarian, of this.
My wife and I go to the movies a lot and we have noticed lately the high and seemingly increasing number of stories “based on actual events.”
Often, 50% of the previews we see are based on the actual.
“Based on” is the operative phrase. Hollywood has always used the factual story as a basis from which to fictionalize. But I notice a greater range of truth in recent stories — from zero to 100 instead of zero to 50.
Does it matter? I think so. Because we are seeing the reflection of a profound and deep disrespect for fact, data and the art of skepticism.
Movies have always spun yarns and fictionalized from a basis of real events. But I think there is a right and wrong way to do it. The base ought to be honest. And the lines of fiction — where they begin and end — clear. Great film, including great documentaries, should never serve a propaganda machine.
Now it is not a new insight: Truth seems to be more than ever up for grabs these days. The right says it. The left says it. In the impeachment trial, both sides said the other side lied and rigged the game. There are people who still maintain that Hillary Clinton did not carry the popular vote in 2016 and people who still say Barack Obama is a Muslim.
The war on truth is often blamed on Donald Trump, who gained his first visibility in politics by asserting an untruth he surely knew was an untruth — that Mr. Obama was born in Kenya.
But I think the war on truth is more complicated than that, and deeper than one movement or one man.
It’s about all of us.
We don’t seem to be able to agree that global warming is real.
Or that Joe Biden’s son got rich based on self-dealing and unearned connections.
Or that hearsay, whether about Bernie Sanders or Brett Kavanaugh, is not evidence.
Great swaths of the media and the writing press have deeply compromised themselves by becoming openly partisan at a time when journalism — serious, curated journalism — struggles to stay alive and to find an audience and a commercial basis.
This goes to the top of establishment journalism, and it is, at once, comic, pathetic and tragic. Try to find a down-the-middle story about Mr. Trump in The New York Times or Washington Post. Or consider the recent CNN hit job on Bernie Sanders: He was forced to deny something he was accused of saying by an unnamed source and instead of seeking some sort of confirmation of the accusation, the network treated it as gospel and essentially called the senator a liar.
At the root of all this I think is a deeper crisis, both epistemological and ontological: The popular hunger has shifted from “give us facts to help us find truth” to “give us affirmation to help us bond with the like-minded.”
Instead of “the truth shall set us free,” we have “my truth affirms me.”
Our movies reflect this. Take the recent film “The Two Popes,” about Pope Francis and his predecessor, Pope Benedict. It’s a pleasant little film. But nothing important in it is truth or Truth. The two men did not have a friendship before the succession. The old pope did not set up the papacy for the new pope. Benedict did not tell Francis he was resigning before he told the world — over pizza and orange soda shared in ancient sacred space. Pope Benedict was not, so far as we know, an abettor of a notorious child abuser — an unforgivable slander. Indeed, Benedict is a sort of cartoon character in the film, whereas Francis is real, human and heroic. This is the broad contextual lie built on specific lies.
Ah, but it’s a movie, you say. Movies are fables. Yes, and they commonly conflate characters and dramatize events.
But this film was not about two mythical or fictional popes. It was about two actual, known, named people.
In “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” a character based on journalist Tom Junod, who really did write a famous profile of Fred Rogers and really did become his friend, was changed to an invented character called Lloyd Vogel. That’s because the makers of the film created a daddy issue for the journalist in order to have some conflict in a film about a virtuous man who worked all the time. The name and character change was the honorable and correct thing to do.
Just as in the Clint Eastwood film “Richard Jewell,” the wrong thing was done. The real-life female journalist from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution should have been replaced by a fictional composite, especially if motives and actions which could not possibly be known were to be attributed to her. In a film concerned with false accusation, a real journalist, no longer living, is essentially accused of sleeping with a source to obtain information. That’s an unprovable and monumental defamation left hanging out there.
I am not against films based on real life and real persons. I recently saw a remarkable film called “Just Mercy,” about a very brave man named Bryan Stevenson who went to the South out of Harvard Law School to defend prisoners on death row. Every American should see this film. It should be shown in every high school civics class, at least.
On the other hand, I recently heard that Bradley Cooper is going to make a commercial biopic about Leonard Bernstein. This made me sad. It will be well done, I am sure. But it could not possibly convey the man or what he did in a two hour entertainment. In simplification and compression the depth and texture of his life will likely be lost.
I know the task in film, as it is in biography, is to create a narrative. But when I read a biography telling me what was in Teddy Roosevelt’s mind as he rode the train to Buffalo after President William McKinley’s death, I know something is very wrong. Small “t” truth has been sacrificed in pursuit of Truth, and both have been lost in the process. The infinite complexity of human personality and the human story, which history and biography attempt to convey, is too often and easily reduced these days to one dimension — a Xerox copy rather than a portrait.