Thanks for this discussion on yesterday’s post, in which I ask whether there’s such a thing as a “true story.”
To tell you the truth (ha!), I knew I was going too far with the whole “no objective truth” argument, but I felt so overwhelmed by my hundred thoughts on this topic that the only way I could bring myself to start addressing them was to just push myself to the extreme.
This may sound weird, but in thinking about that post and your responses, I’ve realized that what I really want to write about is our need to believe in the veracity of fiction that is based on true events.
More to the point, I’ve been thinking for weeks about some of the responses to what I wrote about The Blind Side. I’ve been arguing with the claim of some commenters that it’s impossible to fault the movie’s story without also faulting the real lives of the people involved, as though the story were just a perfect mirror of the world. Reading Mendelsohn’s piece in The New Yorker got me back on that train of thought.
Honestly, I knew I was thinking about The Blind Side when I posted yesterday, but sometimes I have trouble allowing myself just to talk about what I want to talk about. Sometimes, I feel like I have to dress up a subject in grandiose claims because I secretly worry that whatever I want to discuss isn’t “important enough” on its own merits. It’s like this one time in grad school, when I wanted to write a paper about Patty Griffin’s songs, but I spent the first three pages trying to make some big, bullshitty argument about how sound affects our emotions before language does. As with yesterday’s throat-clearing exercise, all that nonsense got me off track from the smaller, more interesting thing I wanted to tackle. In both cases, I ended up making arguments I didn’t really believe in because I wasn’t giving myself permission to talk about what was really on my mind.
Anyway… back to this whole “based on a true story” thing. A few years ago, I reviewed a play that was based on interviews that a playwright did with a group of senior citizens. I specifically criticized the playwright for shaping these interviews into the most treacly, “I love grandpa” stories you can imagine. She reduced very complex lives to a series of saccharine anecdotes, and it annoyed me.
Well, after my review ran in Variety, the playwright e-mailed me to say that I was totally off base… that I couldn’t blame her for the stories in the play because she had merely transcribed them. She wasn’t an author, just a vessel, so by disliking her play, I was disliking the people she wrote about.
That playwright was making the same argument as the many people (here and on The Huffington Post) who told me that by questioning the approach of The Blind Side, I was saying the real-life Tuohy family was paternalistic. Because again, this movie was based on a story that really happened, so I couldn’t possibly fault a screenwriter just for telling it like it was.
I should note, of course, that other people made some well-reasoned claims against my argument that the movie is paternalistic and pro-white conservative Christian (not that there’s anything wrong with that last one). And hey, maybe they were right. I can accept that after our discussion, I might have a different reading of the movie if I saw it again. What I cannot accept, however, is the idea that there is no way to read the movie unless I apply the same reading to the people that inspired it.
What I detect in that argument is a need to deny the authorial hand… a need to find the “truth” in what’s being presented on screen by insisting that the fictional narrative is somehow just like the reality it’s based on. And I don’t understand how anyone could make that argument. All stories are shaped. Even a story I tell my friends is going to have select details omitted and others emphasized for effect, so once an actual event has reached an Off Broadway stage or a movie screen, then it’s damn well going to have been shaped by a writer’s biases, desires, and goals.
So why deny that? Why pretend that the authorial impact doesn’t exist? What is there to gain from insisting that the story on the screen or on stage is telling us the absolute truth? Why argue that by criticizing the artistic rendering of a story, we are also criticizing real life?
To me, this response smacks of the same need that drives us to be so angry when a supposedly-true memoir turns out to be a fake. In both cases, some of us need to believe in stories… to let them comfort us by shaping and grounding (and so making sense of) the world. We so crave the order that a good story brings that we will fight anyone who says the story isn’t true. We will deny that anything other than Life could have written a story, even if it’s being told in the same building as Transformers 2.
Do you know what I mean here? Now that I’ve cleared out the cobwebs of yesterday’s post, I realize this is what I really want to talk about.
