You’ve just watched a film, likely one from Hollywood.
You may have caught the quick text flying across the
Inspired
by true events. How’s that for safe? What story isn’t inspired by true events
at some level? And “based on”? “Based” means the directors and producers—I
carefully avoid using the term “artists” in this sense—are declaring their
right to take as much licence with the truth as they feel is necessary to sell
tickets. Every film, if you stretch
your thinking far enough, every piece
of art at all, is based on true events, or inspired by them. I mean, where else
do ideas come from?
They
add and alter to create drama. The question becomes, why can we not simply tell
a true story? Why must we inject lies into truth to make it supposedly more
interesting? Sin? Sex sells?
So
you watch the film, which follows a pretty basic Hollywood formula. Despite
this, because of the little disclaimer at the beginning, you keep telling
yourself: true story, true story, true story.
Then,
if you’re like me, once you’ve seen the film, you go look it up. You’re
surprised that what you watched was nothing like what really happened. You’re a
little hurt. Maybe you even feel cheated. Very little of what you saw was true,
yet they used the names of real people, they used actual dates and locations in
quick flashes across the screen, so that you would note “this moment was
important,” and, depending, draw parallels to other events in history or your
own life that were happening at the same time. (Was I the only one thrilled by
the Star Wars toys at the end of Argo? Doubt it.)
So
you’re disappointed, feeling conned into believing this great story of
sacrifice /success /ingenuity /perseverance /insanity /sex was actual, when
really it’s just another fiction.
When
you follow up those inaccuracies, you learn that the director or producer or
screenwriter made the changes for the sake of drama. That is, for the sake of
fiction. To make the truth more moving, they needed to turn it into a lie.
This
always bothers me. Not because I don’t like fiction—I love it—but when they use
real names and events and then dress them up, they try to fool the audience to
gain its sympathies. It’s like they don’t trust themselves enough to tell a
good made-up story, so they give steroids to a true story, but then hide what
they’ve doctored.
Braveheart, Pearl Harbor, Zero Dark Thirty,
Argo, Titanic, Munich, Bonnie and Clyde, Gladiator, A Beautiful Mind, Patton—just
a cursory glance at the Academy Award nominees list for any given year will
reveal that lying about the truth sells very well as art. But when you do a
little research, you ask yourself why they didn’t tell the truth in the first
place, why it wasn’t good enough.
One
of my favorite films is Finding Forrester.
It’s loosely inspired by the life of J.D. Salinger, author of Catcher in the Rye. Rather than deal
with awkward bits of reality, or whore up the truth to make it exciting, the
creators took the themes and a handful of applicable facts regarding Salinger’s
seclusion and turned them in to a very fine fiction, without using real names,
people, or events. If you know Salinger, you know it, but you don’t need to know Salinger to know it. It’s
inspired by a true story, but they don’t need to flash you a lie at the
beginning. They trust that their art can stand by itself, and it does.
When
I was young, I saw the violent climax to the film Bonnie and Clyde. Clyde gets out of the car to help a stranded
motorist he recognizes. He munches an apple and smiles in the bright sunshine.
Suddenly, a Thompson-toting posse springs up from some nearby bushes, the old
man dives under his truck, and the ambush is sprung. Clyde gets that one,
meaningful look back at Bonnie, who is sitting pleasantly in the car with the
door open. Then, for what felt like forever when I was ten, the bank-robbing
lovers are hammered with machine gun bullets. I recall still the spasms of
Bonnie’s body as they fired and fired.
Violent,
horrifying, intense.
Untrue.
In
reality, the car never stopped. The posse leapt up and opened fire—no one gave
the order—and turned the couple into Swiss cheese while they were still driving.
Hundreds of rounds were fired, passing through the car panels, the couple, and
then the other side.
Violent,
horrifying, intense.
True.
I’ve
often wondered what that ending would have been like if the true version would
have been filmed. Would I have felt cheated because Beatty and Dunaway wouldn’t
have been filmed in close up for that last “I love you” look? I don’t think so,
but my dependence on art has begun to influence my truth.
Cliché
time: art imitates life. But when life becomes so informed by art that only art
can be depicted, where is the life at all?
Have
we become so dependent on drama that we can’t tell a true story? Has capitalism
and salesmanship so permeated our thinking that lying isn’t just easy and
natural, but expected?
Perhaps
the next great movement in film will be a true cinema verite; the true story as accurately as you can give it
without making a documentary. How’s that for a challenge for actors: to make
them act like it’s life, not art.
