Against Truthiness

We're all storytellers.  We tell ourselves and each other stories about who we are and why we do what we do.  But unless we're being paid to make things up, we're expected to stick fairly close to the so-called truth.  Well, last week the relationship between "lying for a living" and living honestly got a fascinating workout that raised all kinds of questions.  Here's one which may not seem immediately apropos, but hang in there.

Why do we go to movies?  A multitude of reasons, of course: to relieve us from the stress, angst and boredom of real life, to give us a healthy outlet for having our feelings, etc.  And clearly one of the big draws, in psycho-sociological terms, is that they function as wish fulfillment fantasies.  At the movies you can vicariously be say, an ice skating princess, or a stud who beds bridesmaids.  You can use the powers of positive wizardry to ward off heinous evil.  Or hang out with penguins!  Haven't you always wanted to hang with the penguins?

When a movie offers us an alternate reality that's fun to live in for awhile, we make a tacit deal with it: the old suspension of disbelief thing (i.e. I'm willing to set aside much of what I know about life in the real world, so long as you continue to entertain me).  It's the work of a movie's creative team to make that reality credible.  And it seems to me that each wish fulfillment fantasy comes with what I'll call an Acceptable Level of Manipulation, meaning: I'll let you push my emotional buttons, to a reasonable degree, so that the story remains involving.  But if you go too far -- manipulate my feelings too obviously, to the point where I feel jerked around and/or my intelligence is insulted -- I'm outta here, I'm no longer a happy audient, and I want my money back.

Every genre has its own Acceptable Level of Manipulation (ALM), relative to its credibility.  Thrillers and horror movies, for example, have an unusually high ALM, because in watching them, we want to be manipulated.  We've come to be fooled and messed with and scared out of our pants, so go ahead, feckless heroine -- open that door to the basement in the middle of the night, alone (as if you've never like, been to a horror movie in your life).  We know it makes no sense but we don't care.

On the other hand, most adult dramas have a fairly low ALM.  We don't want to feel the manipulation too acutely -- the strings have to be pulled subtly, or we sense that things have gone too far and the dream is over.  It's the difference between Robin Williams as a believable shrink helping a troubled kid work out a problem (Good Will Hunting), and Robin Williams as an absurdly mawkish doctor who puts on a red clown nose to cheer up terminally ill kids (i.e. the unacceptable L of M in the dismal Patch Adams).

One way of assessing the ALM is to look at what a given show is selling.  What value system, what lifestyle, what sensibility is the wish fulfillment fantasy asking you to buy?  On TV, the aptly-named Friends sold the idea of friends-as-uber-family, an ideal aggregate of like-minded people who would always be there for you; similarly Sex and the City sold the family of girlfriends, and neither show could countenance the idea that a healthy human being might be happier alone.  The premise that "grouping is better" was the tacit sell. 

But both shows established an ALM by allowing differences and fallings-out between friends to occur, from episode to episode, earning credibility by at least admitting that being part of a friend-family isn't always a piece of cake.  This is what we've come to expect, in the unwritten contract between entertainment and viewer: we will buy the premise you're selling, so long as you don't exceed an Acceptable Level of Manipulation.

Now: last week, Oprah, our beloved American icon, took writer James Frey to task for having fabricated huge swatches of his supposedly non-fiction memoir.  And I believe it's the most high profile instance to date, of the fictional storytellers' Acceptable Level of Manipulation principle being applied, publicly, in the realm of real life.

What Oprah, on behalf of millions of Americans, was saying in essence was: so long as the story you're telling us really happened -- is verifiably true -- we're willing to accept its excesses,  its most emotionally manipulative turns.  But once we discover that the story is fiction, and its excesses contrived... you've broken the contract.  Your level of manipulation is unacceptable.

Reading a book is an intimate act, and what happened to Oprah and the rest of Frey's readers was a personal experience.  Frey had come right into their homes, into their heads, so to speak, and lied to them where they lived.   That's why I don't agree with a few media critics covering the event who sounded bemused that such a fuss and furor should erupt over a book, when there are surely so many other betrayals of truth to react to, in real life.  I think what happened on the Oprah show was the opening sally in what may well become an ethical battle of far-reaching real-life consequence.

With the lines between fiction and reality rapidly dissolving (see: everything from The Real World to... well, almost everything), we've become lulled into thinking that a certain amount of dishonesty is simply "the way it is" or "the way things have to be" in daily life.  When a politician plays upon cheap emotions, to distract us from a difficult, complex and uncomfortable issue (see: "they hate us for our freedom"), that's an Acceptable Level of Manipulation.  Happens every day! 

Comedian Steve Colbert has coined the term truthiness, as in, can we assess the truthiness of a given so-called fact?  The laughter this engenders is pained laughter, coming from our common perception that the current administration, boasting that it doesn't operate on a "reality-based" playing field, takes a sort of preemptive parental attitude toward truth.  It believes that having the facts isn't good for the public, that "we can't handle the truth."  It wants us to go along with this ALM norm, to shrug off moral inconsistencies and outright incompetence in the name of "so it is and has ever been so."

The wish fulfillment fantasy we're being asked to buy is: They know what's best for us, and we're being taken care of.  And the storytellers are banking on the myth that withholding information, misrepresenting facts, and spinning perception is a necessary evil -- that's the Acceptable Level of Manipulation inherent in the pragmatics of politics.

But I don't find it coincidental that this lead story on the front page of Sunday's NY Times tells of a prominent scientist whistle-blowing on NASA for trying to suppress his truth.  That he's been threatened and muzzled may be de rigeur, but his going public about it is not.  I don't think it's a huge stretch to draw a line from Oprah, as a representative of the public, saying "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore" when she's been lied to, to this man pointing the finger at a government agency that's been thuggishly trying to shut him up for speaking the facts.

I think we're starting to see a lot of this phenomenon, and higher powers-willing, we'll see and hear a lot more.  I think  what happened on the Oprah show signified what I'm hoping, praying, might just be a zeitgeist tipping point.  Call me kinky call me crazy, but I believe Oprah's accusations have helped to open a door, to bring the question of "truth or fiction?" into public debate, and this could lead us into a real emperor-is-naked situation.  The Acceptable Level of Manipulation in the stories we've been asked to buy, from weapons of mass destruction to... don't get me started, has been way too high, and it sounds to me like we're verging on a cultural moment where the manipulations are finally declared unacceptable.

In all this, I'm perversely tickled by the overlap between "entertainment" and "real life."  I loved it when David Letterman, of all people, told Bill O'Reilly he was full of crap.  Maureen Dowd has pointed out that it was book critic Michiko Kukatani's article on the Frey phenomenon that finally helped convince Oprah to reverse her stance and call Frey on the carpet.  It seems that just as comedian Jon Stewart has become one of the nation's most seriously listened-to news anchors, it took a member of the literati to light a fire under what's become a major news story.

So, has the amount of bullshit being slung in the public sphere finally created too much of a stench to ignore?  Oprah set a grand example, by admitting on national TV that she'd been wrong in first giving Frey a free pass, and apologizing for her actions, thus earning herself the moral ground to stand on as she called each lie of his a lie. 

I'd like to follow her lead, because I've had my fill of truthiness.  These days I'm hungry for the real, pure and simple thing.  I find myself singing that old John Lennon tune:

I’m sick and tired of hearing things
From uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded hypocritics
All I want is the truth
Just gimme some truth
I’ve had enough of reading things
By neurotic, psychotic, pig-headed politicians
All I want is the truth
Just gimme some truth

But as my friend from Texas, Nan O'Byrne is wont to say, "You do what you did, you get what you got."   So it seems to me that to get to the truth, one has to give it out -- which means I'll have to do things a little differently, if I want to get a different result.  Ultimately, what happens next begins with what you and I do in our private lives.   When it comes to letting go of our own accepted manipulations -- when whether we'll be liked, or get what we want, is what's at stake -- I wonder how honest we're capable of being with each other, with ourselves.

Comments

[Binnie]

It can sometimes be SO HARD to always be truthful. Whether it's padding a resume, or shaving a few years off one's real age, or telling someone that you REALLY DID have an orgasm, we can even learn to fake ourselves out and believe the lie. To be truthful to yourself IS harder than telling the truth to others. Still, I keep trying. I'd like to believe that the risk of being honest is ultimately worth it in our dealings with each other.

[JJ]

Usually I try to put some smartass comment here but that was a remarkably lucid and cogent explanation of the phenomenon of the Bush administration’s unprecedented free pass when it comes to the truth. I honestly don’t think the world has seen a majority of a population turn a willful blind eye to an administration’s transgressions since the 1960s.

I just watched “Hearts and Minds” again the other night so that decade’s lies are still fresh in my mind.

[Writergurl]

Frankly, I think you're giving Oprah way too many kudos.

1. She had plenty of heads up that Frey's books was not truthful. She was contacted last September (after she selected the book in Septemer and prior to James Frey's appearance on her show in October) by a staff member at Halezden and told that the story was not true. From: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/27/books/27oprah.html?incamp=article_popular

Then, after she yells at him (on live tv, giving him even more exposure) she DOES NOT pull her very valuable "book club" endorsement from his book. See:
http://www.realcities.com/mld/twincities/entertainment/13720499.htm?source=rss&channel=twincities_entertainment

She and her staff also had 3 days to check him out prior to her call in to Larry King defending the "emotional truth" of Frey's book. Obviously, no one did any checking. I know she blames it on the publisher's lack of fact checking but you know, it takes about 20 minutes and maybe a hundred bucks to go on-line and check if all of his so-called arrests DID happen. Not that it would be a perfect way to fact check but it would be a damn sight better than what she did check. (Nothing.)

[Babs]

Bravo.

[mernitman]

Binnie: "The risk of being honest" is a great phrase and really nails what we're all up against.

JJ: Yup, and it can't just keep going the way it's been going... can it?!

Writer G: I wasn't aware of the lack of endorsement-pull, which is very, very odd. Re: the fact check, I guess at that point she was (apparently influenced by a pile of e-mails in support of the book) still waffling and thus not focused on going after the facts.

Didn't mean to come off as an "I love Oprah" (she's actually not someone I've ever paid a lot of attention to) but I still think --even with the obvious self-aggrandizement involved -- it was fundamentally a gutsy move.

Babs: Thenkew!

[Writergurl]

No, I didn't think you were an "I love Oprah" kinda guy, it's just that I get cranky when people give her kudos for FINALLY doing something she should have done in the FIRST place!

She's THE most powerful daytime tv host, she gets paid a ton of money because of that, I think (just my .o2) that she has a responsiblity to her audience to get the facts straight. Let's transpose this to something like oh, say, face cream. She hears it's great, she and her staff try it, it gets high marks, she recommends it and then she gets a warning from a dermatogolist that there's something not kosher about this product. Does she keep endorsing it? Not on your life. She investigates, she FINDS OUT. Why should this product (and that's what it is) be any different?

Don't get me wrong, I think Oprah was right for calling him on the carpet about it, I just wish that she would have done the research, and NOT endorsed his book in the first place. Like you, I don't normally pay attention to what "Okra" is doing but other people DO. I have friends and family who watch her, and they buy into Dr. Phil too...

...sigh...

[ECHenry]

In my own life I've found that the best remedy for dealing with all the world's blurred issues is going to the TRUTH and inviting God into my world by praying to Him and reading His word.

Proverbs 2:3-7 "For if you cry for discrenment, Lift your voice for understanding; If you seek her as silver, and search for her as hidden treasure; Then you will discern the fear of the Lord, and discover the knowldge of God. For the Lord gives wisdom; From his His mouth come knowledge and understanding. He stores up sound wisdom for the upright; He is a shield to those who walk in intergrity,"

- E.C. Henry from Bonney Lake, WA

[Writergurl]

Sorry, dude, not buying "THE TRUTH" as written by King Jamess and his clerics. The Bible is a book of paraphrases, all 48 or so versions of it. The "word" might be your "truth", but it ain't mine.

[abby]

Was enjoying this post up until the line: "Ultimately, what happens next begins with what you and I do in our private lives. When it comes to letting go of our own accepted manipulations..."
Given the dangerous political times we've been steadily sliding into for over 20 years (in express mode for the last 5) I think we need to point our focus beyond our private lives -- into the Public Sphere-- by not being ostriches, staying informed, Demanding journalists live up to that title by exposing lies and holding the "leaders" accountable.
This stuff shifts only through folks enlarging their scope from strictly personal to the arena around them and plunging into the...er...frey.

[Ken Mora]

I've been trying to think of something pithy to add, but you've pretty much said it all. Great blog.

[mernitman]

Abby, I'm with you -- didn't intend for the use of "private" to be read as exclusionary of anyone's participation in public political action; I'm just saying that to promote honesty, one needs to talk the talk and walk the walk, oneself.

Thank you, Mr. Mora.

[uhjim]

nice writing bill. after staring at my navel for a long ttime i decided to contribute my old favorite, "the simple is the seal of the true".