We forgive sleight-of-hand in books as in cinema, but can we forgive Truman Capote for insisting In Cold Blood was factual?
A tour de force of literary imagination …
Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. Photograph: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty
Images
As Oscar night approaches, it's impossible to forget how deeply stories and
storytelling are coded into the DNA of our stone-age consciousness. How
naturally, moreover, we look to stories for moral guidance in the rough traffic
of everyday life.
Perhaps that's why we have a profound, unconscious need to know what genre we're in. Is it a work of the imagination, or cold, hard fact? Never mind that some imaginations are deadly dull, or that some facts can be edge-of-the-seat thrilling, we like to know, as readers and as audiences, what the terms of trade are.
At the same time, as listeners or witnesses to heroic acts of storytelling, we can be quite forgiving. We know, for instance, that some passages of the historical record are steeped in obscurity, and also that fiction is make-believe. Perhaps all we require from a story, fact or fiction, is a fundamental authenticity, an honesty of intent and execution.
McCrum's full piece
Perhaps that's why we have a profound, unconscious need to know what genre we're in. Is it a work of the imagination, or cold, hard fact? Never mind that some imaginations are deadly dull, or that some facts can be edge-of-the-seat thrilling, we like to know, as readers and as audiences, what the terms of trade are.
At the same time, as listeners or witnesses to heroic acts of storytelling, we can be quite forgiving. We know, for instance, that some passages of the historical record are steeped in obscurity, and also that fiction is make-believe. Perhaps all we require from a story, fact or fiction, is a fundamental authenticity, an honesty of intent and execution.
Thus, we come away from
Spielberg's astonishing movie Lincoln
marvelling at Daniel Day-Lewis's performance. We may have been fooled by the
magic of cinema, but we still know that it was acting.
For the same reason, we forgive Spielberg's sleight-of-hand with his
narrative. Lincoln is a deeply researched account of a pivotal moment in
American history, but some things in it aren't "true". There were, for instance,
no freed slaves in the gallery to watch the house of representatives vote on the
13th amendment to the constitution. But Lincoln is a film, not a history book
(though it was partly inspired by a history book). That's its genre. Next.
With Argo, Lincoln's
great Oscar rival, things get more slippery. The film is explicitly "based" on
real events, fantastic and scarcely credible though these are. It uses
documentary footage to heighten verisimilitude. It trades on memories of the
1979 hostage crisis. Many of its characters are, or were, real people, who are
played for real. Like Lincoln, but more so, it's a fiction based on factual
matters of life and death.
Amid these distorting
mirrors, Argo understands its genre. It is outrageously entertaining, and that's
what it's supposed to be: entertainment, of a very high order. Any directorial
sleight-of-hand by Ben Affleck is forgiven by
our acceptance of the genre and its needs.
Argo has a script derived from a now-forgotten news item, a report of a
"Canadian" film crew scouting a movie in the Ayatollah's Iran. The "facts" of
Lincoln occupy just four pages of Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Such
fragments are often the stuff of great films – and great books, too.McCrum's full piece
No comments:
Post a Comment