Maybe Fiction Shouldn't Fsck Facts?

Cole Hadon has an interesting newsletter, as is normal from him, entitled F&ck Your Facts about the place that facts play in fiction. He is channeling Warner Herzog and the concept of ecstatic truth:

Today, I want to share with you his theory of storytelling, which informs every work of art he creates. It involves an idea he describes as ecstatic truth, which is a rejection of facts in favor of a greater truth.

Or, as the author André Gide once wrote, “I modify facts to such a degree that they resemble truth more than reality."

Well, maybe not.

Herzog quite often explains his philosophy by citing this Gide quote, but no one has ever been able to source it. When Herzog has been challenged about this, he likes to say some version of, “I may have made it up.”

And there you go: Herzog’s ecstatic truth as a kind of performance art predicated on a lie to express a deeper truth.

I bring up ecstatic truth because it echoes something I have been preaching to artists for years:

“Don’t let facts get in the way of the truth.”

Now, let’s get a couple of things out of the way first. Cole Haddon is an accomplished script writer and show runner. Warner Herzog is, well Warner Herzog. I am neither of those things. It does say Failed Writer’s Journey on the door, after all.

But.

But I cannot shake the discomfort this idea stirs in me. Perhaps it is just my overly pedantic nature, or perhaps it is the history nerd in me, but the idea that facts are unrelated or not as important as “the truth” really bothers me.

Of course, not all facts are created equal. We are learning new things about history all the time, and we will be amazed tomorrow at what we knew to be true today. And movies are entertainment with limited scope for telling their stories. Not every fact is going to fit, and every fact left on the floor is a choice made to shape the story told. I do not deny these truths, nor do I think movies are lessor because of the need to bow to these realities. But I am concerned that completely ignoring facts in historical movies gives a weight to the “truth” that the artist wants to convey that it does not deserve.

I believe that people generally think historical depictions are good approximations of reality. It is a version of the “they wouldn’t let it on the news if its wasn’t true!” syndrome. The use of a historical background to tell your truth as you throw away relevant facts feels deceptive to me. It feels like you are cheating, like you are using the weight of history and the willingness of people to believe in the facts they see on screen to make your point. If you have an ecstatic truth then that truth should be able to stand on its own, not using the crutches of reality to prop itself up.

Two movies, I think, illustrate this issue. Knight’s Tale is not, to be charitable, factually accurate in its portrayal of, say, Chaucer. However, it does respect the facts about the social relationships, the place of tourneys in the medieval social life, etc. and turned them into a movie that reflected the truth of the time even if most of the factual details were wrong. And I may be a hypocrite because the one script I have written is very much in the Knight's Tales tradition -- a story that I hope respects the facts of being a female shop owner in early modern Germany that does not actually get all the details correct.

The other movie is the Social Network. Sorkin wanted to tell his ecstatic truth about what he believes motivates tech barons. He manipulated the facts to tell his truth and ended up with a story that was much more sympathetic to Zuckerberg than the man deserved, even at the time. Sorkin leaned on the idea of biography to tell the tale he wanted to tell, disregarding the facts as he went. And as a result, his truth is not actually reflective of how tech barons think and operate, and thus gives his audience a false sense that they understand reality from Sorkin’s story.

That is the issue I have. When you don’t respect facts, you can mislead, you misinform. Knight’s Tale respects the facts where it matters and thus gives us a story that is honest about the society it operated in and about human beings in general. Social Network ignored and manipulated the facts in order to tell its ecstatic truth and ended up being a lie.

Weekly Word Count

But caaaaaaaaaaaaaaancer.

Okay my wife, who survived cancer herself a little more than a year ago (makes you wonder about where we live, doesn’t it?) says I don’t get to play the cancer card until I actually start treatment. And she’s from Flint, so she can take me out if I get too whiny. To keep her happy, and my head on my shoulders, I did do some writing this week!

I finished the second draft of the script I mentioned. I think it’s actually worse, but I made some deliberate choices in order to learn about the script. It will be interesting to see, in the table read in a couple of weeks, if the group agrees with my self-assessment about the script’s quality decline. And, just as importantly, it will be interesting to see if the agree about why the changes made the script worse.

I also completely finished plotting out another novel. My writing group/beta readers think, for various reasons, that it should be told in first person. But I am terrible at first person. Even worse than my normal level of terrible, so I have been waffling about getting started.

Hope you all enjoyed your 4th of July, if you are American, and have a great weekend.