Stranger Than Fiction
July 8, 2004

Truth is stranger than fiction, so they say. These days, it sells better, too.
My publisher reports that this year's BEA (Book Expo America) convention for publishers and booksellers was an almost entirely non-fiction event, due to the buzz around Bill Clinton's autobiography "My Life." (Soon to join Hillary's "Living History" at the top of the book charts.)

On television, dramas and sitcoms are going the way of the Dodo (no great loss in most cases), although "reality" TV is no less pre-packaged than fantasy (it's just cheaper to produce). But there was also the recent non-stop wallow in the Ronald Reagan funeral, complete with play-by-play commentators duly trotting out every bathetic platitude known to humankind. What was up with that? It's not as if we were going through a genuine national trauma, like an assassination or a terrorist attack. But America likes to watch, and plugging in to the Reality Channel—the orchestrated pageantry of the news event or reality show du jour— is a way for "little people" to feel connected to the Big Picture.

Another way is at the movie house, where audiences are flocking to plunk down cold cash for non-fiction films. Halfway into the traditional summer blockbuster season, the big tickets on local screens are documentaries. It began with Supersize Me, the anti-junk food manifesto, and for two months the top vote-getter on my unofficial Chat-o-meter. (My personal system for measuring movie popularity, based solely on which movies I find myself most often asked about at parties.) Also drawing audiences were the anti-corporate expose, The Corporation, and Control Room, the eye-opening look at the way U.S. foregn policy is reported on the Arab TV news station Al Jazeera. Of course the godfather of this year's documentaries is Michael Moore's righteously anti-Bush Fahrenheit 9/11. The Palme d'Or winner just six weeks ago in Cannes, this movie brought the French film community to its feet with a prolonged ovation undreamed of by any other film—fact or fiction—in the history of the festival. (Ya just gotta love the French.)

Meanwhile, fiction movies—even the escapist fare of summer—are fighting back with plotlines stealthily reimagined from today's headlines. In the movie Troy, Homer's epic drama of hubris, capricious gods, and revenge, is largely thrown out for a more timely tale of a greedy leader and his imperial army invading a tiny province on the slightest pretext in order to strip it of its wealth. Brad Pitt and Orlando Bloom provide the eye candy, but the subtext seems pretty clear. (However, in Eric Bana's Hector, the Trojan warrior prince who despises war, but will not shrink from defending his home, family, and people, you could also read a rationale for homeland security.) Disguised as an old-fashioned disaster movie (called "event movies" in contemporary parlance), The Day After Tomorrow preaches the dire consequences of unchecked global warming, and scolds governments whose lax policies don't do enough to prevent it.

Now out on DVD, this year's uber Oscar-winner, The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King (along with the two installments that preceded it) presents a fantasy epic about a brotherhood of heroic underdogs waging a prolonged and bloody war against an evil army of destruction-wreaking monsters. Since all people involved in warfare think of themselves as the heroes, and the enemy as evil monsters, the Lord Of The Rings films offer up an equal-opportunity allegory to suit any political viewpoint, along with a vicarious pep talk for staying the course, however brutal, until the last evildoer is eradicated.

Even the latest Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban abandons the candy-coated kiddie world of the first two films and tosses Harry headlong into darkest adolescence, where his anger over the loss of his family leads him to Carrie-like telekinetic rages—recognizable to any parent who has ever raised a teenager. The grown-up world Harry is entering is dicey and confusing, where decent people (a werewolf, an escaped convict) are unjustly persecuted for their "otherness," while slippery villains are able to escape justice thanks to bureaucratic inefficiency.

J. K. Rowling's Potter books go even further in exploring the dark complexities of modern life. In the fourth and fifth books, the battle lines are shaping up in Harry's happy magical world between the evil Dark Lord, the ineffectual and increasingly repressive Ministry either in denial about (or possibly collusion with) the power-hungry villain, and a band of plucky, principled underdogs ready to defy government policy in the battle against evil. The story is ripe with possible analogies: the French Resistance defying the Vichy government to fight the Nazis; citizens in Rowling's native Britain just saying no to Tony Blair's alliance with Bush in Iraq; the citizens of any democratic society fighting to protect their civil rights in the face of an evil and pervasive Big Lie.

Art always imitates life to some degree, of course. The most resonant stories—fact or fiction— are those most deeply rooted in our collective experience. But now even our most traditional channels of escapism are becoming riddled with our hunger to question and examine our modern world. It's a measure of just how turbulent these times are.