Veritas

I don't believe in owning movies, but, of course, I do own movies and all five seasons of The Wire. . I play the DVD's while pedaling away on my exercise bicycle or running on the treadmill, doing my hamster thing.

I recite the dialogue along with The Wire, I've watched the episodes so often.  And Band of Brothers ,  but I cannot speak all those lines, which is okay, because the dialogue is not as important there. Those are the mainstays.

Then there's Infamous which is fascinating because the actor playing Truman Capote really channels him and I can suspend disbelief and think I'm really watching Capote as he creates In Cold Blood which is, as Capote explains to Harper "Nell" Lee, is a nonfiction novel. She does not understand what he means by this non sequitur , but I do, implicitly. 



There's also Dances with Wolves, Full Metal Jacket,  and Apocalypse Now, which I watch less often because they are fiction masquerading as non fiction, and it is the false parts of these fictions which has begun to ruin each of these for me. 

Then there are two works of fiction, which I accept as showing a type of truth very much like The Wire , sort of the flip side of the non fiction novel, the fictional documentary. These are fiction which frees the author from the legal and journalistic difficulties and limitations imposed on the non fiction author, so the author can simply state the truth as he knows it without having to footnote or reference.

And then there is fiction as truth which is not borne of direct experience, but of imagined experience set against a background of lived experience, and these are Master and Commander (Russell Crowe) and what is for my money, the most romantic movie ever made, The Last of the Mohicans (Daniel Day Lewis.)

In Master and Commander, there is a splendid scene in which the captain of the English ship, Lucky Jack, continues to instruct the midshipmen on the use of a sextant as the French warship bears down on his own ship from his stern, the cannon balls splashing all around, and the midshipmen are, understandably distracted, but the captain continues to turn them back to their task of learning, despite the furious distractions. The midshipmen cannot help but look back over their shoulders, but their captain insists they continue to sight through their sextants, straight ahead, eyes to the bow.  That was a scene I have lived in the hospital, as patients were arresting and resuscitations were launched but the professor of medicine would say, they've got that in hand, what we are learning here is so important we cannot be distracted. It's the way masters impart their precious lode of learning to puppies and the way they convey the importance of that work. There is a truth in that fiction which is pure enough.



There's a sort of psychological verisimilitude in The Last of the Mohicans, which rises from fiction to truth in the scene in which Cora, the tough minded woman straight from the mother ship, just in from England, confronts the deerslayer hero, demanding to know why he had not stopped to bury the slaughtered family they had found and left in place.  He explains they were being tracked by warriors who would have picked up their trail by a tell tale burial, and then he gestures to the stars spread out above them and says, that is the best memorial for that family, the sky they had looked upon, knowing they were neither subject nor servant to any king or any master.  He says he understands she cannot know what he's talking about or be much moved by it, but that's the way it is out here in this land she cannot hope to fathom.  And she replies, quite calmly and completely the master of her own mind, she understands completely, and in fact has never been moved as much by any other place or culture.

She is not trying to impress him, or seduce him or even connect with him. She is simply setting him straight, and calling him for his arrogance to think only he and his people could appreciate this land, the free life and the strong gravity all this exerts on the people living in this New World.  She says you may think you know me for a pampered and superficial female, but I'm quite strong enough and perceptive enough to grasp all this. End of discussion, now let's get past this. It's a statement of such power and passion you can only hope some day you will meet a woman like that, and if you are lucky, maybe you already have, but that's the woman you want.

There is a truth there about what makes a woman desirable, magnetic and important which no essay or psychological analysis or philosophical treatise could ever approach. It's all there, simply stated in a few lines of dialogue following thirty minutes of breath taking action.

Then there are those stories where the author loses you, because he's more concerned about the marketing than the truth.  You never ever have that sense with The Wire, but you see it in Dances with Wolves . Here you have Lt. Dunbar narrating the line about the noble savage, the people who live in perfect harmony with their environment, killing only as many buffalo as they need and not damaging the herd while the white man slaughters the herds, rapes the land and destroys the environment. 

As we learn in S.C. Gywnne's Empire of the Summer Moon, the plains Indians, especially the Comanches, but likey also the Lakota Sioux who Dunbar runs with, were  savage, but not what most of us would call noble. They used rape, mutilation, enslavement as their preferred methods of intimidation and domination. While they may have lived in harmony with nature, they regarded white people and all enemies as less than the animals they killed. They tortured other people, they only killed animals. So that work of fiction becomes hard to watch once you know its flaws and you lose faith in the authors.

Flaws of sentimentality despoil the truthiness of Band of Brothers where Richard Winters is depicted as tormented by guilt over having shot a young German soldier, a SS soldier no less, and he cannot get it out of his mind.   Richard Winters was appalled by this depiction and said he never regretted killing a single German.  Fortunately, there's enough unvarnished truth in the rest of the episodes to carry you by the Stephen Speilberg goo, but it's a close thing. Truth is a perishable commodity and once the fruit gets a rotten spot, the whole thing is in danger of going bad. 

As for Full Metal Jacket  and Apocalypse Now   they rely on that suspension of disbelief--you know they are just fiction but you know there is a strong element of truth in the depiction of the psychology of institutional killing. The language, the Marine phrases, which are the lingua franca of the movie, signal if the authors know the language this well, they were probably there, they lived the experience they are writing about, even if specific situations are imagined, and you can trust what they are saying about the culture of lean mean fighting machine marines who are all bravado and very little real toughness. The sniper girl they finally manage to kill is tougher than the whole bunch of them together.  Theirs is a phony toughness; hers is the real thing. 

The narrator of Apocalypse Now tells you enough you already know is true to keep your faith in him, even if you know the story is fiction. But the Playboy bunnies and the French woman on the plantation are thrown in for marketing and that shatters the feeling of truthiness and you lose faith pretty quickly. Thankfully,  these women made the director's cut but not the movie as it was shown in the movie houses.

So truth lately has become transcendent for me. Don't ask me why.

I suppose it has something to do with Christine O'Donnell and Sharron Angle, for whom truth does not seem very important. They are looking for an effect, for marketing effect, for the wow power of saying something they expect you to react to rather than for the simple statement of truth which does not care how you respond. 

Neither of them is Cora. They care too much for what you think and not enough about the truth.