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THE INVENTION OF LYING
I've been thinking about the invention of lying.
Maybe it's the pair of Virginia gubernatorial campaign ads I just saw on TV in which the word "dishonest" was hurled with a fine disregard for any truth but truthiness.
But, yes, I also mean the film by comedian Ricky Gervais by that name, which imagines an alternate world where everybody tells the truth to each other all the time because they cannot even imagine lying. Imagine going on dates or working with colleagues who can't dodge or fudge or fib, even a little bit. Hell would be other people, the filmmaker suggests.
What would politics be like before the invention of lying?
President Obama: "Americans are stupid, fat and easily manipulated. They need direction from cool, smart and glamourous people like me and Michelle, or surely they will continue to do incredibly stupid things like vote Republican or oppose national health insurance."
Gov. Mike Huckabee: "Maybe I'm evangelical, but I can still be cool. You can be cool, too, if you vote for me. Arkansas can be cool. Watch me play."
Mayor Bloomberg: "Vote for me because someone big has to take care of all the stupid little people. Otherwise they will band together and tear down this great city upon which my personal fortunes are built."
"The Invention of Lying," for all its flaws, has a virtue few contemporary films do: It makes one think.
Comics are the philosophers of our time. Funny can't be faked. Funny has to rest on truth, on the rueful recognition of the suffering we endure -- and the suffering we inflict -- and on the point of view from which suffering can make us laugh.
The invention of lying was the invention of crime and religion. By portraying "the man in the sky" (who gives us mansions when we die) as the giant fib of a son distressed by his dying mother's terror, the film could be viewed as taking cheap and easy shots at religion. (E.g., "This wonderfully subversive farce makes comic mincemeat of the Judeo-Christian ethic," wrote film critic Peter Travers of Rolling Stone.)
But cheap shots at religion are hardly subversive in this day and age. The truly subversive thought of Ricky Gervais is that art and religion and love share at their deep heart's core the same commitment: to make reality tolerable by telling lies. The Greek philosophers taught that truth and goodness and beauty must all point in the same direction, albeit in complicated ways. It took the moderns, embraced most articulately by Oscar Wilde, to declare that the proper aim of art is "the telling of beautiful untrue things." So imagine a world where fiction does not exist. People are still hungry for stories, but they would have to ransack history for tales, so movies consist of famous talking heads telling historical anecdotes.
At the bottom of this funny movie is a bleak view of life: Truth points to despair, and hatred, and the reality of oblivion and meaninglessness. It is only through lies that beauty and goodness have a shot.
I appreciate the clarity of that point of view because it points me to the core of my own truth -- my faith, if you will have it so -- love is real. It is inscribed into the creation of our universe and is its one core, true, animating principle.
The truth about the good is that it is beautiful. From that point of view -- its relentless commitment to uncover the bleak truth about reality -- Rick Gervais' vision is admirable.
Oscar Wilde on his deathbed converted to Catholicism.
For each, there remains, stubbornly and ineradicable, that tormentor: hope.
