Perfect Lies

The story-shaped self - at least this decade's or this generation's version of authenticity, has required us to define ourselves by the words we use to frame our lives. The words we use over dinner, over beers, on a date, in school, on our blogs. We want to tell our lives, and have it unfold as we've seen lives unfold on television. My mind plays a few tricks as I imagine - prior to TV and movies, how did people conceive of their lives unfolding? Stories were anecdotal and meant to teach lessons, or just so morals, and not intended so much, as they were passed down, to illustrate a perfect start and finish. It was under these morals we fashioned selves that met socialized, religiously sanctioned lives, authentic or not - they were the lives lived. This isn't to say that books and their fiction didn't have an effect on one's determination of their being - influence their 'authenticity' somewhat, but a book unfolds slowly, where as the passive act of watching feeds you. You are taught by what entertains you, especially as communication methods become more savvy and fold in the psychology of Gestalt, and what we passively watch trains us.

Last week I heard film-maker Guy Maddin talk about his work. He told long, beautifully funny stories about being a child and falling in love with sights and sounds of film and radio. He spoke of the media as wrapping him, folding him in, covering him like a blanket. He eroticized his influences, the women of these films out his grasp but tantalizing and desirous, and out of this desire, an adult Maddin emerges - his adult self shaped by these moving memories - at once time based, and then contained. The narrative framework contains, the movie loop contains, and experience contained - a time capsule of desire that can be revisited and refelt again and again within hour allotments, re-experienced and relieved in every film Maddin makes for himself in order to satisfy this desire.
Maddin's stories sped onward - they were rapid and peppery - and filled with, lies. I think they were lies - the kind that leaves the audience whispering afterward - "was that part about the chimp, true??" But they were true lies - to coin a movie - because they were his. His embellishments and his narrative. These were the lies that Maddin shaped his self with, and his art, and because they were his - his creation - they were true. Who cares if the chimp really pistol whipped him (literally), the carnival ride we take hearing it, is worth the same suspension of disbelief. (You likely won't die on the rollercoaster, but you feel like you might be in danger). Thrills are great lies, but when you experience them, they are still true. The thrill is perhaps the perfect definition of the true-lie.
Is it the millenial moment to have to lie to tell the truth? Is this result of the society of the spectacle, that in our speech and in our framing out authentic selves that we lie, but these lies become and are more true than what other plain words might say? The truth of a story is useless, it is illegitimacy which has value. These little lies acting as manifest destiny, that with their retooling and retelling the narrator will get closer to the truth of themselves each time, until their story has completed the full circle. At full circle it might be bare, stripped, naked, without disguise. It may be uncomfortable or may be charming. But the truth must now be very charismatic to compete with the great lies we have been telling all along. These charismatic truths have begun to shape shift and appear like spectacle, confusing and maybe even conspiratorial.