Off Topic: Fact-based Movies

Last week I was reading a couple of articles on slate.com (here and here) about the various factual inaccuracies of the new movie about Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. I haven't seen the movie, and the articles are actually quite interesting, but they got me thinking about the whole concept of biopics and other movies "based on a true story." It seems like every time one comes out, we see a whole slew of articles about this or that inaccuracy, in a way that never comes up for (for example) novels based on true events.

I think there are a number of interlocking reasons for this obsession with accuracy in films, and I'm going to see if I can try to tease them out.

1) The Categorization of Movies

Movies can be (very broadly) broken down into fictional movies and non-fictional (sometimes called documentaries), roughly analogous to fiction and nonfiction books. Just as there are biographies, science textbooks, histories, and other non-fiction books which ultimately aim at something akin to "truth," there are nonfictional films which attempt to convey the facts or truth about some event - films like Lanzmann's Shoah (about the Holocaust) or Wadleigh's Woodstock to pick a couple of random examples.

On the other hand are fictional films. Nearly every movie that comes out of Hollywood is a fictional movie. Some of these fictional movies are based on events that happened in real life, but they nevertheless continue to be fictional movies. It seems obvious to me (though perhaps less so to others) that these movies can be seen as directly analogous to artwork based on factual events in a variety of artistic fields: painting (say, "Guernica"); music ("1812 Overture"); plays ("The Crucible," Shakespeare's histories and Roman plays), and books (DeLillo's Libra, Oates's Blonde).

If you pick up a copy of a scholarly edition of one of Shakespeare's history plays (say the Arden or the New Cambridge) you will find a section devoted to explaining the actual history of England and its kings and all the ways Shakespeare conflated events and rewrote history. But even when movie versions are made of Richard III or Henry V, no one seems much bothered by the historical accuracy. I think one of the reasons that fictional films are held to different standards is a confusion of categorization on the part of both filmmakers and filmgoers.

As far as I can tell, your average Hollywood producer and your average Hollywood filmgoer are unlikely to have seen or cared about more than one or two documentaries in their whole life, and so they see fictional movies not as a category within film, but as the whole substance of the art of film. For these viewers and creators, fictional films based on fact fill in the gap left by their ignorance of nonfictional films, and they turn to these films to provide them with "truth." This is entirely understandable, but it is also an enormous category error. As with novels based on fact, there are huge variations within fact-based films as to how much fact is used: from James Whale's The Great Garrick, dramatizing an entirely fictional event in the life of a real person (actor David Garrick) to David Fincher's Zodiac, which at least attempts to stay close to Robert Graysmith's account of his Zodiac investigation.

But as interesting as these varietions are, just as one does not look to DeLillo's Libra for an accurate account of Lee Harvey Oswald's life or the JFK assassination, one should not look to The Social Network for an accurate account of Mark Zuckerberg's life. They are fictional narratives which use some level of fact as underpinning, but are not ultimately about uncovering truth about their subjects.

2) Adaptation

The second problem that enters this equation is that of adaptation. In many cases, the source material for a fictional film is not merely facts available to the public but a readily identifiable text, such as a nonfictional book. Biographies, for instance, are often adapted into movies. The trouble here is related to the issues above, but centers around a fundamental misunderstanding of the process of adaptation. James Naremore wrote a fantastic book about Film Adaptation, and I won't by any means attempt to recapitulate even his main points, but one of his points is that the process of adaptation is not about reproducing a text in a different medium, but about "translating" it and using the base text to create a new work of art. (As a side note, this is an enormous issue for novels made into films: the point of making a film is not to accurately reproduce every event and tonal characteristic of the novel - otherwise the audience could simply read the book. A film is it's own art, and should be judged accordingly).

For another analogy, we'll turn back to Shakespeare. Almost all of Shakespeare's English History plays, as well as some of the Tragedies, were "adapted" (in some cases with large blocks of text wholesale plagiarized) from Rafael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Wales. Shakespeare was not attempting to accurately reproduce Holinshed for the edification of his audience; he was attempting to make a narratively interesting play and turned to a historical account of a series of very interesting lives. In other words, Shakespeare was taking a nonfictional text and adapting it into the fictional realm of drama. In the same way, fictional films based on nonfiction texts cannot be seen as "nonfictional," unless the film is explicitly created as documentary (for an example, think of Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room).

In sum, because the average filmgoer thinks the purpose of an adaptation is to faithfully recreate its base-text, she may be led to believe that a film based on a nonfictional text is automatically a nonfictional film, an idea which is patently false.

3. The Illusion of Reality

None of what I've said above is intended to disparage ordinary filmgoers. Most of them would have no trouble distinguishing between a novel and a nonfiction book, or between a Shakespeare play and a text on English history. The problem is that Hollywood wants to have it both ways. Marketing departments want to be able to use that phrase "based on a true story," because it gives films a certain cache; but at the same time, writers and directors want the "poetic license" to create a sound narrative arc. Add on top of this the fact, stated above, that Hollywood is not particularly interested in producing or promoting actual nonfiction films, and you have an area ripe for misunderstanding.

But possibly more important than any of these is the basic fact of movies: that they have always seemed to be a view of reality. We see real(ish) people with real(ish) faces and we are drawn into the illusion much more powerfully than in the case of a novel. Just look at the level to which celebrities have become identified with their on-screen personae and it is clear that we want to believe that what we see on the screen is real, and when someone on slate.com writes an article shattering the illusion, we get mad - either at the writer or at the movie, for having deceived us.