False Narratives Part 6

So where are we going with all this?

Obviously to a great extent this is just noodling. I’ve been thinking about the narratives we create to explain ourselves, and one another. I’ve recently run into a situation in the day job where a legend had been built about my actions, and since I didn’t find it particularly true, I tracked it down a bit and did some analysis. The truth of the matter was rather dull in comparison to the legend that was being presented, and although there was a germ of reality at the core of the legend, the full truth was strongly contradictory to the full impact of the legend. The legend was probably fostered because it provided an excuse for actions by others that were of a dubious nature, but more to the point, made those others look good. The legend initially made me look bad, but then I realized that I could play the legend to my advantage, so I let it be. It’s a win-win situation, based on a false narrative. Strange.

There is a difference between a lie and the development of legend. A lie is knowingly contrary to the facts, told for whatever purpose. The development of legend starts with truth, and makes that truth a better story, often casting aside the truth as the story becomes more interesting or more important than the truth it is supposedly illuminating. There’s so many reasons for legend building that it mostly depends on what legend it is you’re talking about to know which ones apply. We’ve been talking about the West as a whole, and talked in a broad sense about the myth of the West. The legends of the West in many ways evolve insofar as they support the myth. That is, there is a central, underlying truth in the myth that spins the legends in a direction that supports or illuminates that underlying truth, setting aside the specific ostensive truth that the legends purport to be about.

If legends are simply narratives, than the best narrator will create the best legends. And by far, the best narrator I know of is the motion picture. The story-telling ability of film far exceeds any other medium. There is power, immediacy, drive, characters that, on the screen, are literally larger than life. Of course, films can be non-narrative, but when a film sets out to tell a story, and does so successfully, it can’t be beat. At least once upon a time films were limited by constraints of feasibility, but CGI has eliminated almost every conceivable barrier to our suspension of disbelief. Anything is possible in the movies. If it’s done well, we’ll buy it. Hollywood has had a lot of nicknames over the years; the Dream Factory is certainly not a bad one, from our perspective.

As we’ve said, the movies set about making westerns virtually from Day One of Hollywood. Which means that, from Day One, Hollywood was in the legend-making business. Movies had the ability to tell the stories, and as they told the stories, they had the history of the stories already told, and the polishing of the chestnuts, the retellings becoming ever more legendary and ever less historical. By the 50s, the idea of making a serious historical picture would be quite a novelty, as compared to the teens, when making a serious historical picture would exactly be the goal. Hollywood knew what it was doing. And The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence is the perfect expression of it. By the early 60s, there was simply little question that most movies were about something other than the reality of the Old West. “This is the west, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” The particular legend being printed is about the pacific James Stewart character, a lawyer, bringing justice to the West by standing up to the bad guy Liberty Valence character, and, of course, shooting him. An act of incredible courage, a fulcrum moment in the switch of the West from Wild to Tame. As a result of the event, Stewart becomes a hero. And eventually a senator, all because of that event. Except, of course, it’s not true. It’s a false narrative. But the false narrative is better than the true narrative. We’re making a movie here. Print the legend.

In the end, we move from fact, which is non-narrative, to history, which is an attempt to organize facts in order to make some sense out of them (and which is, perhaps intrinsically, dishonest in its selection of which facts to organize), to legend, which is an attempt to organize the best narratives (at which point honesty is no longer relevant). Underlying it all might be myth, which can be considered one way to do the organization, that is, we select the narratives based on their metanarrative relevance.

So false narratives can serve a purpose, either personally or culturally. And since often the falsity of the narrative is not even a conscious aspect of the narrative, the morality of honesty versus dishonesty is theoretically irrelevant. All that’s left, in the end, is the narrative itself, and the narrative will be judged on its strengths as a narrative, not on its strengths as a vehicle for iteration of facts. And one of its strengths as a narrative will easily be how well it touches on any underlying inviolable truths.

When the fact becomes the legend, print the legend.