Books, Arts & Manners: What Is Truth?

THIS IS an age of eroding boundaries; the one between fact and fiction is no exception.

For example, any performer on a major soap opera can tell you about stacks of warning letters he or she receives from viewers about some other character on the soap, about some secret vices that character has revealed only to a third one and some ten million TV watchers. Soap-opera fans can no longer tell that the show is not reality. And what about the much less sappy souls who nevertheless believe that what they see in a documentary is the truth tout court? It never occurs to them that there exists a thing called point of view, and that inclusion or exclusion of data is consciously or unconsciously affected by it, that the filmmaker’s choices represent a slant on the facts, on the “truth.”

JS

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John Simon

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THIS IS an age of eroding boundaries; the one between fact and fiction is no exception.

For example, any performer on a major soap opera can tell you about stacks of warning letters he or she receives from viewers about some other character on the soap, about some secret vices that character has revealed only to a third one and some ten million TV watchers. Soap-opera fans can no longer tell that the show is not reality. And what about the much less sappy souls who nevertheless believe that what they see in a documentary is the truth tout court? It never occurs to them that there exists a thing called point of view, and that inclusion or exclusion of data is consciously or unconsciously affected by it, that the filmmaker’s choices represent a slant on the facts, on the “truth.”