Truth in Storytelling

David Anaxagoras asks, “Do writers have any obligation to the truth?”

I caught the first part of ABC’s new drama Eli Stone tonight. I turned it off when it became clear that the episode would revolve around the titular lawyer nobly taking on a woman’s case against a vaccine manufacturer for causing her son’s autism. The problem? Vaccines — and more specifically, the mercury-based preservative formerly used in most of them — don’t cause autism… But do writers have an obligation to the truth? They might as well base an episode on the “fact” that frogs cause warts, knowing full well that they will be stirring up an awful lot of anti-frog sentiment.

A writer of fiction is a professional liar. That’s really what it boils down to. In that regard, a writer not only lacks any obligation to the truth, but their job is to actively undermine it. It’s only a question of how far to take the lies in order to tell the best possible story.

CSI is an incredibly popular television show that uses science to solve crimes. Excuse me, let me rephrase that … CSI is an incredibly popular television show that perverts science to solve crimes. I don’t exaggerate when I say that I’ve watched episodes of this show slackjawed at the fathomless pit of crazy bullshit masquerading as DNA science and mass spectrometry. I mean, what the fuck?! Seriously, you’re going to figure out what perfume the killer wore using mass spec? Balls.

Ok, but here’s the thing, the writers of CSI have to pervert science in horrible, Godless ways to make an entertaining story, because, quite frankly, science is boring as shit. Anyone who’s worked in a lab for any length of time can back me up on this one: it is sometimes literally like watching water drip from a faucet. Often, it pays about as well as that, too. As much as we would like a writer to stay true to the reality they’re depicting, truth can get in the way of a good story.

Accepting that writers are liars and that the lies they tell are needed to make interesting and compelling stories, we arrive at the real meat behind David’s question: is it wrong for writers to make up a story that can have a negative impact on the way people think about the world around them?

Was it wrong for Jaws to propagate wild anti-shark propaganda, to the point of literally making people afraid to go into the water? I don’t know, but it’s a damn fine film. Is it wrong that Eli Stone propagates the theory that vaccination correlates to autism? I don’t know, but I think some dubious story about vaccines and autism is a hell of a lot less scary than a giant people-eating shark.

The problem with Eli Stone — which is available for free, though heavily ad-supported, viewing at abc.com — isn’t that it peddles a load of crap about vaccines and autism, but rather that it does so in an incredibly uninteresting way. That is the sin it commits. The show acknowledges that it’s basically making stuff up about vaccines and autism, and the main character’s triumphant closing arguments amount to “please ignore facts and evidence, and have faith in what I’m saying.” I’m a huge fan of Hackers, but not even I was buying the shit Johnny Lee Miller was shoveling. It’s not malicious or diabolical or dishonest — it’s stupid. If anything, you could argue that the show didn’t lie enough to make the story interesting, which, for a show having to do with lawyers, is pretty frickin’ weak.