ELAYNE RIGGS: Would I lie to you?
Galaxy Quest is one of my favorite movies. I mean, go wrong with Alan Rickman and Tony Shalhoub, you know? And even the nominal stars of the ensemble, Tim Allen and Sigourney Weaver, go down pretty easily in this brilliant vehicle. But there’s one scene that makes me cringe every time I see it.
The bad guy, Sarris, has coerced Jason Nesmith to confess to Mathesar, who idolizes "Captain Taggart" and the Galaxy Quest crew, that he and his fellow Terrans are ordinary actors, something Jason has been trying to figure out how to do without success for much of the movie as Mathesar’s people have no concept of, I guess, showbiz. But it’s the way Sarris forces his hand that makes me squirm:
Jason: Mathesar, there’s no such person as Captain Taggart. My name is Jason Nesmith. I’m an actor. We’re all actors.
Sarris: He doesn’t understand. Explain as you would a child.
Jason: We, uh, we pretended. [On Malthesar’s blank look.] We lied. I’m not a commander. There’s no National Space Exploration Administration. We don’t have a ship… It’s all fake. Just like me.
Mathesar: But why…?
Jason: It’s difficult to explain. On our planet, we, uh… we pretend to… to entertain.
I was reminded of this scene again just recently when blogger Skot Kirruk at Izzle pfaff! said much the same thing:
[begin quote] I try not to lie. And when I do lie, I try to lie in such a hyperbolic, overblown fashion that I hope that it is patently obvious that I’m just making shit up. I probably fail at this, though. It’s just too easy to lie. Writers lie all the time, because most of the time, life is just fucking dull. So we pull out our little tricks, and we lie. We insert or import in false details to serve an anecdote… Writers are liars. Don’t trust them.
And especially don’t trust me, assuming that you even consider me a writer, as opposed to some twitchy dilettante. I’m also an actor, so I’m also trained in lying. I think I’m pretty good at it… It’s no good protesting that when people go to the theater (and nobody does any more, but never mind), that the audience is damn well expecting that I lie to them: it’s my job. It’s no good because we are delighted to take those very same skills and exploit them for our own base wants and needs.
I have been taught to lie, we realize at some point. This could be awesome.
And so we do. But it’s more sinister than even that. It’s more sinister because actors aren’t just trained to lie, they are trained to lie with the unshakable conviction that they are not lying at all… Don’t ever listen to actors or writers, or worse, some unholy combination of both. They are liars and aren’t to be trusted. [end quote]
Naturally, I believe everything I’ve just quoted to be absolute hogwash. In other words, a lie.
There’s a world of difference between lying and pretending, between lying and embellishing, between lying and storytelling. Oh sure, there are little nuanced areas where they meet, where fish tales and whoppers cavort, enchanting exaggerations created to entertain and perhaps to make a point about something — or maybe just build up the ego of the teller.
But the stories that move you, straight down into your bones — they’re all true. Even the imaginary stories. Aren’t they all?
And the people who tell you those stories, whether on pixels or paper or with their voices and bodies, they’re not liars either. They’re the most hallowed of truth-tellers, showing us the human condition in all its wondrous variations. They’re the jesters in the courts of the arrogant kings, given dispensation to verbalize their actual thoughts, to literally speak truth to power.
You know who the real liars are as well as I do.
The arrogant kings and their descendents, those are the ones of whom you need to beware. They have your lives in their hands, and they and their minions are ready, willing and unfortunately able to squeeze as much of those lives out of you as they can get away with. And they do a lot of it with honeyed phrases and propagandistic feel-good buzzwords that they never define. Because we all know what "freedom" is, don’t we? And we all know the meaning of "support" or how to "value" a family, right? So they and their minions keep repeating their mealy-mouthed nebulous vagaries (in other words, lies) until we "loyal" subjects become utterly convinced that we’re hearing the truth. Partly because we want to believe — who doesn’t want to believe that people in positions of authority have anything but our best interests at heart and would therefore strive to be honest with us whenever possible? — and partly because we’re now well trained to view everything as suspect. If everything is propaganda, then nothing is, everything has equal weightlessness.
But deep down, we’re still omnivorous humans, and we crave substance.
And that’s what stories do. Myths and legends and folk tales and fantasies tell us what we want to believe is possible, what we shouldn’t be afraid to face within us, what we can aspire to with bravery and community and maybe a little bit of luck, what binds us together. The redeeming truth of the "lie scene" in Galaxy Quest is that Jason needs to purge himself of his royal-level arrogance in order to be what he’s always pretended to be. That, as with Dorothy, his courage and his heart and his brain and his home were within him all along.
Stories tell us what we most need to hear, what we most fear, what we most desire, what we most dread. If we stop believing in the absolute power and truth of stories, we have voluntary ceded what makes us the most human. We should hold these truths to be self-evident.
Elayne Riggs is news editor of ComicMix, and has trouble lying.
One of the things I love about GALAXY QUEST (and it's also one of MY fave movies as well) is that Jason and the others ARE liars at the start. By the end, they ARE telling the truth — they have become the ship's crew that they have pretended to be. They see the value in what they do.I used to talk to my step-father about fiction. He never read it; didn't believe in it. Histories were all right; biographies. Non-fiction. I told him there was no such thing as "non-fiction". In every case, the author was deciding which facts to tell, which to emphasize and which, who was important to the event or the life being told. Just exactly what fiction writers do. All in the name of the STORY they were telling about the event or the person.I used to say that stories were lies in service to the truth but i think that's a little glib now. I was going for the phrase. The fact is — we're storytellers, every single one of us, and we use stories every day as part of our social interaction. The rector at my church — I'm an agnostic who goes to church regularly; go figure — calls the stories the ATOMS of society. They're the building blocks of our communication, the way we try to convey information. Do we embelish sometimes? Yes, you bet. Why? You know why if you've ever listened to someone who can't tell a story. The listener's eyes glaze over. They stop listening. As Denny used to tell me when he was my editor, you can talk about whatever you want so long as you tell them a story. A good story. That's how you have a right to their time.A HACK is a liar. They pick your pocket of your money or your time. Maybe both. Jason and the rest of the crew are all hacks at the start of GALAXY QUEST. They change by the end and HOW that happens makes the movie a great story. IMO.
Of all the fans of fiction in the world, there is one group who stick inflexibly that the stories they read are factual, not just invented fabrications of a man being paid by the word.They are Sherlock Holmes fans.It is called "playing the game". Sherlockians state that the adventures of Holmes are biographical, written by Dr. John Watson, and edited by Doyle. They write massive research works to prove this point; works that would put comics fans trying to decide if Superman or The Hulk is stronger to SHAME.And to my knowledge, not one of them has been put away for not being able to draw the line between reality and fantasy. And bless them for it.The person I hate more than anyone is the one who interjects into a conversation between two comics fans (or even more commonly, two pro wrestling fans) and says "Hey, you know this is all pretend, right?" Well, God bless you, sir. I was four hundred dollars away from saving up enough for my own piece of Wakandan Vibranium which I planned to fashion into power armor – you've saved me from a lifetime of embarassment and shame. Of COURSE we know it's pretend, and it's a great deal of fun to have a conversation as if it were true, and try to explain logically the madness of such storylines. These are the same types of people who used to say Dungeons and Dragons was bad fior our kids because they'd not be able to tell when the game stopped. (Here's a hint – it's when you put the dice away).Lying is part and parcel of entertainment. I pity the people who cannot tell the difference, since they will be ultimately be disappointed (Yes, Mathesar's scene in GQ is the best one in the stellar film) as well as those literal-minded people who cannot grasp the magic of the difference between the two (Granny Weatherwax in Pratchett's _Wyrd Siters_ sees her first play and can't grasp why everyone is saying they don't know who killed the king when a whole THEATER full of people saw it were the man with the rusty dagger)."Romance at short notice was her speciality. " –Saki (H.H. Munro), "The Open Window"