Truthiness and factiness

Blurring the lines between fiction and fact

By Jack V. Booch

When attempting to explain away the astonishing array of historical inaccuracies in the Showtime drama The Tudors, writer/creator Michael Hirst proudly proclaimed, "Showtime commissioned me to write an entertainment, a soap opera, and not history."

My instant reaction was incredulity - why call the damn show The Tudors at all if biographical detail is less important to you than populist pap? Why not call it One Medieval Life to Live instead?

Hirst went on to say, "we wanted people to watch it," implying that accurate historical drama is somehow unwatchable.

The whole thing calls to mind the old bio-musicals (the precursors of today's blockbuster bio-pics), in which Hollywood played fast and loose with the facts of their so-called subjects' lives (and all of this set, naturally, to saccharine hit tunes).

Adding insult to injury, Hirst blathered on inanely, explaining his rationale for eliminating one of the well-known Princess Marys from the storyline as, "I didn't want two Princess Marys on the call sheet because it might have confused the crew."

Gasp.

Flashback to James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, which sparked the recent landslide of scandals surrounding falsified literary memoirs.

Frey was crucified for having embellished his memoir (he should have been crucified for writing it poorly), but at least he valued the truth enough to try and subvert it. Hirst and his ilk simply cast fact aside with open disregard.

Oregon's own Margaret B. Jones's infamous memoir Love and Consequences turned out to be beyond the pale regarding exaggeration and has since been withdrawn from publication. Jones abandoned factuality in favor of 'factiness.' In fact (pardon the pun), Jones went positively overboard and invented whole swaths of life experience that were complete balderdash.

But again, at least Jones had the good sense to hide her crime. At least she didn't disregard our concerns and confess her laziness right off the bat.

There have always been charlatans and hucksters at large - that we've been catching them in record numbers lately should be encouraging to us. Conversely, the blithe disregard for facts and accuracy exhibited by hacks like Hirst should have us all up in arms. After all, he commits his crimes in our name, professing devotion to our entertainment.

Stephen Colbert, host of The Colbert Report, recently contributed to the lexicon the delicious noun 'truthiness' in an attempt to satirize the current tendency in the media and politics to project validity onto falsehood.  

Or did he?

The term appears to have been used as early as the Elizabethan Era to describe - get this - the truth. Such irony abounds in careful research.

The essential quality of a 'fact' is as follows: "an assertion or observation which can be proven true or false." Notions of truthiness and factiness fly in the face of ascertainable truth and fact.

Example: the statement "There is no God" cannot be a fact, simply because it cannot be proven true or false anymore than the assertion that "God exists" can be definitively demonstrated.

So why all the confusion?

In the end, I guess it has something to do with the existence of phonies like Michael Hirst. If we don't value the truth, if we don't value history, if all we care about is rapid entertainment... well, as a man reapeth, so shall he soweth.

Stand up for truth. Stand up for meaning. Turn off The Tudors!