Liar, Liar! Pants on Fire!
In a recent blog entry on Waking Vixen, Audacia Ray reflects on how the writing on her blog has changed, and perhaps become a little more guarded:
These days I am sometimes afraid my writing is somehow dishonest, disingenuous because I’m not relating every orgasm, every late night soul-searching moment, every weird detail.
I wondered about this when I began keeping this blog. Making these films is my passion, but it is also my livelihood, and this blog exists to serve a very clear agenda – to promote Comstock Films and help us sell our movies so we can keep making them. Both because of this, and because there are parts of my life and my family’s life that are private, this blog is very much a calculated and crafted bit of “honesty” about the travails and triumphs of doing this work.
In that way, it’s not so different from the films that I make.
At its best, like David Simon’s stunning Homide: A Year on the Killing Streets of Baltimore or Anthony Lloyd’s haunting memoir My War Gone By, I Miss It So, non-fiction reads like a perfect novel—with the added amazement that real live human beings lived the story.
For the rest of us, those of us not quite as gifted as Mr. Simon or Mr. Lloyd, the conceit of the “truth” is a bit of a (much needed) crutch. “Based on a true story” or similar gives the writer or filmmaker a nice dodge for when things don’t quite add up so perfectly as they do in Homicide or My War Gone By.
In offering our audiences “the truth”, we ask for a little patience, a little indulgence, and if we don’t abuse their patience and indulgence, audiences are usually very generous. I very deliberately chose a documentary style for making sex films because I knew that it would help smooth over some of the rough patches that are part and parcel of the very low-budget world of porn, and I am ever grateful that our audiences are generous when they watch our films.
But I am also mindful. Mindful that in a memoir, blog, or a documentary film, “the truth” is always a little slippery. Anyone with any intellectual honesty knows how much their “truth” is shaped by both emphasis and omission, and the deciding factors in exclusion or inclusion can be generous or selfish, accidental or purposeful, naive or cunning. This does not make memoirists, or bloggers, or documentarians liars—or at least it doesn’t have to.
But it should make us thoughtful; thoughtful of what we include and exclude, thoughtful of what we emphasize and what we soften, thoughtful of what we choose to reveal and what we choose to conceal. On this there are no absolutes—and that’s what makes it interesting!
