A watch of Bad Trip yesterday and Shattered Glass this morning put me in a reflective mood about the one thing we all do on some level or another and why. While it’s impossible to argue that lying is an inherently benign act, it can have its virtues. Each of these films illustrates that in very different ways.
While Bad Trip is ostensibly an expansion of Eric André’s chaos agent persona that he has cultivated over several seasons of his truly anarchic The Eric Andre Show as well as his own standup (and that he just seems to actually be), it also has something of a sweet streak to it that I was unprepared for going in. By placing so many random strangers in essentially emergency situations of varying degrees, we get to see how people react to those moments in a very unfiltered way. While this has always been true of hidden camera and prank shows as far back as Candid Camera and up to something like Jackass, there’s a control to those, and an interest in creating a humorous end product, that lessens whatever insights might be gained into the inner workings of the human brain. At least I can’t remember being moved almost to tears by those shows, at least apart from laughing so much. Yet the way some of the complete strangers try and figure out a way to make the ridiculous situations that André and company cook up at least somewhat less so, and even to avoid harm coming to not only themselves but these strange people that are suddenly in their lives, is touching. It’s actually a bit of a life-affirming film in some ways and I know I can use that wherever I can get it these days.
In Shattered Glass, we have a biopic (not my favorite genre) about the journalist Stephen Glass who essentially fleeced The New Republic magazine for four years by fabricating the majority of the stories he wrote for them. It’s one of those few types of biopic that I actually enjoy in that it focuses on the specific series of events that led to Glass’ downfall instead of attempting to tell an entire life story in two hours. And it’s a fascinating series of events that are highly entertaining to watch unfold. Especially with the often-miscast (but not here) Hayden Christensen as Glass. At first, he has all the confidence and even the swagger of a young man at the top of his game. By the end, he’s reduced to simpering and whining his way through every interaction he has as the mountain of lies comes to light. Here was a person that had the whole world of journalism in front of him, ripe for the taking, and he had earned it through the one way that was sure to lead to him never getting it. When lies like this are told it’s essentially an immediate anxiety trigger for me because you spend the rest of your time after putting it out there waiting for it to be found out. That sort of thing tends to compound as well until you’re living in a constant state of fight-or-flight. And Glass is portrayed here as the sort of person to fly. It’s a bit of a startling mirror to hold up to whatever small infractions (or perhaps not-so-small) you might have made in your own life and wonder what sort of internal chaos you may have created for yourself.
We have such colorful language to describe lying. There are little white ones, there’s doing it through your teeth, you can do it until you’re blue in the face, you can be two-faced while doing it. The thesaurus is full of all sorts of evocative words that can be used in place of the shorter versions: perfidious, mendacious, duplicitous, guileful, tricky. It can also, adversely, be used to mean staying in one place in a prone position, which is often the last thing a liar can or want to do. At least not unguardedly. Anyway, we clearly have a fascination with our ability to lie.
Other animals may lie, but in service of survival and clearly not with words. They can do it with sound, sure, but they don’t (as far as we know) have the ability to tell a fellow animal that they look nice when that might not be the truth. At least, not in a manner that spares the other’s feelings. That is, as far as we know, a purely human need; to want to be lied to to make things easier for us. In that way, we can mirror other animals in that we do it for survival. Just in a very different manner. We are so strange.