I read
Picnic at Hanging Rock when I was about eleven. It was a well-worn paperback from a second-hand bookshop, and I have no idea where it is now (I don't know why this is important but it is). It's the true, legendary story of three Australian schoolgirls and a teacher who, in 1900, go missing during a school field trip - a picnic to Hanging Rock. They (or, to be macabre, their bodies) are never found, nor is there a single trace of them - even in pre-CSI days, you would think they would leave something: a footprint, a piece of linen or thread from their dresses, even hair goddammit.
This mystery has haunted me for years, along with the mystery of what happened to Amelia Earhart and who the Somerton man is (this one has apparently been solved - but has it really? Do I really want it to be?). Later, when I was studying English Lit at varsity, we read Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It drove me Nuts (capital 'N' intended - I'm an editor, so just assume every error is intended. It'll save both of us time).
Chronicle of a Death Foretold tells the story of the murder of a man named Santiago in a small town in Colombia some time in the 1950s. The foretelling bit isn't an issue - I'm okay with magical realism. The novel suggests that the murderers are a pair of brothers, the Vicario brothers, who are avenging the honour of their sister. (They murder him, his family murders them, their family retaliates, etc.) But there is some doubt. The novel never definitively names the brothers as the murderers and there are other characters who have reason to hate Santiago, which apparently is enough to murder someone.
Sparknotes and similar sites will tell you that the Vicario brothers are, without a doubt, the murderers, but it's not true, so don't write that in your essay. The story is told by an unnamed 'unreliable narrator', who is recalling the events long after they happened. Bits and pieces are missing, and it's possible that the narrator is remembering the whole event incorrectly - or is the murderer themselves. So what we have at the end of the novel is a whodunnit without a 'who'. So just a 'dunnit'. Trust me. I read the thing three times, determined to prove my lecturers wrong and solve the case.
One of my lecturers claimed that one of the themes of the novel is the nature of storytelling itself. What we expect and how violated we feel when our expectations are not met. Well done. Expectations violated. I suspect that if I ever met the author and asked him who the murderer(s) was, he'd say he doesn't know. Sometimes I really hate post-modern literature.
But Chronicle of a Death Foretold is fiction (although it is apparently loosely based on a true story). It doesn't claim any relationship to the truth. (Truth.) Also sometimes crimes like these don't have a resolution. The police have evidence, but no way to piece the evidence together to form the profile of the murderer. Although frustrating, we have to accept this or go mad every single minute of the day.
Imagine my reaction when, this week (i.e. 28 years after first reading the book), I found out that Picnic at Hanging Rock is not a true story. It's a local legend, but there is no evidence that it is true - not a newspaper article or editorial, no police reports, nothing. This mystery has lived in my brain and I have worried about those girls and what might have happened to them. For. Nothing. Why would someone do this? More importantly, why would someone do this to a reader who already has trust issues?
Fargo, both the movie and the series, used the tactic more recently. The writers and directors and producers who take our money argue that an audience will trust the storytellers more if we think the story is true. So they begin the story with the disclaimer, "This is a true story." They then explain where the events took place and when, hammering in the last nail in what turns out to be the coffin of our trust.
None of these storytellers think ahead, apparently. Yes, we trust you in the moment and suspend disbelief so high that it's pretty much a UFO in the sky. But what happens when a person's trust is violated? You feel angry, right? You think back through your interactions with the other person and brand them 'untrustworthy'. You feel violated. I really enjoyed watching both versions of Fargo. But once I learned that they were fiction and not the true stories I had believed them to be, I felt like they had experimented on me and without my consent.
If they had begun their tales with "Based on a true story" or "Based on true stories that happened [where] in [when]", I might have had slackened the rope I'm using to hang them. Alternatively, they could have ended with a similar disclaimer that acknowledged that the story was in fact not true or not entirely true. It's a small difference, but it acknowledges that at least part of the story is fiction. I would have been annoyed when I learnt that there is no truth to the story, but I would not have been so angry. I would have appreciated the (semi-)honesty.
Instead, I am POed. Part of the reason I am so Angry at this ploy is that the storytellers acknowledge the sleight of hand they played with our trust. They said that they could get away with more when they had the audience's trust. Seriously? Are you children who don't understand ethics or the implicit contract between creator and audience or just social mores? There's a scene in The Office where Michael is giving a seminar and he advises the salespeople to lie to their customers. He says, "You bought it. And now you can't return it." The manager of the branch says, simply, "But now we think you're a liar."
Now we think you're liars.
