Truth In Fiction

I have this thing for DVD commentaries. I know that the standard procedure is that first, you watch the movie, then you watch with the commentary. I tend to do it the other way around. Sometimes, a commentary is like a guided tour through a movie. Sometimes, when you listen, you find a way to think about the movie differently. Last weekend, since I was bored and had nothing else to do, I decided to watch A Nightmare On Elm Street. I had listened to the comentary before, but hadn't really paid much attention to what Wes Craven and the others were saying. I know that writer/director Wes Craven has a degree in philosophy and that he spent some time teaching humanities. Funny, so many "philosophers" get all gooed up over the philosophic tone of Woody Allen movies (who hasn't a philosophy degree), but ignore directors like Wes Craven, who does. Horror movies are fluff, and not to be taken seriously. Wes Craven said that A Nightmare On Elm Street has a philosophical underpinning, that is, what's underneath is the idea that sleep is the enemy. Sleep, says Craven, symbolizes the lack of knowledge of truth ( I suppose that's a capital "T" truth, which is a pretty big deal in philosophy). He says that to survive, one must be awake, know what the truth is, face it, and deal with it. He says that the parents' unwillingness to deal with Truth causes problems for their children -- namely, a rather ominous problem called Freddy Krueger. Nancy, the heroine, lives because she stays awake. Nancy faces the Truth, and that's what saves her life (at least until part 3 or something). The idea of dealing and seeking truth (oops, Truth) is a grand tradition, not just in philosophy, but culturally. John 8:32 reads, " You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free". Truth is essential for knowledge. To say that we truly "know" something, it must also be True. A world within which there is no Truth, is a dangerous place ( that was difficult to say, given my postmodernist inclinations). We must know, even if knowing the Truth isn't pleasant. In On Truth, Harry G. Frankfurt says, "some people would advise us that there may be realities so frightening, that we would be better off not knowing anything about them." Frankfurt insists that, no matter what may frightenus about the truth, it is always better to know (and face) the facts than to be ignorant of them. Hiding won't lessen the danger that we face. If we know the Truth, Frankfurt tells us, we can better deal with the danger. If the parents of Elm Street had told their children what they did, their children would have been equipped to deal with Freddy. Because they failed to tell their children the Truth, their children died. That is, except for Nancy, who was determined to find out who was haunting her in her dreams. Frankfurt says that when we have opinions without Truth, we are either wrong or unable to develop opinions about the world ( in the absence of facts, what are we to think about?). We cannot know what is going on in the world. Frankfurt writes that we may be blissfully ignorant for a time, but that blissful ignorance only works for a short while. In the end, it only serves to make matters worse. Ignorance, Frankfurt says, leaves us in the dark. Likewise, without Truth, the kids of Elm Street are left unprotected in the realm of dreams -- in the darkness of their sleep. Like the Bible and Craven, Frankfurt says that the Truth is liberating. When I began to think about A Nightmare On Elm Street this way, it reminded me of the movie Jacob's Ladder. The plot is way too dense to explain, but in short, Jacob is a a Vietnam vet who has suddenly found himself plagued by shadows and eerie voices. He thinks that he's losing his mind. He may be being chased by demons. In reality, he's dead. (There's a if-you're-been-paying-attention giveaway right about the middle of the movie. It happens when Jacob, played by Tim Robbins, meets up with a scientist, who tells him what "the Ladder" is). The movie, atmospherically, is dark. It's only when Jacob realizes the Truth that we finally see the light, as his son, who died years earlier, leads him to the Light of Truth. That's when we, the audience, get to see what really happened to Jacob in Vietnam. It wasn't scary demons that were chasing Jacob --it was the Truth. He died. And when he realized that, the demons went away. When Nancy realized that Freddy wasn't real (read: True) he lost his power. Thinking about all of that, I suddenly had one of thsoe moments when you kind of hear your head exploding because you've realized what something really means, and I had a single thought -- Plato's Cave. The Allegory of Plato's Cave, found in Book VII, sec. 1 of Plato's Republic ( for anyone who might want to look it up) is all about the idea of coming out of the shadows and into the light of Truth. Inside of the cave prisoners are chained up in a way that they can see nothing other than the wall in front of them. They cannot move. A fire burns behind them that casts shadows on the wall in front of them. The prisoners think that the shadows that the see and the echoes of the voices that they hear is how the world really is. If we unchain one of the prisoners, Plato says, and take him out of the cave and into the light, he will be blinded by the sun and overwhelmed by what he sees. He will initially refuse to believe that the world that he sees around him in the light is the real world. He will attempt to cling to the reality that he has always known (the world of darkness). Eventually, his eyes will adjust to the light and he will see things as they really are. If we take him back into the cave, he will not be able to function in that un-reality. For Plato, the sun equals knowledge. People must be released from the dark (where we are kept ignorant) and brought into the light if we are to see the world as it truly is. This is so, even if what we see is unpleasant. Even if, in the case of Jacob, the unpleasant truth that we must face is that of our own demise. Some people say that a truth as unpleasant as one's death may be one that is so hurtful that we should (if such a situation were possible) remain unaware of it. A truth like, "you're dead, buddy" may be harmful. There are such things, some say, as pernicious truths. There's a saying, I think it was William Blake, but don't quote me, that goes, " A truth that's told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent". It is not beyond the realm of possibility that someone can tell the truth with the intention of causing harm. Or, to tell a truth that, despite our intentions, does harm. When Norma Desmond is confronted with the Truth in Sunset Boulevard she not only kills Joe Gillis, she goes even more batshit insane than she was when the movie started. Norma's films are her shadows on the wall. Her mansion is her cave. She doesn't want to go out into the light of day. When reality, when Truth, comes crashing in (Joe telling her that he's leaving), she kills the messenger. Or... In Star Wars Episode II, Count Dooku tells Obi-Wan all that the Sith are up to. He knows that Obi-Wan will not accept what he says as true, so why not tell him the Truth? He knows that the Jedi will think that he's lying. That way, the Sith can hide in plain sight, knowing that the Jedi will remain ignorant of the Truth. Or... Which is kind of what Catherine Trammell did in Basic Instinct. She told the world exactly how she was going to kill her boyfriend, by putting it in a book. Her alibi was that no killer would be so stupid as to announce themselves before they commit a crime. She knew that the Truth would be treated as fiction. (This movie was obviously made before idiots did start announcing that they were going to/ had already committed a crime via the internet. Recently, some genius posted on his MySpace that he had robbed a bank right after he robbed it. I don't think that Catherine's alibi would work anymore). Sometimes, people say, we can't "handle the truth", as Col. Jessep tells Lt. Kaffe in A Few Good Men. There's a Radiohead video for the song "Just", where this dude is walking down the street. He falls to the ground for no reason. After wahile, he starts to get people's attention. As a crowd gathers around him, they ask him why is he in the middle of the sidewalk on the ground? He tells them repeatedly that he cannot tell them. Finally, after being badgered, he says that he will say, but God help him for doing so. The camera focuses on his mouth (moving in slow motion. for the life of me, I still can't figure out what he says!), and then it pans back to show the crowd gathered around him. They've all fallen to the ground. Whether they are dead or not, the video does not reveal. But the Truth was at least devastating enough to knock everyone to the ground. The truth, the video says, may not only be harmful, but deadly. So then, perhaps there are things that we should not know. But Frankfurt says that not knowing makes things worse. It's kind of like if you have terminal cancer, and your doctor has decided to not tell you that you do. You go on planning your life, making long-range goals, not knowing that you're dying. The fact is, is that you're going to die. That's the Truth. Perhaps if you knew the Truth, you'd live your life differently, maybe even better. You wouldn't put off things that you'd do now, if you knew that you only had a little time left. In this case, despite the fact that the Truth is that you're dying, it may be better to know what the Truth is. When Jacob thought he was going crazy, he was tormented. When he discovered the truth, he found peace. Now that I think about it, the he-was-dead-the-whole-time motif seems to run through alot of plotlines, including (but certainly not limited to) Donnie Darko, The Sixth Sense, Stay, Carnival of Souls (in this case, a she-was-dead-the-whole-time scenerio), and the Ambrose Bierce short story"An Incident At Owl Creek Bridge". Thinking about Plato's Cave, I thought of a movie that also follows the dead-the-whole-time vibe, and is another cave-esque flick. I thought of The Others. In the movie, Grace has a couple of kids who suffer from XP (xeroderma pigmentosum, and actual genetic disease) that renders them unable to protect themselves from sunlight. Exposure to sunlight can be fatal. As a consequence, Grace and her children live in a world of darkness -- cave like. As the film progresses, we're lead to think that the house is haunted (ghosts are shadows of what once lived, you could say), but we discover that the drawn curtains kept out more than the sunlight. It is in fact Grace and her children that are doing the haunting. They're dead. They refuse (initially) to believe that they are. During a seance, they declare that they are not dead. They're being dragged out into the world of the living, into reality, and they refuse to see the world as it truly is ( the fact that the new, living tennants have removed the curtains goes to show this as well. With the curtains gone, Grace and her children have nowhere to hide from the Truth). The Truth is unpleasant, indeed. When Grace admits to what she did (she killed her children and then herself), the three are finally stepping out of the cave and into the light of reality. After first rejecting the truth, the three realize that they will never be the same (in fact another ghost tells them this). As the film closes, Grace's daughter, Anne says that the light of the sun doesn't hurt anymore. For Plato, for Wes Craven, and Frankfurt, the Truth does not hurt us. It can only help us to deal with the world in a competent, dare I say empowered way -- well equipped to face whatever comes to harm us. Even though death is unpleasant, it is better to know. It is better to feel the brilliance of the sun -- to know the Truth rather than to live governed by irrational fear and error.