Truth, fact and fiction

I love the expression ‘in my humble opinion’. That’s because it isn’t just wrong. It’s wrong in so many different ways.

After all, how can an opinion be humble or proud? Or pretty much anything other than right or wrong, well-founded or fanciful? The holder of the opinion may be humble, but if so, why advance the opinion anyway? Surely putting forward an opinion at all shows a certain confidence in it, if not downright arrogance?

Anyway, in my humble opinion, the two best pieces of TV I’ve watched in recent months are Unbelievable and Unorthodox. The fact that both titles are negative adjectives may be unnerving but is certainly unintentional.

Merritt Wever and Toni Collette as the detectives in Unbelievable
Fictionalised versions of real characters

Unbelievable is based on a compelling account of police work, led by two women detectives, on a serial rapist, with the linked story of a young woman whose rape complaint wasn’t believed by far less bright cops.

Unorthodox is drawn from the novel, built around her experiences, of a woman who broke free from an Orthodox Jewish community in New York, and the difficulties she faced both in her earlier existence and in coming to terms with the new one.

Shira Haas in Unothodox
The lake scene is one of the most poignant in the series

Both are works of fiction based on historical fact. This is not a spoiler, but there is a strand in Unorthodox to do with music which does not correspond to the real character’s history. But it’s powerful and engrossing, so it’s a welcome addition to the story. And it certainly doesn’t detract from its psychological truth.

Similarly, in Unbelievable, the names of the female protagonists have been changed. In the case of the young rape victim, this is principally to protect her identity. In the case of the two outstanding detectives, it is because though they are drawn from real figures, they differ from them in certain ways, and the invented names recognise the extent to which they are fictional creations.

Libby Hill recently ran an interview on Indiewire with Susannah Grant, co-creator of Unbelievable. The article’s worth reading in its entirety, but for now I’m going to focus on just a single sentence, because it struck me so forcefully. This is Hill’s opening, a quote from the novelist Madeleine L’Engle:

Truth is what is true, and it’s not necessarily factual. Truth and fact are not the same thing.

Facts can be used to mislead. It is fact, for instance, that UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently announced £5 billion of infrastructure expenditure as a key element in the government’s response to the economic crisis associated with the Coronavirus pandemic. It’s also a fact that when US President Franklyn Roosevelt had to respond to the economic crisis precipitated by the crash of 1929, he called it the ‘New Deal’.

Unsurprisingly, Johnson called his initiative a New Deal too.

The parallel with Roosevelt’s unprecedented and colossal programme in the 1930s is impressive. Or so it seems, until we add a further fact. Johnson’s New Deal represents 0.2% of British GDP, while FDR’s amounted to around 40% of the US economy.

A fact without context gave us a fiction that communicates a falsehood.

Unbelievable, on the other hand, took facts as a starting point, but then built a fiction around them which conveyed important truths. It used the fiction to illustrate the horror and distress of rape, the pain of the victim disbelieved, and the contrast between the slapdash work of an inept policeman and the tireless and exhaustive work of two excellent ones.

In other words, a good fiction can communicate an important truth, while simple facts, as in Johnson’s case, can be used to deliver a falsehood.

This all put me in mind of one of my favourites writers of all time, Denis Diderot, the French novelist and philosopher of the eighteenth century. He was a remarkable writer, and his novels sparkle and amuse even today (if you don’t know it, you should try Jacques the Fatalist, one of the greatest comic novels of all time). Strangely, he admired Samuel Richardson, an English writer whose novels are stodgy and cloyingly sentimental with a touch of sadism thrown in. Diderot was heavily influenced by him, which is odd, since his books are lighter, more compelling and above all funnier.

There was a sharp debate in Diderot’s day about the relative truth of history and the novel. This was a time when historians were not above inventing speeches to put in the mouths of the major figures they were dealing with, on the grounds that, though no one knew what Julius Caesar or Charlemagne had said on a particular occasion, this is the kind of thing they might have said. But even without such downright invention, much history is necessarily speculative – based on documentary evidence perhaps, but filling in gaps by interpretation.

Diderot directly addresses Richardson on this subject:

Oh Richardson! I will go so far as to say that the truest of histories is full of lies, and your novel is full of truths. History paints a few individuals; you paint the whole human race… The human heart, which has been, is and always will be the same, is the model you copy… I will go so far as to say that history is often a bad novel; and the novel, as you have made it, is a good history. O painter of nature! It is you who never lie.

I love that notion. Fiction can be more truthful than fact. “Truth and fact are not the same thing,” as Madeleine L’Engle so sharply put it.

To see how valid that is, watch Unbelievable and Unorthodox if you haven’t already seen them. And tease out the truths in these and other fictions, of screen or page.

Then listen to the allegedly factual statements of Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin or even mini-Trump Boris Johnson, with a seriously large pinch of salt.

Great way to binge through the lockdown

Unorthodox. Shira Haas in Berlin’s Wannsee lake

Even at the best of times, Danielle and I enjoy binging on TV series.

Obviously, it helps if they’re good. Or at least that we like them. But I have to admit that there have been occasions when, watching episode four of the third season of a series, one of us will turn to the other and point out:

“This really isn’t very good, is it?”

“No,” replies the other, “I can’t relate to any of the characters and I don’t care what happens to them next.”

Quite a discovery after 28 episodes.

This isn’t the best of times. During a Coronavirus lockdown, binge watching isn’t just an indulgence (OK, OK, if you prefer, an over-indulgence), it’s also an excellent way of spending evenings when you’re obliged to stay in.

For the moment, we’re still being fairly discriminating. If the lockdown goes on long enough, we may well be forced, as we start season 3 of something mediocre, to say, “well, we may not relate to any of the characters or care what happens next but, hey, there’s nothing else on that we haven’t already seen”. But recently, we’ve seen some pretty great things.

Billions was gripping, even if at times I couldn’t bear any of the characters. That, actually, was something the writers pulled off pretty cleverly, making one character or another off-putting for a while, and then making him or her sympathetic again. A smart trick if you can make it work. Which they did.

Paul Giamatti and Damian Lewis in Billions
A near-deadly rivalry. Except when it isn’t

For those who don’t know the series, it’s about a successful hedge fund manager (Damian Lewis) whose activities sail close to the illegal, if not right over the edge into the downright criminal, as claimed by a US attorney (Paul Giamatti) intent on bringing him down.

Just like our sympathies for the characters, the show’s writers keep changing the direction of the two men’s antipathies. Now they’re intent on destroying each other, then they turn their animosity onto someone else. Around them, in a first-class cast, stand some extraordinary characters, including an outstanding non-binary figure (“my pronouns are 'they, theirs, and them’”) played by a non-binary actor, Asia Kate Dillon. Just as good is Maggie Siff as the psychiatrist and wife of the US Attorney. All in all, it’s pretty enthralling.

Equally worth seeing is For All Mankind. This is an alternative-reality story, where the space race between the US and the Soviet Union goes on far longer, and extends far further, than actually happened. Again, there are plenty of excellent performances, as well as plenty of fine shots of rockets taking off or of explorers working on the moon, alongside plenty of tense sequences, mostly in space but sometimes also in the homes of the astronauts and other NASA staff we follow.

It’s gripping with its tension, and all the more watchable for the sense of plausibility it manages to create.

Working on the Moon, in For All Mankind

Far better than anything else, however, is Unorthdox. Based in part on Debora Feldman’s autobiography Unorthodox, the Scandalous Rejection of my Hasidic Roots, it’s a four-episode mini-series, about a young woman, Esty, brilliantly played by Israeli actor Shira Haas, from an ultra-orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn.

The central concern is whether she’ll be able to get away.

This is the first Netlfix series filmed predominantly in Yiddish, the language spoken by that community rather than Hebrew. Haas had to come over a month early to Berlin, where the series was filmed, to learn the language.

The series shows both the community, with its everyday existence and its rituals back in Brooklyn, in the form of flashbacks to Esty’s life there, spliced into scenes of the life she is now working to build for herself in Berlin. The flashbacks include her marriage and, in some poignant but intensely comic moments, the difficulties she has consummating it, difficulties considerably worsened by the fact that her husband tells his mother everything, and she insists on tutoring Esty on how to steel herself to have sex.

Sex is key because her fundamental obligation is to produce children. To her too, this is a sacred duty. “We’re rebuilding the six million lost,” she declares, “Jews killed in the Holocaust.” But that doesn’t make sex with the husband she married by arrangement any less painful.

Esty (Shira Haas) at the Wannsee, still dressed as a Hasid (left)
and as she begins to forge a new life for herself

In a key scene from the first episode, a group of student friends she has just made takes Esty down to the beautiful Berlin lake, the Wannsee. It’s a place where people go to walk or relax or swim. But in 1942, it was the venue for the Wannsee Conference which took the decision to wipe out the Jewish population of Europe.

When Esty first sees the lake, she’s left speechless. But then Robert, one of the students, says:

“It’s nice, right? But you see that villa? The conference where the Nazis decided to kill the Jews in the concentration camps took place in 1942. In that villa.”

She looks at the villa.

“And you swim in this lake?” she replies.

He laughs. “The lake is just a lake,” he says.

Esty water into the water, still wearing her skirt and one of her two long-sleeved shirts. She takes off the wig that orthodox Jewish women wear after marriage. Under the wig, her head is practically shaved. She drops the wig in the water.

That gesture reminds me of a Jewish friend of ours who told us of a moment when her children were playing with others in a local park. Another Jewish woman came over to remonstrate with her for letting them play with non-Jewish kids.

Infuriated, she went straight over to a bridge across a stream at the edge of the park and threw her wig in it. She never wore one again.

Throwing a wig into water speaks to me powerfully about bids for freedom.

Haas says that the story is “about the right to have your voice”. It certainly is. Indeed, if you watch it to the end, you’ll discover why that’s a particularly apt summing up.

Unorthodox is an excellent way of spending an evening. A great break from the lockdown. You might even manage to spread it to two, though we went through all four episodes in just one sitting.

It was that compelling.