Reflecting on the Truth Versus Fiction Debate, Patsy Cline, Augusten Burroughs, Recount and Chistopher Buckley

This graffiti was there when I saw it but I had to photograph. it seems to me a fitting photo. But then I also find the best place to read the newspaper is at a bar so what do I know?

I have long had a fascination with the age old question of whether truth is stranger than fiction. I've been known to pose this question both to memoirists and novelists.

My favorite answer came from comic crime writer Donald Westlake, who said in an interview with me, "Reality is stranger than fiction because God doesn't have to worry about being plausible."

I'll sometimes hear a crazy news story likethis and think, "This blows my mind. People could not make this stuff up"

Then I'll read, as I did recently, a novel by Colin Harrison that begins with undocumented immigrants killed by being drowned in sewage pumped in their car and think, "Ok, score one for fiction being stranger than truth."

Then there are the memoirists like Augusten Burroughs who say their stories are true but they come across as too crazy to be true and when they settle out of court lawsuits with those who would know the veracity of the story the reader is left wondering whether the line between truth and fiction has become more blurry or murky in recent years or if it's just that this particular reader is paying more attention to the issue.

I've been asking the same questions regarding movies and television as well. Vacelts and I – we're friends so I don't think she minds me mentioning this – have a long-running debate about whether one should be concerned that shows purporting to be reality shows often manipulate what one sees resulting in a bizarre reinterpretation of the word "reality"… or that shows claiming to be live, including American Idol, will sneak in segments that were pre-taped, the phone call-in segment being a big one, according to the New York Times.

This all came to a head when I reviewed a documentary about Patsy Cline. I expect a documentary to be closer to providing the truth about someone, in this case the life of country legend Patsy Cline, than a feature film bio. I think we all know that when we go see Ali, for example, the movie will take some liberties with the truth. As a former journalist I get squeamish about this.

I can understand combining redundant events and I can sort of accept the idea of composite characters. But when entire speeches are composed and then claimed to have been spoken by a real life person who denies making said speech – which is said to occur in the movie Recount, which was shown on Sunday, a movie its makers and actors clamed to be an accurate representation of the presidential recount in 2000 – I get damn right angry. I'd say I boycotted the movie but that'd be a fib since I don't actually get HBO.

Anyway, like many people I saw the movie "Sweet Dreams" which was marketed as being the true story of Patsy Cline. In the movie Cline was abused by her second husband, Charlie Dick. Call me a sucker, call me gullible, but I didn't think a movie would just create a subplot like that out of thin air. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who assumed, from that movie, that Charlie, abused his wife.

About five years ago, my then-girlfriend and I happened to meet Charlie at a West Virginia event honoring the memory of Patsy Cline. His license plate read, if memory serves, Cline's #1.

When it came time to leave the event I realized my car was boxed in by Charlie and so I had to find him and ask him to move his car. I don't think I even bothered to shake his hand because while he was the closest I would ever get to Cline I also believed he had abused Cline. He was gracious and polite.

I recently learned, when doing some research, that there is no evidence of any domestic abuse – the movie supposedly just made up the whole sub-plot.

The documentary in question, Patsy Cline: Remembering Patsy did not mention the controversy over the movie, portraying him instead as a regular loving husband married to an amazing woman. But the movie also skipped over some events and issues which I thought a thorough documentary should cover, such as one about Cline's biggest hit, "Crazy," written by Willie Nelson. It seems that she hated the song initially. An interesting factoid? Maybe. Worth mentioning? I would think so. Now why would that be left out of a documentary, and why would they not delve into the allegations of Always? Probably because the documentary was funded by Cline's widower.

Vacelts and I had a good discussion about all of this in the discussion of my review of the movie

Lately, I keep thinking about the great satirical novels of Christopher Buckley, particularly his latest novel, "Boomsday". Both Boomsday and the more well-known book and movie, Thank You For Smoking, were satirical and yet one reason they were so clever and funny was because they were also disturbing because they got at some real truths. I thought about those things when I reviewed them both.

What I did not expect, though, was to keep seeing real news stories that made me question if life is imitating art or vice versa or what.

Let me give two examples:
1 - In Boomsday the main character works for a public relations firm that has as clients the slimiest characters of the world, and they even have to hide – from the public and the government - some of those relationships. We're talking about, say, doing the marketing for a mass murderer trying to soften his image.

Far fetched? Yes and no. I knew that in theory this happened but I'd never read any news stories about it. So did you see the news in the last few weeks about an adviser for John McCain – Charles Black was his name – having to sever relations with the campaign, when it was revealed that his client list included dictators.

2 – Don't read this one if you are going to read the book, which I strongly encourage you to do.

Ok, still reading? My favorite scene in the book comes when a renegade presidential candidate uses an expletive when insulting the unpopular sitting president during a presidential debate. It's funny not because he uses an obscenity so much as the descriptions of resulting media coverage. It brought to mind how newspapers like the New York Times must have needed chiropractic help after bending over backward to avoid repeating the exact obscenity used by a vice president whose name rhymes with stick feney while still reporting on it.

I thought of that scene when Obama was accused, in this weird flap, of flipping the bird at Hillary during a campaign speech. Personally I don't buy the theory that he was flipping her off but the media coverage of this alleged obscenity was as hilarious and surreal as that of the scene in the book.

(Thanks for reading. I'm considering a sequel where I go into the topic of whether there is such a thing as a "larger truth")

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