The television series Mad Men got grief because the Selectric Typewriter had not been introduced at the time of its first episode. Recently, Treme got grief because the first episode had a character reach into a purse and pull out a Hubig's Pie (a New Orleans staple) when in fact the Hubig's bakery wasn't open at the time.
This is a kind of literalism bred of an over-dependence on familiarity. What often drives drama these days is playing to the audience's simplest sense of recognition. It's a symptom of Mannerism. In more radically adventurous times, the task of art is to render the familiar unfamiliar. Or the unfamiliar familiar. It often seems that the goal of much current art is the much more simple (some might say idiotic) task of rendering the familiar familiar.
It is comforting to have a fact or image or location that the audience can nod to itself and say "I know that, I've been there, that's just how it is." But recognition at this level is not the same as empathy. Which is the the stuff of dramatic engagement. Empathy has nothing to do with familiarity and comfort.
In fact, reality has nothing much to do with fiction. I tell my students all the time, "don't confuse me with the facts."
Authenticity in drama is not whether or not the incidents "happened" or are portrayed with archeological accuracy. Authenticity lies in whether or not the writer (then director and cast) manage to convince an audience of the truth of the incident. It's dramatic necessity. It's compelling and urgent rightness.
In fact, writing about something "true" from your life often leads to over possessiveness. "But it happened that way," a student will say in defense of a scene that simply doesn't work. Things happen in real life that are totally unbelievable on the screen.
Of course, there is a limit to Poetic License. The most obvious limit is Genre. Are you writing a fantasy in which flights of ir-reality or inaccuracy or anachronism are part of the very fabric of the piece? Or are you writing a gritty street drama that strives for a Naturalism? But most important in regulating the use of such license is consistency. Is the little tweak you've made to reality consistent with all the other elements of the story, is it grounded in character necessity. If so, then the deviation from literal truth will not diminish the authenticity of the dramatic moment.
I really got a chuckle out of the Hubig's pie moment in Treme. For anyone from New Orleans, or even who has been to New Orleans, the moment was immediately recognizeable, grounding the viewer in a very particular place (and so the moment, in fact, makes us comfortable). But it also speaks of the larger character and plot issues of the episode. And that part of the moment, I think, would be legible even to those who don't know what a Hubig's Pie tastes like. So, I think, the moment earned it's place in the scene despite the literal fact of the bakery being closed. As David Simon put it in a blog entry worth reading, it's a Magic Pie.
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