"LIE TO ME," Part Two

Consider what difference it would make if the title of “Lie to Me” were “Tell Me the Truth.” Consider the famous Jack Nicholson put-down: “The TRUTH? You can’t handle the truth.” After watching a full season of “Lie to Me” in two days, my premise is that it is NOT about the detection of lies, but the handling of the mix of lies and truth we all face every day. In fact, I take the position that just as the great Fifties wave of Westerns was about force, “standing down” from WWII when anything was permitted in service to the urgent necessity of winning that war, now our best films address information. The Western heroes were always the white, male, morally coherent men that we thought our soldiers were. Today’s hero is shrewd and tricky.

In the new information-based series like "CSI" (medical) or "Law and Order" (legal) we have moved to a global context of mixed races, ages and genders (even adding a few new ones) so that our old clues about who was lying have been discredited. We used to assume that our out-groups were lying and our in-groups were telling the truth, or at least managing information for our benefit. The newspaper prints little thumbnail portraits of major characters in stories and I find myself scrutizing them: is this the face of a killer? Is this the face of an honest woman? It is significant that the opening to “Lie to Me” is a montage of very different faces.

And interesting that Tim Roth has often played shifty villains in the past. He is not a hunk or a lunk, like those cowboy heroes. There is a lot his character doesn’t know and his “partner” -- who is really more a walking conscience -- accuses him of knowing too much while having too little compassion about it. The cold fish scientist. But he obsesses about the ability of his own mother to deceive the scientists (shrinks) in order to kill herself.

Consider the multitude of issues in our society. First of all there are so many questions that simply cannot be resolved with an ordinary education because they are based on highly technical and specialized information. Economics is one category, to our grief. How could we know which asset management companies were lying to us when they themselves hardly understood what they were selling? Theories like evolution or climate change are likewise pretty opaque to an ordinary person on the street. Even within the field there are varying schools of thought and models. A proper understanding of statistics -- as Nassim Taleb keeps telling us -- is very difficult to achieve (tell me about it!) and yet bell curves and standard deviations are the models we depend on for business and education decisions.

Probably no lies are so devastating as the ones we don’t even recognize: that everyone who gets a degree from a good college will succeed, that everyone who tries their best and is loyal will keep a job, that everyone can live the kind of life depicted in television series, get enough to eat, be attractive and have a wonderful sex life. Only a very specific group of people get even 70% of this: the others don’t ask why not. They simply believe the observably false lie that good things always happen to the deserving and deny that prosperity is built on social structures that impoverish others.

Today’s Americans move a lot, going to places where they are not known. Much of the knowledge about them is on the computer, granted, but it’s all data and all data is corruptible. Since it is based on names, your birthday, your social security number (which was once supposed to be inviolably private), and documents that can be bought, people are able to slip out of one life and into another without a whole lot of trouble. Because they often move in and out of relationships all their lives, producing children they might or might not know about, Dear Abby is constantly answering questions about how much they should tell their current partners or their children. The legal categories pant along twenty years in the past, trying to figure out who is responsible for what. Private eyes make their bucks trying to uncover doubleness, whole secret lives. A booming business.

Strangely, we approve of and reward actors, who are technically “lying” when they portray characters, like Cal Lightman. In fact, it’s hard to imagine someone more different from Tim Roth’s character in “Rob Roy” -- which he worried was “over the top” in terms of wickedness -- and the actor Tim Roth. If you want to see just how much he is acting as Cal Lightman, in this age of video it’s easy to pull up one interview after another. Analyzing Roth’s body language is a blast: displacement, distancing, itchy nose, glances down and away . . . Which brings up the topic of humor, which keeps these series tales from being grim. Much humor is based on surprise and incongruity, which abounds in the plot twists and character revelations.

Acting is about managing one’s internal consciousness in a particular way. One must convince one’s self of the reality and coherence of the character’s internal state while also keeping track of the actor’s reality: hitting the mark, pleasing the director, timing. We all do it to some degree. Some actors make a fetish of it, staying in their character even off-camera or off-stage, as though they are afraid of losing that inner compartment where the character lives. Yet people who develop multiple-character disorders can manage as many as dozens of internal people, each with a voice and mannerism. It was interesting that Roth reports when he sees movies he’s in, he doesn’t enjoy them because he doesn’t see the illusion. Rather he pulls up internally his memories of the day of the shot, remembering what was for lunch and whether it rained. That’s where his consciousness goes, unless he directed the scene. Then he goes back to what he was thinking while keeping an independent critical awareness, moving the ability to judge outside the experience of being “in” it.

Our society insists that the morality of the writer is different than that of the actor. They insist that what is represented in writing be “truth,” even though it’s pointed out again and again and again that the “author” as represented in the writing is not the same as the “ink-stained wretch” who actually produced it. Readers want to believe that writers are “channeling” their real lives, maybe. Or does this leak over from the idea of Biblical inerrancy, which is self-evidently not true? Even my co-writer and myself sometimes have to remind each other that we are not quite exactly like the representations in our work. “I” is NOT “I.” And yet every character we invent is “we,” including ourselves.