Comedy Is Not Reality...But It Might Be Truth. On "Can You Ever Forgive Me?"
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There may be nothing in art that I find more redolent of numbskullery than an insistence on some kind of meaningful distinction between "real" and "fictional." One comes across this all the time in the publishing world, where people are desperate to know if a book is a "memoir" or "fiction," if a book is based on someone's "real experience" or is invented out of the materials of imagination, as if there weren't some vast field of overlap between these two things.
One also feels its allure in Hollywood, where "based on a true story" carries so much weight as to almost, but not quite, obscure the fact that cinema by its nature has an extremely complicated relationship with reality. (Actors are, of course, acting; all the irrelevant parts of life like sleeping and waiting in line for things and going to the bathroom are cut out; everyone is wearing enormous amounts of makeup and lit accordingly; scenes are blocked and shot with care and often come with the kind of soundtrack that we don't (hopefully) hear in real life; etc.)
Which is not to say that art cannot touch truth, because it's maybe the finest instrument we have for doing so. It's just that getting hung up on the horns of a real vs. fictional distinction prevents one from engaging with many of the actual ways that art, and film in particular, work.
In terms of storytelling, one of the best ways to contemplate this is to think about memory. Think of a story you share with your family or friends, one that's retold when you get together. And then think of the ways different people in your group remember the story, and tell it, and think about how irritated or amused you get when they tell it wrong. But they're not telling it wrong, quite; they simply remember it differently than you do.
Psychologists – themselves strange beasts caught between science and interpretive imagination – love to remind us that memory doesn't function the way we wish it did, like a bank vault full of safe deposit boxes. If this was the way memory worked, we could simply stroll into that vault and pull out a memory, unchanged from the day it happened. Unfortunately, given the structures of our brains, memory is more akin to a process of reconstruction. When we reach back for something that happened in the past our brains have to rebuild it for us, every time. And not only is this process open to the vagaries of the passing years – all the small errors that might be introduced each time we rebuild it – it's also open to all the vagaries of human psychology: what we want, fear, love or hate can sneak into the mix, reshaping our memories to help us or harm us, making us the center of the action or injecting a stain of guilt that may not be warranted.
Stories are, of course, shaped recitations of events, and thus not all that different than memories. Their function is to help us understand things, be at peace with things, contemplate things, or simply to give us pleasure; this is far different than simply trying to show us, like some kind of robotic recording intelligence might try to do, what occurred.
Thus, stories touch truth through intimating meaning, in a thousand blatant and subtle ways. Think of the feeling that arises in your chest when a character on the screen perishes tragically or triumphs nobly; think of the uncontrollable way that laughter bursts from you when a comedic bit lands – these feelings are tied to a deep recognition that something about the world has been conveyed. They work because they get it right; if they don't get it right, you don't respond. They do not simply show events; they invest those events with meaning.
This is an enormously – and maybe never-endingly – important, moving, and complex process, like an intricate dance or the wavering of a flame, which is one of the reasons we like stories so much and can spend so much time talking about them and revisiting them. They are unstable, always providing new delights, comforting or enraging us precisely not because they have one fixed meaning but because they are fonts of stimulation, capable of making us feel and understand new things each time we return to them.
Which brings me, perhaps via the roundabout route, to Can You Ever Forgive Me? Marielle Heller's extraordinary comedy (or is it a tragedy?) from 2018.
The film directly tackles the issue of the real versus the fictional, and of what it means for something to be true, in two ways. The first is through the mechanics of its story; the second – and far more illuminating – is through its understanding of comedy.
Melissa McCarthy plays Lee Israel, a writer living in New York City in 1991 and struggling with many of the things that writers struggle with, namely poverty, depression, and isolation. (Since I many not get to it later, I'll pause here to say that any discussion of the film should begin with McCarthy's acting. She and co-star Richard E. Grant both give tremendous performances, making one wish that McCarthy would get more opportunities to act in dramatic roles.)
The movie is based on an autobiographical book of the same name, written by the real-life Israel. It tells the story of how, faced with financial desperation, she embarked on a career as a forger. This begins when she's doing archival research for a biography of the vaudeville comedian Fanny Brice and finds a letter that Brice wrote. Israel takes the letter from the archive and tries to sell it, only to be told that the writing in it is a bit bland to be worth much. Annoyed, she takes it home and types an amusing post-script onto it, then takes it to a different seller, who loves now-witty letter and buys it for top dollar.
From there Israel falls steadily into her new career. Armed with her own formidable wit, she finds that she can forge delightful letters by famous epistolary writers like Dorothy Parker and Noel Coward. She also meets a like-minded spirit in an aging Manhattan flaneur named Jack Hock (Grant). They're well matched in their love of alcohol, razor-sharp humor, and alienation; despite some difficulties in their friendship – Hock lets Israel's beloved cat die while he's on a drug binge – they find a meaningful connection, one of the only such connections, the film suggests, in either of their lives.
In the end, of course, it all comes crashing down. Despite her impeccable abilities as a forger – an afterword to the film tells us that two of Israel's letters were included in the first printing of a 2007 Noel Coward biography – eventually the FBI catches up with her. She is convicted and put on probation. Hock continues his hedonistic ways and eventually dies of AIDS several years after the events of the film. But the story ends on a somewhat hopeful, or perhaps humanistic, note: the book that Israel writes about their adventures is a success, and also serves as something of a lasting testament to Hock's beautiful personality.
In all of this, the film wrestles with questions of authenticity and of the real versus the fictional that I was thinking about at the beginning of this piece. Israel is not Dorothy Parker or Noel Coward, but writes letters that bring great joy into the hearts of the people who admire those authors, or at least collect their works. The value of these letters is based on a deception, of course, and the film does not suggest that there is some kind of equivalence between a real Noel Coward letter and a Lee Israel forgery.
But it does ask us to think through what it means to be a "real" writer. Israel is brilliant and accomplished (one of the biographies she wrote spent time on the New York Times bestseller list) but finds herself held back because of her abrasive personality and absolute inability to suffer fools. Her foil in this regard is Tom Clancy, who the film suggests made millions of dollars by writing intellectually vacuous escapism. Despite this, it's Clancy who is feted in the New York literary world and Israel who is despised. Play the game, she's told by her agent (a wonderfully sharp-edged Jane Curtain) or find a new line of work. But this is precisely the point, Israel insists: shouldn't being a writer be about the writing one does, rather than about the whimsy of the market or the cocktail circuit?
There are many layers of fact and imagination here. It's a film based on an autobiography written by a known forger and large personality; like the various things Hock tells us throughout, once we get past the brute facts, everything should be taken – playfully – with a grain of salt. Everything, that is, except the human truths of the story itself: how it feels to be an outsider, to engage in friendships, to struggle financially, to wonder at one's own legitimacy or success, illegitimacy or lack of success, to thrill in moments of accomplishment, and to find oneself doing things one perhaps regrets but cannot help doing. How it feels, in other words, to be alive. Which feeling, in a story, has virtually nothing to do with questions of what may or may not have really happened.
The mode in which the film operates is a kind of elegant and devastating comedy. And it's in this comedy, I think, that it achieves what we might term, somewhat awkwardly, its most ethereal profundity. Ethereal because all comedic truths seem to combine those disparate elements: at once light, playful, and difficult to articulate without deadening them; profound because those truths are at the same time anchored, solidly grounded, somehow reaching down into the depths of us.
It's essential to Can You Ever Forgive Me? that both its main characters are outsiders, and use humor to survive this condition. Hock's primary mode of survival is charm. He's a man always at ease (he projects) in any situation, always with a clever line at the ready, the kind of person one wants to be friends with because of the liveliness he brings to living. This charm exists in the context of Hock being – as a gay man in 1991 – a member of a besieged minority. His charm, then, is clearly in part a mode of survival. It's a defense against a world that does not want him and at the same time an assertion of his own irrepressible joy in the face of that world. Put differently, it's a kind of playing with the distinction between appearance and reality, an example of a broadcasting of power to combat powerlessness, and at the same time an expression of a real inner force, a many-layered and uncatchable way of interacting with the world and other people and himself. In short, his charm is a way of creating a story about himself that blends reality and fiction.
Israel's wit functions differently, but at base provides the same service. She is as much of an outsider as Hock is (and is also gay) but doesn't charm her way through any scene in which she finds herself. Instead she uses humor like spiked armor, as a way of keeping people from getting close enough to hurt her. Even tender moments in which other characters want to engage with her can draw an edged witticism as a reminder to keep their distance. This is a function of both strength and despair and, as funny as McCarthy is in the role, we never lose sight of the pain beneath the surface.
Israel is a character for whom life is fascinating and important; we get a sense of this through her devotion to writing biographies, and her insistence that they – essentially the stories of other people's lives – are more worthwhile than what she derogates as Clancy's claptrap. But at the same time she's a character for whom life in its very constituent elements is difficult and painful. Her response to this pain is not charm but that mode of acerbic observation that's both funny and cutting because – despite its obtuseness and exaggeration – it always holds at least a kernel of truth.
Like memory, comedy on the screen bears a strange relationship to reality. It takes the materials of the world and arranges them in a new way in order to supply us with meaning. It presents us with facades, outrages, misdirection, distortions of the real, all of it in order to make us feel, to bring out from us that sudden bodily recognition that what we're seeing gets something right about what it is to be human. Can You Ever Forgive Me? does this as well as any recent film.