All About Lies

One of my favorite movies of all time is All About Eve. There are many reasons to love the film: Bette Davis, witty banter, costumes by Edith Head; none of these reasons make my love for it appropriate to this blog. All About Eve is about misguided trust, about the ease with which a pretty girl can get anything she wants through lies and treachery, about the difference between acting and lying. The best actors (or is it the best liars?) seem to catch on to Eve's deceit early in the film, but the non-actors are more naive and thus truly shattered by the revelation of her lies. Eve only speaks in truth when she talks of acting in front of a theater:

They want you. You belong. Just that alone is worth it.

A running trope of life-as-play runs through the film, but it seems that only Eve takes the idea seriously. Eve's an actress from the start whose life is a fictional play. She wins because she has no life separate from her act; she nullifies any true self to fake her way into the theater, to "belong" at any cost. 

I've not done this film justice in my discussion, but I doubt this will be the last time I have something to say about this film and others like it. I encourage commentary.

Documentary and the Truth

I saw the film Exit Through the Giftshop several months ago in theaters, but it's just begun to get more attention due to both its video release and recent Oscar nomination. The documentary follows a French expatriate obsessed with filming himself doing everything from shaving in his bathroom to scaling buildings in the name of radical street art. Despite its fairly sophisticated commentary on the economic and political value of art, the artistic merits of graffiti, and the stupidity of the general public, the film seems notable to most people for its dubious authenticity. Is there really such a person as Thierry Guetta? Is he really this moronic? Has he really duped Los Angelinos into buying his terrible art, or is the whole thing a stunt created by Banksy (pictured above) in order to piss on (or off?) art connoisseurs and the general public?

Though I rarely say this in my blog, I feel that the viewer misses the point if he looks for the line between truth and fiction in this documentary. Whether or not Thierry Guetta is real, tons of the terrible pseudo-street quasi-pop art by "Mister Brainwash" was viewed and sold at an exhibition in Los Angeles. The crazy Frenchman subject of the film is annoying/unbelievable/interesting whether he is made up or not. The point is still that most people who buy art are following ridiculous fads and that it is extremely easy for people like Banksy to exploit those people. Banksy is prosecuted for the free art he puts on public walls, and paid millions of dollars for essentially the same art placed in private spaces. I'm not necessarily entirely on Banksy's side in this matter, but I agree that the question of Guetta's existence/authenticity is not the main one here.

Art Forgery and the Law

A few months ago I discussed this breaking story, of a man who appeared to be posing as a Jesuit priest and donating forged art to museums across the country. The forger has now been identified as Mark Augustus Landis, and it appears that earlier claims that he took no money for his dozens of forged artworks is true. His story has been discussed at length in the Financial Times and New York Times, and the FT article was even featured on one of my favorite arts news websites, Arts & Letters Daily. The elaborate masquerade involved with the donation of Landis's forged artworks seems a work of art in itself; Landis had to create not only the fake artworks, but also the benefactor priest persona.

Authorities are now attempting to find a way to prosecute Landis for something but are having trouble because the man doesn't seem to have stolen anything or acquired compensation for any of his forged gifts. It appears that the only harm he's caused is injury to the pride of museum curators who probably should have known better than to authenticate these works (and some did). What do you think about this enigmatic figure? Should he be punished in any way possible, or slapped on the wrist and told to stop giving away fakes? I'm still not sure what I think.

Authentication Euphoria?

Today Yahoo! featured this article about a document purported to be one of Lincoln's last actions before his death in 1865. As is fairly evident to us (especially once we know it's a fake), the "5" on the document does not quite match the other numbers and there appears to be an ugly smudge underneath it. The document was "discovered" by Thomas Lowry in 1998, so one wonders why it took so long to prove that it had been altered.

It seems to me that everyone wants to believe that others are truthful and well-meaning. We especially like the idea of "Honest Abe," and probably hate the suggestion that anything connected with him would be fraudulent (even if it's not his fault). Tests to gauge authenticity are also expensive and time-consuming, and question the expertise of the experts. It makes everyone feel better (I imagine) to authenticate a work than to expose a forgery. Lowry counted on this, and though the National Archives now "has banned Lowry from its facilities," he likely rode the wave of that discovery for a decade with publications and lectures, and is now nearing retirement age anyway. His rivals are gloating at their discovery of the alteration, but they get little else from it. No one's really proud of the guy who annoyingly points out an inconsistency in a document or work of art.

On the Double Life and Television Entertainment

I'm several months late on this post and I'm not quite sure why it occurred to me now (maybe the Golden Globe Awards stirred it up?), but I'd like to discuss the (extremely) short lived FOX television drama Lone Star. I was one of only 4.1 million people to watch the first episode of this program, which involved a con man in Texas who leads two separate lives and is partnered with two separate women, but starts turning his life around when he gets hired by Jon Voigt (at least I remember it to be him) and can start making money legally. But there is still the issue of his two women...

I'm fairly certain that the main problem with the program was that all of the things mentioned above happened in the very first episode. The character development was so rapid as to seem unimportant ("I'm not going to con people anymore, Dad!") and the protagonist's supposedly well-built life/lives of lies was already beginning to crumble by the end of the first episode. Despite my obvious love for con men and double lives, I didn't bother to watch the second episode, and neither did most of the rest of the country, apparently. FOX canned it after only two episodes (supposedly that may be some kind of record) and put another show about fakers, Lie to Me, into its Monday-after-House spot. I'm slightly surprised because like me, the American public seems increasingly interested in manipulation of truth and con men, but I'd prefer an episode of Lie to Me any day.

Layers of Fake

Orson Welles's last finished movie is the anomalous pseudo-documentary F for Fake that I need to see at least one more time in order to make a complete analysis. The film involves, among others, notorious art forger Elmyr de Hory, his biographer and fellow faker Clifford Irving (whose story involving the fabricated autobiography of Howard Hughes is told in the film The Hoax starring Richard Gere), and Orson Welles himself, who variously purports to tell the truth "strictly based on the available facts" and confesses to falsehoods while simultaneously creating others. The result is less illuminating than further confounding; rather than fully expose de Hory and Irving's lies, Welles appears in some sense to join forces with them or even attempt to beat them in some sort of faker competition.

The film gives an odd sense that fraud has a sort of viral quality, that either exposing fraud turns the exposer into a fraud himself, or that only fakers can see the falsehoods of others. I wonder to what extent the exposer of fraud feels he has power over the exposed, even that his exposé allows him to then commit his own frauds. It's difficult for me to discern truth from lies in a film that lies about telling the truth and lies about lying to its viewers, and perhaps this is the point. I'm comfortable with fiction because it does not say it is truth, but F for Fake, which seems to flip-flop the ideas of truth and fiction with varying amounts of success, makes me all sorts of uncomfortable.

When Forgery becomes Murder

I am twenty-five years behind on this story, but I can probably be forgiven since I was not even reading yet when it happened. In 1985 Mark Hoffman, on the verge of having his hundreds of forgeries discovered, sent bombs that killed two people before maiming himself with a third explosive. The story is reminiscent of several others I have discussed here, most notably those of Jean-Claude Romand and Brian Blackwell, in that it deals with a man who killed in order to protect his lies. Both Hoffman and Romand ended their deceptions with suicide attempts, but it is notable that neither attempt succeeded. Hoffman was obviously adept at making bombs, but only two of three he made killed their targets. I don't think that Hoffman ever intended to die.

I wonder whether these types of deception are forms of survival for some people, to such an extent that they somehow feel that they must ultimately kill or be killed (or discovered to be frauds, which is apparently just as bad). While I am extremely interested in forgery, I don't necessarily think that it is the worst possible crime, and find it almost unbelievable that a person would kill for the preservation of his forgeries. People like Mark Hoffman seem almost like another species, one that follows its own set of social/moral rules. I will probably continue to be baffled.