4. The Invention of Lying
Let's go ahead and get this out of the way: I'm a Christian. And I didn't find The Invention of Lying offensive by any means, but I found it horridly unfunny. The film has a premise with promise; an enlightened individual finds that in a world of nothing but the truth, he can lie whenever he so pleases. It's a stretch, but it exists on the opposite side of the spectrum of the wonderful lunacy that is The Truman Show, where instead of a world against one man, the tables have now turned. Right from the start, you've got my attention. But the movie falls into the same problem 99% of Christian movies fall into; it uses its plot to become a movie of pandering to a specific audience, thinking it's clever enough to change the views of the audience that is now trapped in the cinema. I hate it when Christian films do it (and that's why I don't go to see them) and I hated when this movie did it. It's a complete reversal from a film that could use universal humor to appeal to the masses (you'd be hard-pressed to find a culture that doesn't lie), to a movie where it grabs a handful of ideologists out of the fire and persecutes the rest. And it's not that I was turned off by the atheism, it was because the movie abandoned its own fantastic prospects to serve a select group of people, while bludgeoning the rest. I'd have the same issue if I watched The Avengers and Captain America suddenly began converting every Avenger to Christianity; it takes me out of the movie and explicitly becomes the statement that it should implicitly give. An excellent example of a film that does this is Sunshine (2007) written by Alex Garland and directed by Danny Boyle. Garland, an atheist, writes a beautiful, moving script that implicitly suggests atheism, rather than attacking followers of a specific religion. And yet, Garland also said in a
recent interview: "I think everything I write is from an atheist perspective. I mean, it's partly from an atheist perspective because I'm an atheist, and I'm just not really interested in religious-based questions...the difference with 'Sunshine' is that it's actually about God in a weird sort of way, it's a bunch of people who are faced with something really powerful and how they misinterpret that thing and it sort of blows their minds and makes them act irrationally." That's the kind of writing I respect, whether someone shares my beliefs or not. Back to The Invention of Lying, I see where the temptation comes from. From an atheist standpoint, I'll say that the idea that an atheist is the only purveyor of truth in a world of religious ruin and lies is brilliant, and that it's very tempting to use such a fantastic premise in any way other than playing out that message. But people don't like to be preached to; it doesn't matter who is at the podium. Ultimately, the abuse of this movie's premise was its undoing.