Fine print does indicate . . . things like perspective and previous incidents lead to bylaws/rules and copyright/inspiration disclosures. I was struck as we finished watching a 2021 film called “Queenpins” (not a recommendation, by the way) to read the following fine print at the end:
“This film is inspired by actual events, however, characters, names, dialogue, businesses and certain locations and events have been fictionalized or invented for dramatic purposes.”
Now, the film is about fraud, capitalism gone amuck, spouses/relatives who do not listen, bending the rules, and many other themes that make you want to champion the underdog and figure out if there is a real hero – or if this is all about anti-heroes (or more rightly – how do you define a hero).
But what struck me in the fine print? The use of “fictionalized or invented”.
The description of the movie indicates that this would be historical fiction – a category used quite often in current literature. The fun in this type of fiction is to find out what is fact and what is fiction. In the past half decade this has become more and more the realm of AI (artificial intelligence) – where research is left to a great “mind” to scrape the known universe of knowledge and then spew forth the “truth” gleaned from these sources. Of course, even AI can be biased in choosing sources – thus the term mis-information could be applied.
Current world philosophies play on this type of realization, turning all of life into fiction – or at least giving no purpose or meaning to life because truth (or even simple facts) cannot be determined. So, a certain generation lives in fiction and stories told (movies produced) are merely ways to help them interpret their own lives from their own perspectives. Truth derives from themselves – a statement that something is fictionalized is taken for granted because fiction can become truth if you want that to happen.
But what about invented? There appears to be an attempt to distinguish between a writer’s ability to make something up in their head (to fictionalize) and then the film having parts that were tested in some type of reality (to invent).
We have gone from “actual events” that inspire a narrative, to “fiction” that is created as truth in the head of the narrative’s writer, finally to the writer then seeking out “science” (in the pure use of the term) to test a hypothesis of what might have happened.
In a world where narrative reigns to create a path for a person’s personal life story: fact, fiction and invention become the triumverate of your life’s philosophy. Is that enough? Or do we have another starting gate that leads down another path?