To the Archives: The Invention of Lying

"Man In The Sky forbid!"

First off, if you haven’t checked out my guest post on Amanda Kusek’s The 90-Minute Movie, please do so and follow Amanda. She is very talented and funny, and has a devoted readership, as evidenced by all the positive feedback I received over there. Hopefully, one day I can do it again.

Zombieland (88 minutes)

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I was recently going through some old posts on my Blogger account, which I quickly realized was a bad idea. I used to post on there frequently in the mid-2000’s when I apparently had more free time. I actually had a part-time night job that involved a lot of down time, so I guess I was technically getting paid to do it, but that did not make the writing any better. I was a really angry man back then. (I know what you’re thinking: “Back then?”)

I did find one post that I thought was salvageable, so I did some rewriting and decided to post it here. Thanks for reading, as always, and don’t forget to check out my podcast, my Red Bubble Store, and if you feel so inclined, to Buy me a Coffee. And obviously you can stay right on this page and like and subscribe.

Years ago, my friend got bit by the acting bug. A romantic comedy called "This Side of the Truth" starring Ricky Gervais and Jennifer Garner was filming in his town Extras were needed for a crowd scene, and my friend decided to sign up, despite the fact that I warned him it was really, really boring, having spent hours on the sweltering set of The Great Debators a few months before. For a rundown of my extra work, check out my previous post on my background work. It’s kinda funny:

Still, he insisted it might be fun, so I told him to go with my blessing, but bring a book.

He came away from his days on the set with a desire to try his hand at acting. He regaled me with stories of meeting fabulous people and being in a scene with Ricky Gervais and Jennifer Garner and making friends with his fellow extras and wanting to get a head-shot and asked what websites one goes to in order to find acting gigs. I was both excited for him and slightly perplexed. Like a lot of folks from our generation, he had a tendency to embrace all sorts of endeavors back then, and some would stick and some would not. His history, coupled with what I knew about extra-work, made me absolutely sure that he was sugar-coating this whole experience.

Nevertheless, buoyed by his enthusiasm and feeling slightly poor, I went with him to a cattle call for the Bruce Willis vehicle shooting in the area, The Surrogates, where we met up with several people that he had worked with on "Truth."I wrote about my experience on that set in the above post, so I won’t go through it again, but in case you missed it, my friend went back out to film in the rain while I retreated to a nearby bar. I will say I felt a little guilty that we both got paid the same rate for the day. However, he still really enjoyed himself, and even parlayed it into a commercial (although he was blotted out) and a few other acting gigs, even as a lead in an indy comedy.

When The Surrogates was released, he saw it opening weekend. His review was somewhat tepid, and he actually has a very positive attitude. Since he did not see anyone he knew and certainly not either of us, I have never bothered to see it. In fact, I might have even given him an “I told you so.”

But here's the clincher; The Invention of Lying, the film formerly known as "This Side of the Truth" was released the following week, and my friend again went to see it on opening night. The next day he told me that not only was it a funny movie, but that he saw himself in several shots. I've known enough extras to know what that really means: you may have seen his arm for a tenth of a second wwwaaaayyyy in the background. Hey, I told everyone I was in Great Debators, but I only knew I was in it because I paused the DVD to the exact tenth of a second that I am actually on screen. So, it was with great skepticism that I saw the movie with him, asking him (rather obnoxiously) to point out every shot that he was in. Even as the very first shot unspooled, a helicopter shot of downtown Lowell, I started to heckle him about: “Is that you?” “Are you there?” “Is that dot you?”

Here's where I ate a big fat helping of crow. my friend was in fact clearly visible in several shots, actually close to the action, and even if he was not there to point himself out, I probably would have seen him.

That’s him next to the angry guy railing against the Man in the Sky. And here’s the full scene, because it’s pretty funny:

To top it all off, the movie itself was decently-funny, original movie. And I think if I had been an extra on this one, I might have actually enjoyed the experience, and maybe I would have thought, "I should do this more often, and not just for the money." I can see why he got the bug from this one, as opposed to all the times I sat around a movie set, bored as Hell, sweating my balls off, asking myself why I was wasting my life. His experience was probably the polar opposite of mine, and not just because he's a more positive person, but because the movie was better, the crew was probably better,... Hell, even the lunch was probably better.

The movie is interesting on a couple levels. At the beginning, it is a guy-meets-girl story, but there are layers under that premise, since the “guy” (Gervais) is the only person in the world who can tell a lie. Everyone else in the world can only tell the truth. Telling the truth all the time sounds good, but can be, as Gervais describes in the opening voice-over, “a little harsh.” For example, Ricky goes on a date with Jennifer Garner, and she instantly informs him that she is not attracted to him because he is, well, not attractive. She eventually tells him that she can only be attracted to someone whom she has the potential to make good-looking babies with. At the time, as a single man who was going on a lot of first dates, I remember feeling a kinship with poor Ricky, because I felt that women weren’t giving me a proper chance, and this reasoning made sense. It couldn’t be because of anything I did wrong, of course. It was obviously because my date didn’t feel like she could make good-looking babies with me, and I saw no way around that trap. Whatever helped me sleep at night…

The crazy thing is, once Gervais realizes that there’s this thing called “lying,” he discovers he can basically do whatever he wants, because only telling the truth makes people incredibly naive, since they don’t know what a lie is, so obviously nobody would do it. At first, he uses his lying trick for financial gain, by simply telling a bank teller that they need to give him money. He also goes to a casino and just tells the employee that he won at slots but the machine never paid out, and the guy believes him with no proof.

Things take a turn after he visits his dying mother, and the doctor, played by Jason Bateman (I had forgotten how many really funny people are in this movie, including Tina Fey, Rob Lowe, Jonah Hill and even John Hodgman), tells him, rather casually, that she will definitely die that night. Bateman also tells Gervais that it’s fajita night in the cafeteria and that he should grab a bite after his mom dies.

Ricky is crushed, and his mom is incredibly frightened. Since nobody lies in this world, there’s also no theories about the afterlife. Everyone believes that there’s just “an eternity of nothingness.” Since Ricky can lie, he tells her that everything will be ok, because the afterlife is actually filled with love and joy and mansions. Word of this soon gets out, and suddenly Gervais has spilled the beans on God, turning himself into a sort of Christ-figure to the rubes of this world, who have never heard of such a crazy thing. So, the movie is pretty much coming right out and saying that Christianity is a big lie, because these people only tell the truth. It’s definitely a little weird, but it does keep the movie from becoming like a Saturday Night Live skit that goes on too long. Interestingly enough, once Rickey tries to explain to people how the “Man in the Sky” pulls all the strings, a lot of them think God is pretty terrible for making bad things happen to good people (hence, the angry man next toi my friend). And it’s kind of hard to argue with them. Gervais has to explain to everyone his mansion theory about the afterlife, and that if they're good in life, they’ll get one when they die. This seems to please everyone, and Gervais ends up becoming the Time Man of the Year and a Hollywood bigwig because of it.

However, beyond the religious undercutting and all his success, he’s still not able to get the beautiful Jennifer Garner, who from the opening scene has told poor, chubby Gervais that she is out of his league and that genetically they are a poor match and so shouldn't bother dating at all. This, to me, is why this movie is almost the anti-romcom, even skewering modern love as a whole, yet somehow embracing it because, in the end, (SPOILER ALERT, in case you have never seen a film), the guy gets the girl, based on his personality, and not his genetics. In the real world, all animals seek out their ideal genetic partner, the one that will help them make the best babies. Humans do this too, consciously or subconsciously. It is basically the premise of meeting people on apps. If you wouldn’t make the best babies with Jennifer Garner then she’ll just swipe left, or right. Or whichever the bad one is. Now I’m left to wonder, however, if he could have just said to her, “No, I am good-looking, and we would make great babies,” if she would have just believed him.

This movie, however, is the only one that I've seen that comes out and says that people are kind of shallow when it comes to love, and yet it does it in such a clever way that it still has a happy ending. It weirdly pokes holes in the very genre that it's in and it should, in fact, be kind of an indictment of the Hollywood happy ending, but they still did it. The message in the end; You can be with someone who is not necessarily your ideal genetic mate, as long as that person makes you happy. Look at these two making it happen:

Just kidding. Colin Jost is awesome. I’d probably marry him if he was available.

To me, there was another message to this movie, because I find it ironic that a movie about lying can expose me to the truth: things are not always what they seem. Ricky Gervais may not seem like the ideal mate for someone as hot as Jennifer Garner, but he was in that case, and he made her happy. And extra work may not always be the most horrible experience of your life. It wasn't in that case, and it seems to have made my friend happy.

Thanks for reading. Please leave a comment below. Just make sure you tell the truth in it.