Ricky Gervais’s The Invention of Lying is a movie based on a brilliant central idea with mixed results. In a world otherwise like our own, no one has the capacity to lie or even to conceive of the concept of lying. Since all fiction is a lie, actors in this world simply narrate historical events. When Mark (Gervais) tells a friend that “he said something that wasn’t” he is met with a blank stare of incomprehension. While Mark tries to seduce the unwilling Anna (Jennifer Garner), he believes that he can use his unique power to make people happier. He tells a depressed man that things will get better for him. The man of course believes him, and so is instantly happier. Or at least hopeful, which is a big improvement. And then his biggest lie gets him into a spot of bother: faced with his dying mother’s terror at an eternity of emptiness, he concocts the ultimate lie. Religion.
Mark tells his mother that she will go to a wonderful place and be reunited with everyone she ever loved. Having been overheard by the doctor, Mark becomes an instant celebrity as the man who “has no information about what happens after you die.” Not having had a lifetime to master the art of deceit, however, Mark is not particularly good at weaving lies. One day he tells Anna a story, meant to impress her, about the time he saved a baby from a burning building and was attacked by a bear after jumping from the second floor into enough jam to break his fall. But the weakness of his lies is irrelevant for a world that has no choice but to believe them.
While the idea of exploring the value of lying to individual happiness and societal well-being is fascinating and clever, the execution of it in this movie had a couple of problems. The most serious, for me, is the struggling romance between Mark and Anna. Anna likes everything about Mark except the likelihood that their children would be overweight with stubby noses. Except for some physical appeal, it is not at all clear what Mark sees in Anna, who is dreadfully shallow. Unless, as the movie indicates, her focus on genetics is somehow a natural part of this lie-free world. But why would it be? And other couples are seen in the movie who are in love, or are fighting, or are otherwise having normal relationships that are not built around their genetic compatibility.
A deeper problem, though one that presumably must be accepted along with the movie’s premise, is that people can “say something that isn’t” without lying. My students do it on their exams, on average, about 30 per cent of the time. They are certainly not lying when they say that the solar system is 4 million years old, or that the Earth is the largest planet, they are simply mistaken. And in making a mistake, they “say something that isn’t.” So the inhabitants of Gervais’s world should be very well acquainted with the idea of people saying things that turn out not to be true. Somebody should have the idea that, perhaps, all that new information about what happens after we die might be an honest mistake.
As a fan of Ricky Gervais, I think I’ll probably enjoy this movie, but as a history major, the idea that history = truth (i.e., not a lie) made me chuckle.
i think that on a test if a student in the movie’s world didn’t know, they would write, “I don’t know”
There have been lots of times when I thought I knew the answer, but turned out to be incorrect. Okay, maybe not lots of times.
But it has happened.