Fiction and Nonfiction: What do they mean?

Mostly the first story seemed to me to be to be about peoples perceptions of politically sensitive subject matter and the dangers of portraying such matters in fiction or art in general. In real life if a white woman is raped by a black guy it's simply what happened. If you write a story about a black guy raping a white woman then you run the risk of being called a racist, even if it's based on something that happened in real life. Lots of things happen in real life but when you choose to make them the subject of a work of fiction they become transformed into something else that is both more and less than the truth. The artist takes on the responsibility for everything that happens in the work even if it is simply a reflection of reality. This fact means you have to be very careful in what you do.

People might not think twice about something like a mildly racist or sexist remark that is commonly overheard in everyday life and that will usually be dismissed and forgotten but when confronted by same thing in a movie or book they will have a powerful negative reaction to it and blame the director or author for making the choice of showing such an ugly side of life and criticize it as false or exaggerated or unnecessary. It's not really fair but it does place a great deal of pressure on what artists can do in certain areas. Art is held to a higher standard that reality and often judged more harshly.

The following may run the risk of providing an example that proves my previous point, but what I didn't quite understand is why when Vi finds the pictures of the naked women in Mr. Scott's bathroom she keeps saying to herself "Don't be racist". Was it because the pictures were of white girls and she was trying to avoid putting him in the cliche of the black guy who prefers white women? Another strange thing was when Vi read her story some guy in the class seems to think the story was about her being raped when the sex we saw between her and the professor was consensual. Why did he think it was rape? Was it a racist reaction from him to assume that any sex between a black man and white woman had to be rape? What was the director trying to say by showing these type of reactions by white people towards a black man's sexuality? That they were more racist than they realized? I know there is plenty of racism by whites against blacks in our society but somehow it seemed too heavy handed to me if that was what he was going after.

What was the reason for having Mr. Scott say that Vi's story was an improvement over her last one since it at least had a beginning, a middle, and an end considering that Storytelling lacks a clear middle or a traditional definitive end? Was the director trying to say that Mr. Scott was really just an unimaginative hack too bound by tradition or was he just making a little in joke with the audience?

The second story struck me as being more about the differences that perspective places on our perceptions of reality. Consuelo's tragic story of her grandson's death doesn't seem to reach Mikey. Similarly the problems that the Livingston's face are viewed as a comedy by the audience who sees the documentary. It's true that Toby's life is even more pathetic than that of the Livingston's and it's made to seem like comedy to us when it's doubtlessly more serious to him.

It's also interesting that the Livingston's are murdered by Consuelo for their uncaring attitude since we as the ultimate audience are in the position of sympathizing both with her and with the cold attitude of an observer who mocks the Livingston's troubles. It's always easy to ignore somebody else's pain or even to laugh at it. The director doesn't seem to be saying that people should lighten up about their own difficulties and learn to laugh about them, which would be a more conventional attitude for a movie to espouse, but that people should be more compassionate to the suffering of others. Perhaps this is a bit of a humorless and overly pious attitude on his part demonstrated by Scooby's hollow and empty reaction, after the crushing experience of seeing himself held up to public ridicule at the film screening, to finding his family dead and making that remark about how the movie is a hit. I guess it's supposed to make us think about the cost of things we ignore like how Americans always seem to care much more about dead US soldiers than we do about dead Vietnamese or Iraqis or that real harm that is done by jokes told by late night comedians or Internet backtalkers about real people. Quite a lot to cover in one little movie, isn't it? Maybe that's why it came out as seeming like a case of the director trying to say too much and to cover too many different bases to me. But I liked the movie over all and greatly prefer it to the too prevalent alternative of movies that manage to say nothing important whatsoever.

Put simply: All characters are living a fiction of their own making, and truth is stranger than fiction.