Is What We’re Watching True or False?
One afternoon, already feeling wary of commercials—whose unreal relation to everyday life far predates the rise of A.I.—I was served an ad for legal services, promising cash for people involved in accidents of various kinds. The bald guy lecturing me on how to get the money looked real enough, but the question of his true being kept rattling around my increasingly paranoid mind. The camera kept cutting to images of success, or cautionary portraits: people looking distraught, or flipping through reams of bureaucratic paper, or crowing about their new lease on life after grasping back from the system, say, seventy-two thousand bucks. Tucked away at the end of the commercial was a bunch of reality-oriented legalese:
Everybody knows already, one hopes, not to trust the lure of quick cash, especially as it is depicted on TV. But here’s a new spin on that untrustworthiness: Did the ad-makers pay real human beings to sell you a dream, or did they conjure these faces, these A.I.-spokesperson borgs, by way of some dashed-off prompt? Who can say? Life on the internet has become, among other things, a test of patience and an experience of gruelling duration; the ad somehow continued for more than three minutes. A captive audience, it turns out, gets crude digital puppetry as its just deserts.
So many pointless simulacra! The situation makes me appreciate honest bullshit so much more. Maybe that’s why I’ve come to sort of love the new USA Network crime drama “Anna Pigeon,” based on a series of novels by Nevada Barr, an exercise in implausibility so total and so sincere that it always leaves me in fits of appreciative laughter. If you haven’t seen this show, you’re missing out. Anna Pigeon (Tracy Spiridakos), the lead character, used to live in New York, stage-managing Broadway shows; now, after a personal tragedy, she’s a park ranger in Montana. Through the episodes, she solves bank robberies, puzzles through the mysterious murder of another ranger, and braves the vicissitudes of a vicious storm after realizing that one member of a camping group is trying to murder another. At one climactic point during that last escapade, a wooden cabin erupts into flames, but none of the people who make an unlikely escape seem too irritated, lungwise, by all the smoke they’ve surely gulped down. The part of Montana is played by Alberta, Canada. Nobody making this show expects you to believe that any of its plotlines could occur in any real place or time. That’s the kind of falsity I can get behind.
Here’s the text of a Facebook post from a few weeks ago, by the eighty-year-old film director Paul Schrader, famously a Metaphile with a penchant for intense and often abject bouts of self-disclosure:
