Rarely does a movie make a philosophically interesting mistake, but “The Invention of Lying“, which I just watched on DVD, is an exception. In the world of the film, no one is supposed to have any concept of lying, and the film’s conceit is that the main character gains lots of power by inventing lying, with unintended consequences. There is an interesting screenplay on this theme that has yet to be written, but it’s not this one. The problem is that “The Invention of Lying” makes a conceptual error that renders it not just difficult to swallow, but completely incoherent. The error is to confuse lacking a concept of lying with lacking a concept of falsity. To lack a concept of lying, one need only never have intended to lie or ever thought that one has been lied to. But to lack a concept of falsity, one must also have never noticed oneself – or anyone else – making a mistake of any sort. One problem for the movie is that while it would be fairly easy to “buy” a world of the first sort, that’s certainly not the case with a world of the second sort. But, more importantly, if one were to lack a concept of falsity, one would also lack a concept of truth (which is defined, in part, by its opposite); and lacking a concept of truth, one would lack a concept assertion; and lacking a concept of assertion, one would lack a concept of communication. But the people of this world communicate constantly, even compulsively, and clearly are aware of what they are doing. So by being presented with a world full of communicative people that lack a concept of falsity in addition to a concept of lying, we are presented with a world that makes no sense at all (and this makes a willing suspension of disbelief, at least for me, impossible).
I thought this was a very enjoyable movie, although it certainly required you to ignore some plausibility issues. Ricky Gervais is very funny, so that makes it easy for me to overlook some loopholes. I enjoyed it exactly as intended – wouldn’t it be funny if nobody had ever lied, and then suddenly somebody tried doing it, catching everyone off guard; cue hilarity.
A friend of mine who is a devout Christian was very offended by this film, and I can understand why. By near the end, you might feel you are watching a different movie that what you started with. An observation is can be derived that challenges belief in a higher power. Are such beliefs only possible within the context or origin of a lie?
I’ve always liked and cheered for movies that are written, directed, and starring the same person. This was clearly Gervais’s brainchild all around. I remember liking Billy Bob Thorton’s Sling Blade and some Clint Eastwood movies for the same reason.
Well, I understand why the film has its fans. I liked the first 30 minutes or so quite a bit myself. It’s mainly after the invention of God that the movie starts to get really silly (and, in my view, incoherent), although the problems I mentined in the post first start to arise in that early bar scene with Philip Seymour Hoffman – that’s when you realize that everyone except the Gervais character is not only gullible, but also impossibly irrational. In general, I think that both the God gag and the rest of film could have been written in a way that remained within the more plausible bounds of gullibility. After all, religious folks in our own world manage to believe in God while maintaining a complete concept falsity (one that even applies to religious beliefs)… but that would have been a tougher script to write.
By the way, Sling Blade is real favorite of mine. Beautiful film.