the fine line

Over the past several years I've seen or experienced a few things that seemed to transgress the fine line between truth and fiction. Watching Garden State again reassures me I'm not the only one out there disconcerted by this stuff.

For instance. The character in that movie who speaks Klingon. This is a language, folks, made up for a wonky sci-fi franchise, yet there are people out there who take the time to learn it. It has rules governing its phonetics and grammar. You can use it to say stuff. This is straight out of Jorge Luis Borges, ladies and gents. Welcome to Uqbar. (NB: Uqbar is a made-up place that appears, in a Borges story, in an apocryphal edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica). But here's the thing: there's no such thing as Klingons. But the fact that there's a Klingon language, people can speak, read, write it, makes it so. To put a finer point on it, someone like me is out here going, that's a ridiculous waste of time, how can you take something like that seriously, grow up and drop in on reality now and again, and yet you know somebody's making bazillions of dollars off Star Trek merchandising and conventions. You know, dollars, redeemable for any number of (more or less) meaningful real-world goods and services. If money talks, it has at least a Berlitz knowledge of Klingon.

I remember the first time the fine line was really crossed for me. It was at the Detroit International Auto Show, 2002. The U.S. Armed Services had a stall in the basement of Cobo Arena where they were showing a film people packed their fat asses into the folding chairs to see, called "Supertruck". At the beginning of the movie a flock of angry, vaguely Eastern-European-looking citizens lobbed Molotov cocktails at the American Embassy, until Supertruck crashed out through the wrought-iron gates and plowed through the unruly crowds. At an estimated 8 miles per gallon, the truck spent the next ten minutes terminating the irate masses with extreme prejudice and locking down the city (Prague?), all the while undergoing a series of Inspector-Gadget-like permutations.

And here's what scares me: I was the only one laughing.

What was I missing? I still don't know. I had lost all hold on reality vs. unreality. I've never known the American military to poke fun at itself. On the other hand it unflinchingly advertises itself to 18-25-year-old males disguised as a video game. Other Supertruck audience members turned around, deadly serious, to shush me. I struggled then, and struggle now, to understand what reaction the makers of "Supertruck" were trying to provoke at the auto show.

Would I understand this stuff better if I had a TV? Do I want to, or would I rather continue to be a crusty, befuddled academic?

Five years later, examples abound. We seem to crave it. Hollywood seems to be searching for the tipping point at which viewers finally decide women are too non-biodegradable to be beautiful. We don't even expect the stories we see on the news to be true. In general, we're much more sanguine and jaded than we used to be, and the question "Is this for real?" has been rendered largely irrelevant. Confronted with a reality in which it can be tricky to tell real from fake, is retreating into perpetual irony just our coping strategy? If I can't tell if something's authentic, isn't it safer to have an inauthentic response to it?

I guess I'm old-fashioned. I at least like to know the answer to the question: is this some kind of sick joke? Magical realism is wonderful but there's nothing magical about Supertruck. I like my reality only medium-rare, served up with a healthy side of certainties. Like how I know for sure that, last night just before I fell asleep, Zach Braff stumbled onto my blog, read it, saw my picture and realized that, even though he didn't know it at the time, I was the girl he wrote Garden State about and he's currently winging through the air over the midwest on his way to my doorstep to tell me he wants to make legions of babies with me.

And that's the god's-honest truth of the matter, that is.