Is there any truth in true life stories?
The most common mistake that mankind makes is believing the media, whether it’s an instinctive naivety or a reluctance to challenge mainstream thought.
No platform has more influence over peoples’ minds than a screen. It could be your phone, tablet, TV or, my personal favourite, the movie theatre screen. By that token of thought, you shouldn’t blindly believe what you’re reading right now: it’s probably all lies. It’s not always that extreme but in some instances we need to push a little harder to see through the agenda, or rose tinted glasses that the media wears.
Not many things more popular than a ‘true story’ at the moment. Four out of seven movies nominated for an academy award this year being are true stories, five if you count The Martian.
Movies like these, true stories, can be inspiring and brilliant. I love going to them, but I find issues with them when I go home, sit down, and reflect on the story. My inquisitive nature takes me to Google and then I find out some of the shaky foundations those stories where built on. Spoiler alert, Matt Damon wasn’t really stranded on Mars. The trend has started to work itself into the national media landscape with big ‘TV Events’ hitting our network TV screens usually around the end of summer.
Whether that be Kerry Packer, Rupert Murdoch, Gina Rindehart, Shappelle Corby or Molly Meldrum, the greatest myths and tales of our fair country are romanticised and used to seduce the viewer. A charismatic character is needed to succeed after all.
Most of these are shows still trying to find their footing in a suddenly shaky media environment, so you can’t blame them for falling back on something that’s a proven winner. But we can’t let this become our history lesson for the people that accept this as fact; to string a few clichés together a true democracy is an informed democracy, and we need to know our history or we are doomed to repeat it.
One safe way to avoid these pitfalls is watch Transformers, we know that is mostly based on fiction.