True lies
What is reality? In fiction, realism is not necessarily real life, and that isn’t what readers really want anyway, argues Sophie Beal
Film director Richard Curtis summed it up: ‘If you write a story about a soldier going AWOL and kidnapping a pregnant woman and finally shooting her in the head, it’s called searingly realistic, even though it’s never happened in the history of mankind. Whereas if you write about two people falling in love, which happens about a million times a day all over the world, for some reason or another, you’re accused of writing something unrealistic and sentimental.’
In fiction, whatever the medium, writers strive to achieve realism. But that notion of ‘reality’ – the kind that keeps viewers gripped, and glued to their screens – doesn’t really correspond to real life.
Curtis was talking to the BBC about his time-travel romance About Time. Watching the film, I waited for the fight. Surely the female lead would find out about her partner Tim’s time travel, or hear he’d almost cheated on her with his first love. She’d feel either manipulated or betrayed. But the film finished before any of this happened. There were plenty of tears but the conflict came from events outside their control. These stimulated the character growth and by the end Tim learnt to savour everyday life, whether or not he could change what was ahead.
Curtis’s ambition was to tackle a big, real life, question with no simple answer – How do we find happiness? – but the film was critically dismissed as ‘another romcom’.
Helen Fielding didn’t set out to speak for a section of the population in Bridget Jones’s Diary. But nobody else had dared to describe how difficult it was for single women in their thirties to ‘figure out the career/ dating/babies issues – no one has fixed the biological clock yet’. She portrayed single women in their thirties as something other than ‘tragic spinsters’ or ‘bunny boilers’. Meanwhile, she made us laugh at tactless comments from ‘smug marrieds’, and celebrate the ‘Singleton Urban Family’. It was ground-breaking comedy that created a new genre. It wasn’t truly realistic, but still rang true with audiences. And among the broadsheet critics, it had more detractors than fans.