lies

Lie of the land

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I know we’re not really in a post-Trump era yet, but it feels as if we are. It feels as if not every post has to be about Trump, that he doesn’t colour everything any more, or wear everything down. For the first time in years, it feels as if we can have other concerns and even enjoy tiny, little ones.

Such as this. I don’t think I’d have had the room in my head before to notice but this week one school in America replaced all its world maps with a different design. This one school’s decision slightly narked me, slightly made me frown, and completely reminded me of a true story. It’s a story about the map they chose and ultimately it’s about one person’s ego.

When I said world map just there, you pictured what I imagine you know is called the Mercator map. Strictly speaking, it’s the Mercator projection. And what this school says it has changed to is called — if you listened to its creator back in the day and you didn’t find him as irritating as apparently everyone else did — the Peters projection.

You know this one, too. It’s the one where the world looks funny, where every country is oddly skinny.

I’m not going to name the school because I don’t know it. And I’m not going to criticise them because I hope they’re teaching their students what this all really means. It’d be good if they also taught about map gerrymandering by politicians to redraw districts so that voting favours them, which is clever and abhorrent and not the story I want to enthuse about with you today.

Anyway. The usual claim is that Geradus Mercator’s map is wrong and Arno Peters’s one is right. Mercator did his in 1569 and Peters, well, borrowed his in the 1970s. He brought this out then and shouted about it so much that quickly people pointed out to him that exactly the same idea had been done by James Gall in 1855.

It was exactly the same because it would be. These two designs, Mercator’s and the Gall-Peters one, are not paintings, they are maths. If you believe that Mercator’s map is wrong, you are correct. But the Gall-Peters one is precisely, I mean exactly as wrong –– just in a different way.

Proponents of the Gall-Peters version say that Mercator distorts the shapes of countries, that he makes ridiculous decisions that make smaller countries look as big as, well, big ones. And that their version shows every country in exactly the right size. Ta-daaaa.

The list of things I love about this started with Peters pissing everyone off so much that they searched back into the 1800s to find a way to diss him. And it continues with how that claim about Mercator’s distortion and Gall-Peters’ showing the correct sizes is simultaneously entirely true and entirely bollocks. Isn’t that wonderful? If anyone ever insists there are two sides to a story and won’t listen to you saying there are usually more, settle the discussion by pointing out that both sides can be bullshit.

I’m going to take Gall out of it for a second because by all accounts he knew what his map did and did not do whereas Peters, though he must have known, pretended it was perfect. So there’s Peters, way back in the 1970s, righteously adamant that his map has the correct sizes of every country. And if anyone should point out that the sizes are right but the shapes are not, he’d point to someone else and say “Next question.”

It is not possible to have a flat map of the world that doesn’t have something wrong with it. If you want a correct map, buy a globe. The act of transferring a map from a sphere to a flat surface is an art, sure, but it’s chiefly maths. It’s called projecting the globe onto the map and you have to make certain decisions about which way you’re going to do it.

Sometime in the 1990s, I interviewed the owners of a Geographical Information System, a GIS, and asked them about this. These two men looked over their shoulder to see if their PR person was listening and when she wasn’t, they nodded at me with these gigantic, enthusiastic grins. And then they showed me how their GIS map is really exactly as wrong as everyone else’s. It was a very good system and you had to do an awful lot to it to hit this projection issue in any way that would be a problem, but you could do it.

You just don’t have to be a dick about it.

If Peters had been like Gall and just said here’s a map, it does this, it doesn’t do that, well, he might not have been noticed, there may not have been much attention paid to him. He talked himself up, though, he claimed a creation that wasn’t his, he reportedly slammed all alternatives. Oh, god. You’re thinking this too. He did claim he had the best maps and he was lying.

Anyway. Here’s the thing for me. I like Mercator’s projection and I like it for a very specific reason. The Gall-Peters projection is usually used as a political tool. It is used by people who know full well how maps work but reckon you don’t and so they can say they’re putting right centuries of misrepresentation.

Whereas Mercator did his map in the way he did because it does a job. Mercator did not set out to misrepresent countries or distort continents, he set out to make a map that ships could navigate by. Use his map and you got where you were going. That’s it.

I like that honesty of purpose. I like that purpose. So if we have to have maps that are wrong –– and we inescapably do, it is impossible to have a completely correct map of the world –– then I vote for Mercator. I vote for the one that was designed to help everyone, not for the map some eejit used to aggrandise himself.

That list of things I love from this tiny fact of a school changing its maps. I said that Peters was apparently so irritating that people not only looked up the previous James Gall version, but they also rubbed Peters’ nose in it as much as they could by always referring to his projection as the Gall-Peters one.

They stopped short of drawing on it with a Sharpie. But they did very quickly call it something else.

The Unmitigated Gall-Peters projection.

Lies, damned lies and percentages

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I’m not saying that people make up percentages, I’m saying if that they were telling the truth they’d give us the figures. I’m going to make up some examples here in part because my point is about the lying rather than these specific lies but also because it seems appropriate. For I’m seeing this particular lying technique used a lot at the moment over whether Britain should stay in Europe or not and if you’ve seen an actual fact for either side, well done.

I’m seeing it most of all in discussions about immigration which is apparently a dreadful problem. Oh, is it bollocks a problem. BBC Breakfast interviewed a woman this week who said, like so many others, that immigration is a very bad thing and it must to be stopped. Only, she’s an ex-pat British woman living in Spain. She’s an immigrant. You can’t buy stupidity like that but you can pander to it.

Consequently you’ve seen people banging their fists on tables about how immigration has – I don’t know, let’s make up some high figures here – doubled. Maybe more. Maybe there are 60% more immigrants.

Since when? Usually people say “since when” in the same tone and with the same meaning as something like “you and whose army?” but I mean it literally. Immigration has doubled since when? Wednesday? The 17th Century?

The 60% or whatever other percentage in whatever argument you like is not a figure, it is a red-alert klaxon saying the speaker wants you to believe something you wouldn’t if you knew the truth. Say it is 60%, say immigration is up 60% and let’s even throw in that it’s up that much since this time last year. We’re throwing in an actual baseline comparison, we’re throwing in a genuine since-when.

Only, say 10 immigrants came to the UK last year and a whole 16 came this time. That’s a 60% increase right there. Gasp. Doubtlessly or at least presumably the actual figure is more than 16 people but I don’t know what it is and people telling you percentages don’t want you to know.

It offends me that politicians think immigration is a vote-winning issue and it offends me even more that they’re right. For god’s sake, though, my family is from Ireland: I’m only first-generation British born. I shouldn’t be allowed.

It’s not you, it’s me

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Okay, you may have trouble swallowing this considering how I go on at you every week. But when we meet in person, I am infinitely – infinitely – more interested in you than I am in me. Have I said this to you before? I tell you everything, I must’ve mentioned it: my attitude when nattering away with someone is that I know all about me, I was there, I saw me do it, let’s talk about you.

Truly, time spent talking about me is wasted and boring. I’m not knocking myself, I’m just not interested and I have plenty of time to know me, I might get only minutes with you. And look at you: look at all you’re doing, all you know that I don’t, how could I possibly waste any time talking about me?

I got told off for this today.

I saw a friend for a coffee – she’s Steph Vidal-Hall, she does coaching for creatives and you could look her up right now – and she is doing so much that is so interesting. I was really looking forward to learning about it all.

And I did find out a lot but she also tricked me.

Before I knew it, I was telling her about a job I have on that is worrying me, about projects that are vastly delayed because of my cold, and I was even telling her about a thing recently that went spectacularly well for me.

Clearly I will never have coffee with this woman again.

She argued that this is how conversation between friends is supposed to be. I can’t disagree. I do also wonder if I’m a bit selfish in conversations, wanting to ditch me and talk about you.

This is all a small and maybe obvious point but I’m thinking about it a lot now. Previously, I admit this, I’ve liked that I put the spotlight on you. That’s mostly because that is exactly where the spotlight should be, but also we’ve all had people who can barely hide that they exist to tell you about themselves. So I have enjoyed not being like that.

Plus, my lights, you cannot believe the things people have told me. It is amazingly flattering and I’d give you examples but for how that would be rather destroying the whole trust that I seem to have got from strangers and friends alike.

I’ve looped around this thought before and always managed to kick it to the kerb. But today’s friend did two things that fixed the issue in my head and also made me want to talk to you about it.

First, she pointed out that she has previously enjoyed our chats but gone away feeling bad that they had been so completely about her.

And, second, she helped me.

I have this job on and I am nervous about it. I’m still nervous, I’m not going to say she changed my mind and has made me look forward to it, but she gave me a nudge that helped. It’s a nudge that may mean I get over these particular nerves given time, it definitely means I had a moment when I actually felt relaxed.

Also, she bought the tea.

If we were chatting face to face now I’d be grabbing your arm and bringing you over to her.

Let’s all get a tea some time and you can tell us about you, Steph can tell us about her, and hopefully you’ll both take long enough that I have time to make up some interesting lies.

Don’t lie to me

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I must be on my own here or The Usual Suspects wouldn’t be so popular. But there is an issue in that film that came up to an extent in a play I just saw and unfortunately is also pressing on my mind over a project of my own.

There are spoilers here for The Usual Suspects but I won’t tell you the name of the play. That hurts me more than it hurts you: I enjoyed the play very much and I only saw it on its opening night, there’s a fair chance you could still see it – and I am certain it will tour and tour and tour. Nonetheless, I ain’t telling.

Let me get the Suspects spoiler out of the way: if you’ve not seen it and you want to, look away now.

The twist in the film is that Kevin Spacey’s character has made up the whole story.

Fine. As twists go, it is enormous because it transforms the entire film and reveals the baddie to be the one person who didn’t or at least were not supposed to suspect. And it’s a lie: I like being lied to in drama, I love being misdirected. That’s true in the production as much as it is in the story: I even wrote a Self Distract once called Lie to Me.

But.

I was really enjoying The Usual Suspects up to that revelation. It was written by Christopher McQuarrie, directed by Bryan Singer. The cast was impressive. (Well, you keep hearing stories that the actors didn’t know who the baddie was in the story and it’s a little hard to remain impressed if none of them could be bothered to read to the end of the script.)

Still, there I am watching this film in the late 1990s and I was quickly into it, into the story, engrossed by these characters. But that’s the problem, I was engrossed by the characters. And then told they didn’t exist.

It’s a funny thing: characters in a drama never exist, it’s just a story, yet being told that they don’t, told that within the drama itself, that makes a difference.

All these characters I’d followed and invested in and believed, they didn’t exist and they never did. All a lie. I was meant to be jolted and I was, I was meant to be blown away by the twist and I wasn’t. It’s done cleverly, I should write something that smart, but instead I solely found myself thinking oh. Okay. That’s clever. What time is it?

The twist gave us a surprise but it took away every single thing, every possible element that I had been interested in, that I cared about, that had got me into the story. I don’t think that’s a fair trade. I would’ve come away enthused but instead I left that cinema annoyed and clearly I wasn’t alone because it only won two Oscars and another thirty major film awards.

The Play I Saw Recently included two characters that we join as they are first meeting, first getting to know and to like each other. It’s a funny, touching, growing relationship necessarily conducted in little slices as these two happen to be in the same place. You quickly suspect they are both going out of their way to get back there when the other is likely to be around, but it’s sweet and believable. You want them to get together and that is quite a hard thing to pull off in drama. It’s done well and seems to be the sole light in a bleak story. Except toward the end you learn that their meeting was not an accident and that one of them has been explicitly working to get revenge on the other.

That revelation fits the play perfectly and I am vastly more satisfied with this PISR than I was with Suspects.

However, because we aren’t supposed to guess that this is happening, we only learn very late on that there might be a reason for anyone to want revenge on this person. It’s a big thing that’s happened. I envy how the writer has crafted something that we can be jolt-appalled by yet also feel for the person who did this big thing, how we can understand how it could happen.

But we get that for a moment and then we learn the reveal. The enormous thing is uncovered and dispensed with in a thrice and that reduces it. It doesn’t make it trivial, but it makes it smaller because we don’t get long for us to see how it affects that character. Something enormous is revealed late and the plot moves on instantly so the enormous because dispensed with. It therefore becomes smaller. So the revenge that comes immediately after that feels out of scale. The fact that we haven’t suspected anything – that may well be my fault, the script may well be riddled with hints and as I say it all fits in with the gorgeously bleak story – also changes things. We didn’t suspect this person had done this thing, we didn’t suspect that the other would be there for revenge.

So we’ve spent this time getting to know these two characters and really we didn’t get to know them.

I think it works better than The Usual Suspects, though, because I think we can feel that what we’ve seen is the real character beneath the plot. What we’ve learnt of how these two feel and think is real even though what we’ve learnt of how they act is not.

I’m not sure. Maybe this comes down to how I love stories and I don’t like puzzles. The Usual Suspects is a fundamentally different film if you watch it a second time. This PISR is a drastically different play if you go see it again. Jagged Edge is a taut thriller unless you know whether the guy did it or not, in which case it’s a bit empty.

All of which would be fine, I could do the critic dance and say McQuarrie and the writer of PISR aren’t as good as I am, QED, except that I am tussling with this issue in a project of my own and, oh my lights, it’s hard.

I have a tale that doesn’t exactly depend on you thinking a key character is something when she’s really something else, but it helps.

She’s lying her teeth off and of course I want the moment you realise this to be enormous. But I’m trying to make it so that everything you’ve learnt about her is still true, she is still this same woman going through these same issues – those issues are just gigantically bigger than you expected and they are profoundly more her fault than you thought. I want you to be truly shocked but then immediately feel for her.

Easy.

I know that moment, I can see that exact instant when you are to realise and I know to the pixel where it will come in the story. Unfortunately, it has to be instantly followed by another shock that I fear is about as big. The revelation causes the second shock, I can’t see a way to even separate them by a minute. So whatever part of my brain it is that just does plots for me while I sweat about characters, that’s tapping me on the arm and asking me to ponder this. To ponder a lot – such a lot – whether an immediate second shock diminishes the first one. You want to get the most value out of something, especially when you’ve worked hard to get us to that point, so it’s an issue of whether I am throwing away some of the punch. Whether I am making this enormous thing feel smaller and out of scale.

I might be turning this into a puzzle.

But I am clear on this one thing. Even when you learn the truth about this character, she will still be the same character you’ve come to know. She’ll just have this whole other issue and I hope to make it that this hurts.

I’ve said this before but I think drama is like running your hand over a piece of wood. Go one way, stroke against the grain and your skin gets cut by shards, it stings and you bleed. That’s what a story should do as you go through it. But the way when you then stroke back, stroke in the same direction as the grain, it’s all smooth. Stories have to work in retrospect; take us somewhere new and most certainly, definitely, unquestionably, undoubtedly take the characters somewhere they don’t want to go but they have to be the same characters.

I think.