Three years ago, Kristen Roupenian’s "Cat Person" had the dubious honour—unheard of for a short story—of going viral. The story, which followed the romantic disappointments between Margot, a twenty-year-old woman and Robert, a man of thirty-four, was published in the New Yorker and shared throughout social media and acclaimed for its relatability. It was often mistaken for a "confessional" first-person essay, perhaps transposed to the third person in order to protect identities or to allow the author to distance herself from the events it described. The story was shared by many as straight-up testimony.
The web lit up with debates about the age gap between the protagonists, or about Robert’s aggressive behaviour—all of which would be fine if these conversations also made way for the glaring fact that "Cat Person" was a work of fiction. Like most fiction it was rooted in experience, but the characters were an invention.
Some suggested—with good reason—that "Cat Person" had been read as a thinkpiece because it was written by a woman. Laura Miller in Slatesurmised that some had mistaken the story for an essay because they had read it on their phone, where they read many opinion and news pieces, and concluded: “It’s inevitable that some readers view "Cat Person" as weighing in on a timely issue and offering up lessons, the way personal essays are so often inclined to do. It’s easy to get into the habit of thinking that every imaginative literary work must be made to carry an unambiguous moral.”
The Cat Person episode came to mind earlier this month when a brouhaha erupted over Netflix’s royal family drama The Crown. In an interview with the Daily Mail, the UK’s culture minister, Oliver Dowden, added his voice to a growing clamour among Britain’s blowhards for Netflix to add a warning before the programme to explain that it is a work of fiction. One would hope that the presence of actors, all of whom at least 50 per cent more attractive than their real-life counterparts, would have alerted an audience to this fact. Certainly, some viewers have been turned off by Prince Charles because of the programme, with one Twitter user writing: “I just finished The Crown and I will single handedly bully Prince Charles to abdicate the throne.” Though to see this type of banter as evidence of a rising tide of republicanism is to underestimate the British population’s capacity for grovelling subservience to royalty.
The Crown should obviously not carry a fiction warning, and not because viewers clearly understand the difference between fact and fiction—in the internet era the difference between the two is all too often fumbled—but because that would be a grotesque imbecility. Instead, what is needed is comprehensive education in media literacy and in fictional storytelling from the written word to the screen, so that consumers of undifferentiated “content” online will be able to interpret images and words more ably. Our ways of reading and viewing are more complex now, given that merely clicking on a hyperlink from this article can take you to a short story, a film, an article, a tweet or a TV show. On top of helping internet users to identify and navigate so-called ‘fake news’, a programme of education would assist them to appreciate richer, more diverse storytelling. It could also entail divorcing ourselves from the noxious modern habit of viewing film and literature as mere vehicles of learning, rather than works of art. Reading Toni Morrison to educate yourself about the evils of slavery is all well and good, but Beloved differs from a Wikipedia entry in that it is, among other things, a soaring work of imagination, with inhabited prose, magical elements, and passages of stunning imagery.
Last year, a clip from Ruben Östlund’s film Force Majeure, a work of fiction just like Cat Person, went viral on Twitter. The clip shows a scene which forms the very crux of its narrative, where a typical nuclear family is sitting at a mountainside terrace. An enormous avalanche begins to rumble towards them. The mother of the family seeks to protect her children, while the father flees, thinking only to save himself from sure death. The clip was briefly everywhere, evidently retweeted by people who believed this heavily edited film segment to be “real-life” footage captured on camera.
One user wrote: “please tell me this was a parody. did he really LEAVE his wife and kids behind?” Daily Dot wrote about the viral clip, summarising events with the headline: “Fake avalanche video sends Twitter into frenzy.” Of course, something being fiction does not make it fake: it is an artistic act of invention, created not with the intention of deceiving anybody but rather of entertaining, delighting, intriguing or unsettling us. The clip’s appearance online had led internet users to misconstrue it fundamentally: it seems the kneejerk reaction on the web is to read everything, flatly, in the first degree.
We live in a world of relentless content. Clips and gifs can pop up everywhere; parody, documentary, news and fiction live alongside one another more closely than ever, and biopics and true crime documentaries are the meat and drink of the film & TV industry. It is, then, increasingly important to educate ourselves about how to read words and pictures in a critical way, giving people the ability to put them in context and, where possible, derive pleasure from the act of artistic creation. Putting a content warning on The Crown only plays into a culture that can lack these critical tools; it would be curing the symptom, not the cause.
