As the live orchestra faded out, a CBS radio newsman urgently broke into the broadcast: “Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin. . . .” An astronomical observatory at Princeton, reported the anchor, had just witnessed mysterious blue flames emitting from Mars. After delivering the report, the anchor returned listeners to the strings and brass of the orchestra but quickly returned seconds later with more breaking news. Over the next fifty-seven minutes, sober news bulletins morphed into shrieking live reportage, each bringing more terrifying details. Martians were invading New Jersey.
If you had tuned in just a minute earlier, you would have heard Orson Welles introduce the coming apocalypse as a Mercury Theater production of The War of the Worlds.175 Some listeners who missed that introduction thought they were hearing an actual news report. More still were persuaded by fraught phone calls from frantic friends. The exact tally of confused listeners is still debated, but this was 1938, an era when people had damned good reasons to be frightful, and not just because the radio was reporting an alien invasion on the eve of Halloween.
The Mercury broadcast was live because all radio was live. (Through the ‘30s, recorded audio was verboten because tape was deemed manipulable. Recorded news was the fake news of its day.) The War of the Worlds marked the seventeenth episode of the weekly show, which had developed a small but respectable following by adapting highbrow material into radio drama—Dickens, Brontë, and Shakespeare had occupied previous episodes. The source material of this week’s episode, H. G. Wells’s 1897 novel, was both scientifically dated and dramatically drab, but the radio playwrights took brilliant license in updating the plodding sci-fi tale. By adapting the plot into a series of news bulletins, and parlaying them through the very network that delivered real news, the radio play literally turned the medium into the (fake) message.
Other factors contributed to the hyperrealism. Because the Mercury Theater was noncommercial (a “sustaining program,” per the argot of the era), the show played continuously for forty minutes before a break. The local color and contemporary setting also enhanced the simulation, especially for nearby listeners who recognized the names of New Jersey towns destroyed by an alien “heat ray.” Orson Welles pulled out every trick to intensify its verisimilitude. The voice actor who played the Secretary of the Interior, for instance, performed a dead-ringer impersonation of radio’s most recognizable voice—President Franklin Roosevelt.
Some people fell victim to the artifice.
During the broadcast, switchboards at CBS lit up with calls from confused listeners. Rumors spread of panic-stricken citizens fleeing their homes to seek refuge from the Martians. Newspapers, the next day, reinforced the storyline with reports of suicides and heart attacks. No one verified these accounts, but even reputable newspapers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, passed along tabloid-y hearsay as fact.
In the years that followed, the legend of a naive populace saturated society. Psychology textbooks, documentaries, and popular literature propagated the lore of the gullible masses. Even today, most people know The War of the Worlds story as one of bewildered sheeple fleeing their homes. Six million people heard the broadcast; one million fell for the ruse, according to legend. One in six might be the perfect ratio for this type of quasi-scientific account. It signals to nearly everyone, those rubes fell for it, but you certainly would not.
It took several decades to unpack the truth. Here is how a recent researcher—the first to have access to the actual FCC complaints—characterizes that night in 1938:
These panicked scenes of flight and near flight, which turned War of the Worlds into the stuff of American legend, did happen, but they were very, very rare. Even among the people frightened by the program, most stayed close to their radios, listening intently for twenty, twenty-five, or thirty minutes before they figured out it was fake (as many did) or heard an announcement that it was fiction.176
Some people were tricked, but it was hardly pandemonium. The media, and newspapers in particular, exaggerated the hysteria. An attitude prevailed among newspapermen at the time that the young whippersnappers in the “new media” of radio had lower ethical standards. Newspaper editors deemed broadcasting a lesser medium, and the newfangled radio box a tool for spreading untruths, so they were quick to deliver a comeuppance when the upstarts stumbled. When it appeared that Orson Welles was spreading fake news, newspapers seized the moment with a clear message: Radio will lie to you. To the old media guard, Martians were not colonizing earth, but broadcast signals surely were.
The War of the Worlds was fake news, but the reaction it engendered was an even more exaggerated form of misinformation.
SEE ALSO: AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF HOWARD HUGHES; THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT; F FOR FAKE; THE FOURTH WALL; HUMBUGGERY; THE MARCH OF TIME; ROBINSON CRUSOE
By 1967, Andy Warhol’s art-making machine was running on all cylinders. Pop art had become a global phenom; celebrities were crowding his misfit studio, The Factory, to request silkscreen portraits; his kinky films, including Chelsea Girls and Blow Job, filled art houses; and his raucous house band, the Velvet Underground, had just released their debut album. Warhol was one busy dude. So when he was asked to perform a speaking tour of small state colleges in the Rocky Mountains, yes was a surprising answer.
His first stop was the University of Utah. A few students picked Warhol up at the Salt Lake City airport, discovering a disheveled man, reticent and caked in makeup. When the wind blew, a cloud of white powder puffed from his coarse silver hair. On campus that evening, where more than a thousand people gathered for the event, Warhol, still wearing dark sunglasses, played excerpts of grainy black-and-white films with sketchy sound quality. During the Q&A, an audience member asked what the film meant. “My films are to look at,” he replied. Another attendee asked him to characterize underground film. “Black and white and very cheap,” was the terse response.
Warhol ended up making three more such campus appearances, each as cryptic as the first, across the Rockies. Except it wasn’t actually Andy Warhol—it was Allen Midgette, a young actor and Factory denizen hired to impersonate the pop art icon.177 A couple months after the tour, the ruse was uncovered by a college newspaper, creating a scandal that forced Warhol to justify the flimflam. “Because I don’t really have that much to say, he was better than I am,” wrote Warhol in a statement from New York. “He was what the people expected. They liked him better than they would have me.”
Maybe. But those words, inimitably, sounded like the true Andy Warhol. Only the master of reproduction could rationalize, with such innocence, a desire so diabolical: to casually replicate himself, like a simple Campbell’s soup can, into a slightly better product.
SEE ALSO: CLIFTON, TONY; CONFIDENCE GAME; FOUNTAIN; HUMAN CLONING; LEROY, JT; TRIBUTE BANDS; TUPAC HOLOGRAM
The career of a professional athlete is mired in upset, loss, and grief. In all sporting events, someone has to lose. Even if you are great, you still fail at some point. No champion exits their career undefeated. No Olympiad wins every gold, there are no infinite streaks of flawless scores, everyone scratches on the eight ball at least once. Nobody is perfect.
But what if perfection in your job meant always losing? Every day you showed up at work, played the game, looked up at the scoreboard, and always saw your team behind. But for you, losing is victory; winning might get you fired. Failure is a fait accompli, your modus operandi, your raison d’être, and every other foreign expression for the futility of human will. You play to lose.
This was the life of a Washington General, perhaps the saddest of all careers in professional sports. For more than sixty years, the Generals were the basketball team that played the Harlem Globetrotters. Their job was to act the foil for their competitors’ comedy bits and to lose every time. Defeat was part of the game plan. But losing wasn’t enough. They had to make it seem like they were trying to win. And on half the court, they really were. On offense, they were coached to play their best, shooting and scoring fast. But on defense they had to play the role of shills, letting themselves be duped over and over again by Curly Neal and Meadowlark Lemon.178 It took real athletes to enact the charade, and the Washington Generals were no scrubs—most of the players were once decent college basketball players. Which makes their Sisyphean tragedy even more bleak: They knew what winning felt like.
The Washington Generals, who were named in honor of Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952, were impeccable at their job, losing more than 14,000 times to the Globetrotters. But as already foreshadowed, all athletes must fail at least once. For the Generals, their failure came in 1971. In an exhibition game in Tennessee, the Globetrotters became preoccupied with entertaining the crowd and lost track of the score, finding themselves down by twelve points with two minutes remaining. They fought back, but in the final seconds the ball ended up in the hands of Generals point guard Red Klotz (who was also the owner and coach of the team). He continued to follow the playbook as instructed: On offense, you shoot to win. In the final seconds he hit a jumper that created one of the most shocking final scoreboards in history: Generals: 100, Globetrotters: 99. Spectators hated the outcome. For decades Klotz could be heard muttering, “Beating the Globetrotters is like shooting SANTA CLAUS.”
The Washington Generals played their final game in August 2015. Of course, they lost, because that is how they won.
SEE ALSO: CANNED HEAT; CLAQUE; KAYFABE; SMARKS
When a child is accused of some misdeed, they often mount a defense that begins by blubbering, B-b-but wha-wha-what-about what Johnny did? This is what-aboutism—distracting from your transgression by shifting attention to some completely unrelated indiscretion. Even more than children, tyrants savor the rhetorical technique.
Vladimir Putin is famously adept at mobilizing the whataboutism, which The Guardian has called “practically a national ideology” in Russia. When his woeful human rights record is questioned, Putin frequently responds with a whataboutism about America’s history with racial discord. During the Cold War, the line “They lynch negroes” even became a Soviet catchphrase, dispatched as a punchline whenever you committed some malfeasance. The ironic idiom became so common that it transformed into a synecdoche for all types of Kremlin propaganda.
Another virtuoso of attention diversion, Donald Trump has dispensed whataboutisms to criticize his own country. During an interview on Fox News, host Bill O’Reilly attempted to draw an unambiguous distinction between Russian and American systems by declaring, “Putin is a killer.” Trump responded with a classic red herring: “There are a lot of killers. You got a lot of killers. What, you think our country is so innocent?” The whataboutism implies that because America has its own history of injustice, accusing any other country of oppression is hypocritical.
SEE ALSO: CHEWBACCA DEFENSE; NOT EVEN WRONG; SOPHISTS
This is not the philosophy of the Klingon lieutenant commander of the Starship Enterprise.
Rather, Whorfianism is a form of extreme “linguistic relativism,” named after Benjamin Lee Whorf, an early twentieth-century linguist who was inspired by Einstein’s theories of relativity. Whorfianism posits that the language you speak dictates how you perceive the world. An extreme Whorfianist would assert that French speakers comprehend the world differently than English speakers do, not because of their culture or geography, but because of the actual grammar and syntax of their language.
Most of Whorf’s evidence derived from indigenous communications, especially the Hopi language. After postulating that the language had no grammatical notion of time, Whorf inflated linguistics into mass psychology, declaring the Hopi people have “no general notion or intuition of time as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at equal rate, out of a future, through the present, into a past.” Sounds trippy, but it was quickly proven inaccurate: the Hopi language does in fact have many temporal grammar forms and the Hopi people seem to grasp time just fine. Today, exasperated linguists refer to the incident as the “Hopi Time Controversy.”
Whorf also popularized the widespread notion that Eskimos have a disproportionate number of words for snow. (Whorf said there were “several” Inuit words for snow, but popular media inflated the number to fifty, and then one hundred.) That theory was later debunked by showing how the seemingly unique Inuit words for “snow drift” and “falling snow” were simply different prefixes and suffixes appended to the same root word. Flummoxed linguists now refer to this one as the “Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax.”
To commemorate the spread of the fallacy, linguists even forged a clever new word, snowclone, to designate fill-in-the-blank phrase templates. The namesake snowclone—“If Eskimos have N words for snow, X surely have M words for Y”—is one of the many instantly recognizable clichés implemented by uninspired journalists. Other overused macros include “X is the new Y,” “The only good X is a dead X,” “X in the streets but Y in the sheets,” and, a hackneyed favorite of this encyclopedia, “In Soviet Russia X Ys you.”
SEE ALSO: ESPERANTO; NACIREMA; NEWSPEAK; RASHOMON EFFECT
In a unique televised event in 1967, both CBS and NBC broadcast the clash between the hard-nosed Green Bay Packers, led by warhorse quarterback Bart Starr, against an upstart AFL foe, the Kansas City Chiefs. The simulcast, seen live by more than 51 million people, was later dubbed Super Bowl I.
By most accounts, the game was close until half-time, but the Pack defense dismantled the Chiefs in the third quarter. Or at least that’s how most people remember it, but no one could say for sure, because no video existed of the game. It seems unfathomable now, because one-fourth of the country watched the first Super Bowl, but no one thought to actually record it. As a cost-saving measure, all known broadcast tapes of the games were reused—or wiped—by both networks.
This was not unusual. The first seven Super Bowls all have portions missing.179 Nearly every episode of Tonight Starring Jack Paar was taped over. Only a handful of World Series games before 1965 survived, and most NBA Finals games before 1976 were erased. Out of 2,753 episodes of the original Jeopardy! (the one hosted by Art Fleming), only twenty-four remain extant. Six years of Walter Cronkite stoically reading the CBS Evening News were expunged—only his coverage of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the JFK assassination survived.
In most cases, the master tapes were rendered to the dustbin of history because of wiping—a colloquialism for reusing old videotapes. In the early days of broadcast, tapes were often recycled, under the assumption that the broadcasts were of no real value. As digital drives replaced analogue tapes, the word has taken on a new meaning, which is why Hillary Clinton can now be described as “wiping” her email server or bad memories can be “wiped” in fantasy movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
SEE ALSO: BERENSTAIN BEARS CONSPIRACY; HYPNOSIS; NODDY; TRUTH CLAIM
A woozle is an imaginary animal found in the book Winnie-the-Pooh (1926). In the third chapter, “In which Pooh and Piglet Go Hunting and Nearly Catch a Woozle,” the titular protagonists track some suspicious paw prints, round and round their scraggly acreage, before finally realizing they have actually been following their own tracks. “I have been foolish and deluded,” concludes Pooh. “And I am a bear of no brain at all.” Either the story is an allegory about CONFIRMATION BIAS or Pooh is a stupid bear.
The woozle effect occurs when a dubious citation is repeated over and over, like Pooh chasing his own tracks, causing society to perpetuate lies and myths. As Mark Twain once said, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” Except Mark Twain never actually said that. The quote has been attributed to him so many times that the woozle effect has made it seem true.
The comicstrip xkcd coined a similar neologism, citogenesis, to describe the process by which one publication accidentally disseminates misinformation that gets repeated by another publication, only to be cited by the first publication as fact because the second one repurposed the misinformation, creating a vicious circle of hooey. In journalism circles, the same phenomenon goes by the handle circular reporting.
Stephen Colbert offered a similar concept—wikiality. “Together,” said Colbert, “we can create a reality that we all agree on—the reality we just agreed on.” Under the reign of wikiality, reality is whatever Wikipedia says it is, and because “any user can change any entry, and if enough users agree with them, it becomes true.” Some people [citation needed] have suggested that looking too closely at Wikipedia could tear open a woozle wormhole, where all known information is exposed as a series of self-referential FACTOIDS, collapsing a galaxy of knowledge into a super-dense black hole of nothingness.
SEE ALSO: BACKFIRE EFFECT; BELLMAN’S FALLACY; BERENSTAIN BEARS CONSPIRACY; CONFIRMATION BIAS; ESQUIVALIENCE; FILTER BUBBLE; MANDELA EFFECT; OVERTON WINDOW
Nearly all movies have it—that disclaimer text, blocked and scrolling, that crawls onto the screen after the last credit has rolled.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
It doesn’t matter if you’ve just seen Ewoks vanquish stormtroopers or a Kansas farmhouse whoosh into Technicolor Oz, some version of that cautionary caveat creeps onto the final reel: “This is a work of fiction . . .”
Like all cut-and-paste boilerplate, this scrap of legalese has an origin story—a history that can be traced back to someone. In this case, that someone is Rasputin.
Yes, that Rasputin—the Russian mystic/lech/peas-ant/swindler who cavorted in the Romanov court until he was murdered a few months before the Bolshevik Revolution. The identity of his assassin is no secret: An aristocrat, Prince Felix Yusupov, killed Rasputin. We know this because Yusupov later wrote a book with the humblebraggy subtitle The Amazing Memoirs of the Man Who Killed Rasputin (1953).
The story goes like this: On December 30, 1916, Yusupov invited Rasputin to his palace and fed him poisoned wine. That didn’t kill Rasputin, so Yusupov gave him cyanide-laced cakes. That didn’t kill him, so he shot him. Twice. Not even that eradicated Rasputin, so Yusupov threw him into a frigid river.
Finally, Rasputin drowned. The perfect Hollywood ending! Or at least that’s what MGM Studios concluded sixteen years later, when it released Rasputin and the Empress, starring John Barrymore as a lightly fictionalized Yusupov. When the real Yusupov (now penniless and living in Paris) heard about the historical biopic, he schemed to sue MGM for defamation. But there was one small problem: He had already written a memoir marketing himself as Rasputin’s assassin. So Yusupov devised a second plan: have his wife sue the studio for implying that Rasputin raped her, when she had never even met the rogue. MGM reportedly settled out of court for the modern equivalent of about $8 million.
Due to this spurious lawsuit, Hollywood studios, starting in 1933, began appending “all persons fictitious” notices onto their films, even when those films were clearly based upon very real events and people. Even modern movies like Velvet Goldmine (1998) and The Master (2012) now conclude with a declaration of pure fiction, despite their existence being inconceivable without the very real David Bowie and L. Ron Hubbard, respectively. Raging Bull (1980), which unabashedly portrays the life of the rowdy pugilist Jake LaMotta, contains the same admonition, even though the boxer’s name appears just before the disclaimer in the actual movie credits.180
It would be impossible (and fairly undesirable) to watch or create a movie with literally no connection to reality. Yet this single random lawsuit from 1933 demands that all artistic creations be labeled “entirely fictitious” and that any resemblance to reality is deemed “purely coincidental.” Because of this, nearly every movie ends with a blatant lie. This puts cinema in an absurd logical position, where the legal disclaimer is sometimes the only part of a movie that’s actually fiction.
Ultimately, the legal notice undermines the legitimacy of a movie to depict and critique society, which is often the goal of cinema. If a movie has no basis in reality whatsoever, as the disclaimer contends, then why even see a movie?
Some filmmakers use the logical paradox as an opportunity for artistic invention, such as with Fargo (1996), which inverts the disclaimer text to its opposite, a decree of truth that appears at the beginning of the film.
This is a true story. The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.
Except that’s a lie, too. Not only were events not “told exactly as they occurred,” but no such events even occurred. Fargo, unsurprisingly, ends like most other films, with the same legal boilerplate disclaimer scrolling up after the credits roll: “The persons and events portrayed in this film are fictitious . . .” Except this time, the lie is the truth.
SEE ALSO: THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT; DEFICTIONALIZED PRODUCT; F FOR FAKE; IF I DID IT; THE TREACHERY OF IMAGES
175 It is worth noting that neither Orson Welles nor the Mercury Theater music conductor, Bernard Herrmann, were particularly famous at this time. Citizen Kane, which Welles directed and Herrmann scored, was a few years away.
176 This passage is from A. Brad Schwartz’s Broadcast Hysteria (2015), now the definitive account of the event. Schwartz was the first researcher to obtain access to letters from listeners that night—a total of 353 complaints to the FCC, plus 115 to the Mercury Theater. Needless to say, the letters reveal a new story, but the book also creates an incisive rendering of The War of the Worlds as a bellwether of the incipient fake news industry.
177 In addition to Warhol flicks, Midgette had already acted in several Italian productions, including bit parts from Bernardo Bertolucci and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Years after the hoax, Midgette became a professional Warhol impersonator and sold imitations of his artwork. When Oliver Stone announced a casting call for The Doors (1991), Midgette naturally tried out for the role of Andy Warhol, but the part went to Crispin Glover.
178 Tangential Globetrotter detail: Meadowlark Lemon’s birth name was Meadow Lemon III. He legally added -lark in the ‘50s. Somehow, it seems the perfect touch.
179 For decades, Super Bowl I was thought to be completely lost, but most of it has recently been painstakingly reconstructed from different reels of footage found deep in the NFL Films archive—a place often described like the final warehouse scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
180 A handful of noble flicks forgo the disclaimer, such as Citizen Kane, despite blatant parallels to William Randolph Hearst. Some movies that are indisputably based upon real events—including Apollo 13, Chaplin, Lawrence of Arabia, and Walk the Line—make a tiny modification to the first few words of the standard disclaimer: “This film was based on a true story, but . . .” And then everything after the “but” screams, “It’s all a lie.” Of course, that’s even more confusing—a story cannot be both based upon a true story and a complete fabrication.
