I almost said something a few days ago. I want you to know that. I opened the reply box, I typed three sentences, and then I closed it without posting. This is progress. A year ago I would have typed six sentences and posted them, and then spent the rest of the evening watching the replies come in, each one more certain than the last. Now I typed three and closed the tab, and wrote to you instead.

The occasion was a film. Or a book. It began as a book, apparently, and had since become a film, and the film is called The Polygamist. I will not rehearse the plot; it is available to anyone with a phone and fifteen minutes of curiosity. I have not read the book, neither have I watched the film. I am not certain I will. What interested me was not the story itself but the argument that had formed around it, the way people talked about it in these open forums where strangers perform their opinions for other strangers.

The argument went in two directions, and the same people travelled both.

Someone had pointed out that the film took liberties, that the characters carried names which did not belong to the tribe they were supposed to come from and that the legal proceedings depicted would not have survived contact with an actual courtroom. The defenders waved this aside. It is fiction, they said. The audience was expected to suspend disbelief. Art is not a documentary. To demand accuracy is to miss the point entirely.

That was, and remains, a reasonable position. I have no quarrel with it.

But then someone else arrived, or sometimes the same person arrived in a different mood, and the argument shifted. The film, they said, revealed something true. It was a mirror. It showed men as they were. To deny what it depicted was to deny what women had always known. The discomfort of the men in the comment section was itself proof that the mirror was working.

And here is where I had begun typing my three sentences.

A mirror and a painting are not the same object. A painting can distort, exaggerate, invent, and compress time; we praise it for doing so. A mirror has one job. When you tell me a work is fiction and therefore entitled to its distortions, you are describing a painting. When you tell me the same work reflects reality and therefore indicts the men watching it, you are describing a mirror. The question is not which description is more flattering to the work. The question is which one you are using at any given moment, and why.

What I had observed in that thread was a system with no mechanism for being wrong. Criticism of the film’s plausibility was deflected by invoking art. Confirmation of the film’s thesis was accepted by invoking truth. The same work, the same scenes, the same characters, performing two different functions depending on which direction the argument needed to travel. This in my view is not a reading of a text, rather It was and is a toll booth where one direction is always free.

I want to be careful here, because there is a version of this observation that is itself a deflection: the man who says it is only fiction every time fiction happens to implicate men. I am not making that argument. The stronger version of the opposing case would say that fiction has always been a vehicle for social critique, and that demanding it meet evidentiary standards is how power protects itself from art. I take that seriously. But social critique and evidentiary claims are different instruments. Charles Dickens was not producing a crime report. The Polygamist is being used as one.

Fiction can carry truth. A novel can know something about human behaviour that a survey cannot. The question is not whether The Polygamist contains truth. The question is whether the people invoking it are actually making a claim about the world, or whether they are borrowing the authority of truth while retaining the protection of art.

If the work is a mirror, the argument requires them to describe what they see in it and make a case. Which in my view is to name the specific behaviours, and trace them to something outside the film. To show that the film has captured something real. That is a claim one could engage with.

If the work is art, then it deserves to be treated as art, with all the latitude and all the limitations that are implied. Art is not evidence. It is not a study. It cannot be used to make claims about half the human population any more than a photograph of a single man can describe all men.

What you cannot do, is alternate. You cannot lower the shield when the argument goes your way and raise it when does not. That is not nuance. Nuance sounds like this: the legal procedures were exaggerated for dramatic effect, but the emotional dynamics rang true to my experience, and here is why. Personally I would have found that worth engaging.

What I had read instead was a conversation that had already decided what it meant, and was using the film the way a drunk uses a lamppost, for support rather than illumination.

I closed the tab. I made tea. I am writing to you now, which is where these things belong.