Tonight’s dyspeptic screed concerns the essential dishonesty of movies.

Which I mean in the most positive sense.

I’m not going to go off on a classic Christian Fundamentalist jeremiad against Hollywood as the Whore of Babylon, the cancer that is slowing destroying our culture.

(Although, when I read those old denunciations, I’m struck by two things: 1) they were in general factually correct, and 2) all the bad effects the critics predicted that movies would bring about have in fact come to pass. You can’t fault them as prophets.)

But my subject is the dishonesty that is inherent (it seems to me) in the medium.

Christians of a legalistic bent often complain that fiction is, by definition, “just lying stories.”

Without getting into that argument, I think I’m justified in saying that novels are scrupulously truthful when compared to movies.

The reason is simple, I think. Novelists have to work very hard to achieve “the willing suspension of disbelief.” The average novelist does a tremendous amount of research, even when writing about things he already knows pretty well. He has to. Readers are notoriously critical, and each reader has his own expertise. Woe to the author who gets the caliber wrong on a particular pistol, or who sends the wrong railroad through the wrong town. He will hear about it. But worse than the criticism is the knowledge that he’s failed in his job—that of creating belief in the reader’s mind. This is a delicate operation, a recipe as easily spoiled as a souffle.

Movies, on the other hand, are their own evidence. The movie viewer doesn’t have to imagine the story—it’s right there in front of him. His critical faculties drop to the level of an MSNBC reporter at an Obama press conference. “It must be true—I see it right there in front of me!”

Movie makers have neither time for, nor interest in, the re-creation of the facts of any historical situation. They are working with a vocabulary in which pictures matter more than words. Nuanced stories, in which fine distinctions are carefully explained, make for boring cinema.

The causes of the warfare between England and Scotland in the 14th Century, for instance, were complicated and had more to do with long meetings than with acts of atrocity (I wrote about the subject in this post last summer). I doubt that writer Randall Wallace or Mel Gibson ever gave a minute’s thought to presenting the actual story. It would have been bad filmmaking. Instead, they created an entirely fictional prologue to “Braveheart” in which the evil Edward Longshanks treacherously murders the chief men of Scotland. Didn’t happen, but it made a better scene.

(In fact, from a historical point of view, about the only thing they could have done to make “Braveheart” less historically accurate than it was, would have been to give it a happy ending.)

This doesn’t mean I’ve decided to stop watching movies. I love movies. I appreciate them as an art form and a source of entertainment and relaxation.

But as a novelist, I insist on the moral superiority of my own craft.

(Unless I get a movie deal. Then forget I said anything.)