"The Harm that Excessive Candor Can Do"

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about the scene in Whit Stillman's film Metropolitan in which all of the characters play a truth-telling game.


(transcribed from the DVD)

SALLY: It's called Truth. You stretch a Kleenex over the mouth of a glass and place a dime on it. And we each take turns burning a hole in it with a cigarette. And if the dime falls in on your turn, you lose. And you have to answer, with absolute honesty, whatever question you're asked, no matter how embarrassing.

CYNTHIA: Yeah. The more embarrassing the better. Sometimes you can find out the most amazing things. It can really be incredible.

AUDREY: I don't think we should play this.

SALLY: Why not?

AUDREY: There are good reasons why people don't go around telling each other their most intimate thoughts.

CYNTHIA: What do you have to hide?

AUDREY: No! I just know that games like this can be really dangerous.

TOM: Dangerous?

SALLY: I don't see what's dangerous about it.

AUDREY: You don't have to. Other people have--that's how it became a convention. People saw the harm that excessive candor can do.

CYNTHIA: You admit that it's basically just a social convention, then.

SALLY: What you say might be true among people who don't know each other well, but surely not with us.

AUDREY: Then it's even worse.

CYNTHIA: Okay, let's discuss this. Basically, what this game requires is complete candor. Which means: honesty. Openness. I don't see how that can be bad.

AUDREY: Well, it can.

CYNTHIA: Well then, don't play. But don't wreck it for everyone else.

Now, why has this scene been on my mind? Well, first, last weekend I made the acquaintance of a guy who asked me several impertinent questions about my salary and my love life. He seemed to share Cynthia's point of view: cynically appealing to my notions of "honesty" and "openness" in order to get me to share things I wasn't comfortable sharing. Most notably, he said that if everybody knew how much money everybody else made, there would be less income inequality in the world, and so I should start things off by telling him my salary. And I found myself arguing Audrey's position: there are some things that are better left unsaid. And even if that is just a social convention, the rules are there for a reason. Sure, it's depressing to realize, as a teenager, that human interactions are governed by a series of rules and social codes--but isn't it even more depressing to think about what would happen if there were no such codes?

Another reason that I've been thinking about this scene is that I am trying to write a play about a bunch of teenagers playing a truth-telling game (Never Have I Ever). As much as I agree with Audrey's opinion that such games are "dangerous" (and they always made me so very uncomfortable and squirmy when I was a teenager), it is because they are dangerous that they appeal so much to me as a writer. Whit Stillman makes a similar point in an interview about the film: "In a sense, Audrey’s right, in the short term, about the truth session. It was a disaster, and everyone—except Cynthia—acknowledges that. Yet, in the long term, it saves her would-be relationship with Tom." From a moral point of view, the characters should not play the truth game. But, from a dramatic point of view--if they didn't play it, the movie would end.

Image: Audrey (Carolyn Farina) attempts to explain why she doesn't want to play Truth.