Frances Farmer and why the truth is always more intriguing

I read a thoroughly entertaining and engaging essay by Matt Evans for The Morning News on the legend of Frances Farmer during one of my breaks from work this morning and was struck by how often tragic fantasies obscure what I feel are the grounded yet infinitely more compelling real-life tragedies.

From the essay, titled Burn All the Liars (taken from Nirvana’s ode to Farmer from their ’94 album “In Utero”):

This idea of Frances as, I guess, some chewed-up Barbie doll tossed into life’s Goodwill box is, in the spirit of Professor Harry Frankfurt’s philosophical treatment of bullshit, On Bullshit, bullshit. Arguably, Frances, although damaged by her repeated institutionalizations, saw her best and happiest years after This Is Your Life. Happy years cut short only by the sad-but-predicable effects of a lifelong cigarette habit.

Despite the assertions of a hack critic turned faux biographer and a Hollywood film heavily influenced by the lies he peddled, Farmer was not routinely molested by cartoonish villains in an Asylum until she was lobotomized into a lifeless husk that aimlessly roamed the Earth for three decades after. The truth is more spectacular, more life-affirming, more depressing, and yes, more tragic. It’s full and complicated, which sometimes makes it hard to fit into a two-hour narrative or in words that a person can grasp with just a passing glance.

Harder, but not impossible, which is why it’s always worth it to put in the extra bit of work to find the truth. It doesn’t matter if you’re telling the story or absorbing it. It’s always, for the sake of art and truth, worth it in the end to find out what really happened. It’s always more fascinating and only serves to enhance the story. Though she was still in many ways a victim to outside parties and circumstance, she was not a victim of a lobotomy. Nor did she have outside forces conspiring against her. It seems, rather, that despite all the unfairness that needs to be noted when discussing her treatment, Farmer was her own greatest enemy. Or, it might be more appropriate to say, her greatest enemy was the disease of alcoholism, which like with so many of us, gripped her through her ascension, her decline, her pitfalls, and ultimately made all of them worse and contributed to her tragic story.

READ: Burn All the Liars by Matt Evans (The Morning News)