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Watch: Charlie Lyne’s Pizzagate Meditation Personal Truth
We’re pleased to be hosting the online launch of Charlie Lyne’s new short Personal Truth, which premiered last year at IDFA. The Field of Vision short builds on the digressive, zig-zag first-person narrative style of Lyne’s earlier short Copycat, this time looking into Pizzagate, the conspiracy theory involving John Podesta running a child sex ring out of a DC pizza parlor. Whether he likes it or not, Lyne sees a bit of himself in Maddison Welch, the man who shot up Comet Ping Pong in an attempt to liberate the kidnapped children he was sure were being held there. Before he was cos-playing Travis Bickle, Welch was an aspiring filmmaker (just like Lyne!), and the director connects the dots between the unlikely Pizzagate theory and a much more plausible, potentially similar scandal in the UK.
Lyne—a friendly acquaintance and one-time contributor to the site—has the same taste as I do in terms of which particularly dark cultural K-holes to dive down. The short’s obviously apposite during a week in which headlines are unexpectedly dominated by the cancellation of the Roseanne revival due, at least in part, to people finally catching on to Roseanne Barr’s tweeting about, yes, Pizzagate. It’s fortuitous that before watching Lyne’s short, I found myself on an Amazon deep-dive into the world of alt-right Kindle novels (yes, these are a thing—why wouldn’t they be?), leading me to a novel by one Mike Stone. A New America: The First Novel of the Alt-Right! (that would probably actually be The Turner Diaries, but let that pass) contains the following fairly jaw-dropping exchange:
“You’re being lied to, Susan. You’re being lied to on a daily basis by the entire mainstream media. Twenty years in this town [editor’s note: Hollywood, naturally], surrounded by all these showbiz phonies, and you can’t see that?”
“They’re not the ones lying, it’s you. Everything you say now is a lie.”
John fixed her with a cold stare. “Are you going to tell me Pizzagate is a lie?”
Susan fell suddenly silent. Her two decades in Hollywood had taught her plenty about the sexual perversions of the rich and famous. “I don’t know about Pizzagate,” she said quietly.
Choose your illusion. Thanks to the Field of Vision team for letting us host the film.
