cross my heart

Two of my earliest memories involve lying. I can't be any older than five in either of them, and already I'm compromising truth for convenience. In one case, I lifted a dollar bill from my mother's purse and claimed I'd found the money behind the Christmas tree. In the other, I pocketed a keychain -- it had a small boat that floated from top to bottom as you tilted a transparent plastic tube -- I found while my family was visiting friends. In each case I was caught out, and in each case I lied like a trooper to cover the crime.

I'd like to say this is proof that lying comes naturally to all people, but it's probably closer to the truth to say that it came naturally to me. I'd also like to say that I learned my lesson from these formative busts, but if I did it was that to learn to lie more effectively. I simply needed more practice.

Throughout my life, I've lied in a manner I like to think is consistent with the way most people lie, but maybe that's just a rationalization. Not that I lie a lot, just that I do whenever the circumstances seem to call for it, and those circumstances have changed over the years. As a kid, I tended to lie to get something I wanted, to keep something I took, or to protect myself from getting into trouble, which was only frequently made worse when the lie was exposed.

As an adolescent, I lied about missing classes, about why I was out so late, about whether I was high, and in order to convince people, girls usually, that I was a better person than I was. Part of my lying was about status, and the rest a cowardly extension of the old self-protection racket.

As an adult, I tend to lie less than ever, and I wish I could say that it's because I've now got the moral fabric of an army surplus pup tent, but the truth is it's just easier not too. If age has taught me anything about situational ethics, it's that you should only lie if you're prepared to keep lying to protect the first lie. That's work, and who needs more work when when your hair's already grey and every good night's sleep is a blessing worth weeping over? The conscience is a formidable adversary, and only gets more so  as you grow older. Why feed the bastard? Besides, the game is up when you realize the only lie that really sticks is one one you tell yourself.

I still love lying, just not my own, and not so much in real life. I'm fascinated by it, and to me there are fewer more inherently gripping spectacles than watching someone attempting to navigate their way through life on a tank full of unadulterated bullshit. In itself, lying may be the most revealing form of social discourse. It reveals the limits of our sacrifice to the greater good, the limits of our comfort in just being ourselves, the shape of our fears, anxieties and desires, and the exact point where the interests of society lose out to pure self-interest. It's humanity distilled, that is, and the very struggle to stay honest may be the single most important process defining how we live. It's the leash on our animal instincts, and the tether by which we're tied to all those other bamboozlers, hustlers, snake-oil pedlars and conscience-strugglers we share this big dirty ball with.

I think this explains why I can't get enough of characters -- in the fictional sense -- who lie like rugs. Over the past few years, I've been glued to certain TV series, like The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men and Dexter, who have at their centre people whose lives are so steeped in bullshit they can't even smell it any more: it's become the medium of their existence, the default mechanism for even the most basic forms of human interaction. They lie because they can't live without it and because they feel they'd cease to exist if they told the truth. They're the liars who need to buy their own pitch.

As some of the best TV always has, these are series that inhabit the zone between public and private life, or the chasm separating the public persona from the domestic one. Tony Soprano is a struggling suburban dad whose psychopathic tendencies serve him well in business and at home, even if these same tendencies tend to permit more honesty in the former sphere than the latter. At work, he can kill, steal, fuck and terrorize with impunity because that's the job description. But at the end of the day he's got to pretend, and it's in that act that the real guy is revealed. The contradiction is what gives the drama its heat, freight and fascinating ambivalence: you root for this guy because he's really just trying to be as decent a dad as his world permits, even if the cost is the spiritual integrity of everyone in his orbit. If there's a real bitter tragedy at the heart of Sopranos, it's Tony's wife's gradual acceptance of the lie on which her marriage is based.

As an advertising man, Mad Men's Don Draper is in the bullshit business, and no small part of the reason he's so brilliant at it is because he himself is the product of one big lifelong sales pitch: he's not what he seems, and when he goes home the very thing that has made him a star in the soap-selling game is what makes his otherwise idyllic suburban family a pure wallpaper job. His normality, or its appearance, is entirely erected on a foundation of smoke. That his business rewards what his personal life condemns is the program's structuring irony: Mad Men is as much about the role of institutionalized bullshit-making in American society as it is anything else, and the historical setting of the early 1960s allows it to track the transformation of American culture from idealism to cynicism in the decade that dawned on Kennedy and died with Nixon. (Incidentally, both these men are proven liars. The difference lies in the fact that no one wanted to know that Kennedy lied and everybody knew that Nixon did. What a difference that decade made.)

The saga of Walter White in the extraordinarily ballsy Breaking Bad is the story of how a good man slowly turns bad, but how the incremental process of lying gradually renders him incapable of returning to the life that his lying ostensibly served to protect. A family man who turns to methamphetamine cooking as a means to provide for his family once he's diagnosed with cancer, Walt ultimately succumbs to a disease far more aggressive, voracious and incurable. His is a kind of spiritual cancer that kills far more than the body of the diseased, it poisons everyone around him. Like Sopranos and Mad Men, the real story here is the madness incurred in the process of protecting some ideal image of domestic harmony: these guys lie because they think that's the only thing that will maintain family stability, a suggestion that renders the very idea of family stability a kind of cancer at the heart of a desperate normality.

Dexter Morgan is a killer who's learned to behave normally because that's what it takes to keep on killing. In this program, the psychopath thrives on the contradiction between normality and perversion, and the means by which he surfs so gracefully over the gap is his lifelong skill at the art of bullshit. And he's our hero for it. It's not so much Dexter's "Dark Defender" code that makes us root for him -- he's a killer who only kills the deserving -- it's the constant process of having to conceal himself. What we love is watching him continue to function not only undetected but loved: he's a terrifically magnetic guy with a boyish kind of idealism, and we accept not only his murderousness but his dishonesty because it serves in the interest of protecting someone we've really come to like. And that may be the program's most subversively seductive achievement: it reminds us how much lying and bloodshed we'll forgive provided it's in the interest of likability. In that alone lies a helluva tale: how we came not only to live in but to love our own bullshit. It's the story of advertising, politics, consumerism, celebrity, virtuality, cosmetic surgery, spin and everything we currently call culture. It's said that honesty is its own reward, and that's certainly, um, true. The catch is that lying pays out in cash.