Yes It is, It’s True: I love truth-seeking documentary films

When I am not writing stories, columns or editorials, my favorite pastime has become watching documentaries on the Internet late at night with glass in hand and monocle at ease.

This isn’t entirely a new interest because I have enjoyed the televised series “Forensic Files” for more than two decades as a guilty pleasure.

I suppose I prefer documentaries very simply because they are not fictionalized stories, like the fantasy fest offered on the cesspool known as television. I enjoy tales that are supposed to be true, even though I have come to realize that the search for the truth indeed can be difficult, if not futile.

Two of my most recent favorite documentaries were “Making a Murderer” and “The Keepers,” the latter which I just finished this week. I have read with interest reviews of and reactions to “The Keepers,” the story of the unsolved murder of a nun in 1969 and allegations of sexual abuse by priests in the school where she taught.

Some people indicated they didn’t enjoy watching the seven-part series and admitted it was because there was no resolution, no happy ending, like in many fictional movies and television shows. It seems we Americans often seek that happy ending and avoid presentations that make us uncomfortable, sad or depressed.

I admit that during my childhood I despised an episode of a “Bosco” cartoon that left viewers hanging as to whether the hero was able to save the damsel in distress. But as I grew older, I became more interested in real rather than fairy tale endings.

Perhaps one of the biggest reasons why I hated “Forrest Gump” was that the near impossible turns of events kept happening, sacrificing reality. I remember most the young Forrest walking with a brace and then suddenly running all over the country and getting a lot of perky and positive publicity. Yeah, right.

Back to “The Keepers.” That and “Making a Murderer” and for that matter “Forensic Files” are tales about the search for truth, which I fancy myself doing every day in my retirement, in my advancing years. I have learned slowly but surely over the years that it is extremely difficult to get to the truth and sometimes difficult to accept it.

Some people don’t like you if you tell them the truth if it’s unpleasant. George Bernard Shaw once said if you tell the truth you’d better be funny. Otherwise people will kill you. Hence the rise of comedy truthtellers such as Jon Stewart, John Oliver, George Carlin, Bill Hicks and Lenny Bruce.

The court jester can get away with it because he’s funny.

“The Keepers” raises some unpleasant truths about priests who abused parishoners and children. “Making a Murderer” raises questions about our criminal justice system, which indeed may be tilted away from the poor and unfairly favoring the rich. How else can we explain why so many Wall Street tycoons got away with crashing the economy in 2008 or why George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney got away with “crimes against humanity” by invading Iraq for false reasons, resulting in the unnecessary deaths of people who never harmed us.

I continue to hunger for visual documentary accounts of seeking the truth, and what better venue than a murder mystery, a whodunnit?