Stranger than fiction: Fauda, Wish You Were Here and The Measure
And why it's not always a compliment
I’ve been watching Fauda since season one but nothing prepared me for episodes 7 and 8 of season 5.
These two episodes are a dramatization of real events from October 7. If someone had written that plot in seasons 1 through 4, viewers would have thought the writers lost the plot. It’s extreme, apocalyptic and completely unbelievable.
And yet it happened. It’s our real story which is exactly what made it so painful to watch.
It reminded me of two books.
Jodi Picoult’s Wish You Were Here. If someone had written a novel before 2020 about a worldwide pandemic that grounded every plane, shuttered every city, and killed people at that scale, it would have seemed far-fetched. And then it was real, and suddenly the premise wasn’t fantasy or even pure fiction.
After the pandemic, I also read Nikki Ehrlich’s The Measure. The fictional premise is that everyone over 23 wakes up one morning to find a small box on their doorstep. Inside is an indestructible string, its length determined by how much life they have left. The questions that flow from that range from, ‘what do you do if you know how much time you have?’ to ‘what if your string and your partner’s are different lengths?’. It raises societal questions, ‘would you discriminate against a job candidate or a political candidate whose string was short?’ and ethical questions, ‘would a doctor bother saving you if they already knew your length?’
Having lived through something that would have seemed stranger than fiction before it happened, my mind opened up, less sure about the line between the plausible and the impossible, allowing me to enjoy the book tremendously.
We used to say “stranger than fiction” for a fun or quirky observation or a mildly amusing plot twist in real life.
It doesn’t feel like that anymore.
As my head and heart still hurt from Fauda, I think about how I felt and how my mind opened up reading Wish You Were Here and The Measure the common thread seems to be that it asks you to follow the questions, knowing just how crazy the world can be: What if this happened? What would you do?