Yes, how provincial and constraining are those rules about not lying!

What "rules about not lying"? Movies are entertainment. Most of them are based on lies, regardless of what it says at the beginning or in the credits. Actors are professional liars. Hollywood thrives in fiction; story and tropes.

Lies are distinguished from fiction by the intention to deceive about the real world, as opposed to counterfactual imagining.

Given that, what point were you making?

The point is, lying is bad, it rips the fabric of society. Fiction is not lying, it is useful, contextualized nontruth.

Lies are the lubrication of society; you're lied to anywhere between 9-200 times a day.

I see what you did there.

That depends on what the definition of "is" is.

That lying to people in order to make your film feel more realistic is a bad thing to do, even if minor in the grand scheme.

I don't think the intention was in any way to deceive the audience. I personally see it as part of their post-modern filmmaking[0] style.

What personally makes this style interesting to me is that there are usually several layers of meaning and intention. And usually references to other films or common perception or convention.

Even if the intention is to tell the truth or a true story, there's always the bias of the storyteller, the selection of what to tell, and what not to mention etc. So in this case, the Coen brothers re-used the "based on a true story" concept, and even exaggerated it. They re-use the format, but mock it at the same time.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernist_film

It doesn't stop being an attempt to deceive just because it's self-aware, ironic, or motivated for other reasons. Likewise, murder during a robbery is still murder even if the primary is theft.

There are no such rules about not lying.

We have societal norms about it, maybe. But there are certainly no explicit rules about this, and the societal norms about lying are already pushed to their breaking point when you walk in to a movie theatre.

Rule and norm are synonymous, IMHO. What is the difference? What makes a rule explicit? Do you mean laws? Law itself is often rather abstract, does that still count as explicit?

I think there are specific laws about fraud. In film they can claim artistic license, though.

"The Amityville Horror: A True Story" was nearly all fiction. http://www.snopes.com/horrors/ghosts/amityville.asp

I remember as a kid seeing the "nonfiction" on the spine of the book cover, and thinking that mean it was a true story, rather than the reality that it was marketing spin.

Well... the family claimed it was true for decades (especially the father). Granted mostly for money, but there is some grey there.

Is that grey area enough to call a book a piece of non-fiction?

I don't think so.

In the sense that the author and the subjects claim it are non-fiction - yes, quite enough.

For people to approach it non-skeptically, no - not at all.

It's like that rubbish about the child that had visions of heaven or whatever while in hospital, they even made a "based on the true story" movie of it, and it was listed as non-fiction.

Non-fiction doesn't actually mean "factual", technically...

Is the Bible sold as non-fiction? Seems like many of the same logical points apply.

It would be nice if you said what the grey area is. Quoting Snopes:

> The truth behind The Amityville Horror was finally revealed when Butch DeFeo's lawyer, William Weber, admitted that he, along with the Lutzes, "created this horror story over many bottles of wine." The house was never really haunted; the horrific experiences they had claimed were simply made up. Jay Anson further embellished the tale for his book, and by the time the film's screenwriters had adapted it, any grains of truth that might have been there were long gone.

Here we have a co-creator of the story specifically saying that it was not real. We don't have that for the Bible. It doesn't mater if many of the same logical points apply when one rather big logical point doesn't apply.

In any case, many works of fiction, like Aesop's Fables, are classified as non-fiction. My belief that "non-fiction" means it actually happened was wrong.