When is it important to fact-check fiction?

Last year, Gregg Easterbrook mocked the New York Times for publishing a correction saying that it had made a few errors in recounting a plot point from the HBO series The Sopranos. Easterbrook noted:

Here the straight-laced, precision-obsessed, oh-so-conscientious New York Times runs a detailed “correction” regarding events that are totally made-up. OK, we know the media have ever-increasing difficulty distinguishing between actual events and things that are made-up. Worse, many news outlets show increasing lack of interest in this distinction. But how can you “correct” a statement about something that does not exist? The Times box is like running a correction that says, “James Bond drinks vodka martinis, not gin as was stated in yesterday’s editions. The New York Times apologizes to Mr. Bond.”

Now, I take Easterbrook’s point that this sort of corrections policy can border on the absurd, but consider, as a counterexample, Alex Kuczynski’s essay in today’s NYT on religious interpretations of the movie Groundhog Day. Here’s Kuczynski’s plot summary of the movie:

In the movie, which enjoys its own seemingly endless cycle of rebirth on cable television, the character played by Mr. [Bill] Murray is in Punxsutawney, Pa., covering Groundhog Day, Feb. 2, for the fourth year in a row. Frustrated because his career is stalled and by the fact that he can’t seduce his producer, played by Andie MacDowell, he sees his assignment — waiting for a groundhog (or a rat, as Mr. Murray’s character calls it) to see if there will be six more weeks of winter — as the final indignity. But it isn’t quite. The next day he awakens in the same bed in the same bed-and-breakfast, to the sound of the same tinny clock radio with Sonny and Cher singing “I Got You Babe” and the babblings of the frighteningly cheerful local D.J., to discover that it is Feb. 2 again. At first, he uses the repetition to his advantage — he learns French poetry, for example, as part of his scheme to seduce the producer. Then he realizes that he is doomed to spend eternity locked in the same place, seeing the same people do the same things every day. It is not until he accepts his fate and sets about helping people (saving a homeless man from freezing to death, for example) that he is released from the eternal cycle of repetition. Of course, this being an American film, he not only attains spiritual release but also gets the producer into bed.

There are two errors in this plot summary. First, Bill Murray’s character Phil Connors does not save the homeless man from freezing to death — indeed, this section of the film shows that as the day repeats itself, the homeless man dies no matter how much Phil attempts to save him. Second, although it appears that Connors has successfully seduced the producer at the end of the film, the dialogue suggests that Phil restrained from any hanky-panky, acting like a perfect gentleman. Nitpicky details? Perhaps, but in an article on how “the film has become a curious favorite of religious leaders of many faiths, who all see in Groundhog Day a reflection of their own spiritual messages,” these facts are actually pretty crucial. One corrected, the movie suggests: 1) The limit’s of man’s power over life and death; 2) The merits of abstinence as a means of attaining spiritual enlightenment. [You, who never misses an opportunity to ogle Salma Hayek, are preaching abstinence?–ed. No, but surely some of the religions discussed in the essay do proffer such advice. And there’s a big difference between admiration from afar and acting on such admiration, buddy!] It would be absurd for the Times to issue an apology to anyone for these errors. However, this is an example of how getting the facts wrong about fiction do alter the tenor of a particular argument.