The Constructed "Truth"

The biographical drama film Spotlight directed by Thomas McCarthy was released in 2015.The film was adapted from the 2002 Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” team’s investigation that Roman Catholic Church has been covered up several priests’ child sexual assault in Boston city.After its release,the film has been well-received in the United States for its calm and restrained expression and won the Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay Awards at the 88 th Academy Awards.This paper will analyze the historical construction of “truth” in Spotlight from the perspective of New Historicism theories,so as to argue that the “truth” of the film is constructed under the historical context of society.The movie seems to objectively record the process of journalists’ investigation,but it is impossible to restore the truth of history.Instead of concerning what is the truth of the case,it attaches more practical significance to make clear how the truth is constructed in the film and why it comes into being.The body part is composed of three chapters.The first chapter discusses the intertextuality of the news and film adaptation,and film shooting and narrative techniques,which aims to illustrate the historical construction of film’s authenticity.The second chapter analyzes the images of two professional groups — priests and lawyers,so as to reveal how power paradigm takes effect on the construction of historical “truth” through the relation of subversion and containment.The third chapter explores form the perspective of the self-fashioning of the “Spotlight” members which is formed from the negotiation between self-consciousness and the mainstream discourse of power,and it reveals that the “truth” of the film is formed in the complexity of self-consciousness,social history and culture.