The Bergerac Test

My favorite movie of all-time is the 1990 adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac starring Gérard Depardieu. From the moment my best friend sat me down and showed me the film, it went straight to the top. I became obsessed with the original play and its various translations, the fantastic Steve Martin version “Roxanne,” and even saw a brilliant rendition in New York with Peter Dinklage playing Cyrano.

For those who haven’t seen any of these, a very brief synopsis: the titular Cyrano is everything you’d love about a man, and everything you’d want to be, save for what he perceives to be his fatal flaw: his enormous nose! No matter how much wit, skill, grace, physical prowess, and panache he has, he feels ugly, and this cripples him. Especially when it comes to love. And Cyrano is madly, deeply, profoundly in love with his cousin, Roxane.

He never lets Roxane know this, because losing her as a friend and confidant would be the death of him. So he stifles this love and channels it into his poetry and chivalry. For her part, Roxane has never met a man who compares to Cyrano, so she has stayed unmarried. It’s an unrequited truce between them. All of which is destroyed by the arrival of young Christian, who is as gorgeous as he is dumb.

A romantic, comedic triangle ensues: Christian is obsessed with Roxane but fears talking to her because he’s a dolt; Roxane is drawn to Christian’s good looks, but the guy keeps avoiding her; Cyrano just wants to tell Roxane how much he loves her, but is scared of her revulsion. The answer comes in the form of letters!

Written by Cyrano and delivered by Christian, the outpouring of true love with Cyrano’s masterful poetry / prose / wit knocks Roxane off her feet, gives Cyrano the release he’s always wanted, and gets Christian laid. Everyone seems to be getting what they want, but none of them are truly fulfilled. Because it’s all fake. It’s nonsense. No one is being authentic. And the audience is in on it the entire time.

The culmination of the 1990 film is the most tragic, beautiful bittersweet moment in cinema for me. I lose it every time. Gerard is outstanding (the entire cast is). Go watch it and enjoy. Nothing I’ve said above will spoil the experience.

Now, I’ve had theories about what makes this story resonate with me so much, why I have always identified with Cyrano, and why my heart breaks for him over and over with each retelling of the story. It might be my larger-than-average nose. Or my hopeless romanticism. Or my love of language and the written word. Or the feeling I’ve had since I was a teenager that true love was right there in front of me but the fear of rejection made me bottle up my heart’s contents and pour it privately onto paper.

I filled notebooks with poetry as a kid. I wrote my highschool girlfriend an endless love note once (it was on a spool of paper literally a hundred feet long). Handing that note to her was terrifying. She took one look at it and confessed that she had another boyfriend at a different school, and he was into punk rock and leather jackets and didn’t write poetry, so she was going to need to break up with me. So yeah, Cyrano hit pretty hard.

But these are surface-level things. There was something deeper about the play and films that has impacted millions of readers and viewers, and it’s becoming more and more relevant today. And that’s authenticity. The tension in the film comes from the fact that everyone seems to be getting what they want, but no one is actually getting what they want. Cyrano doesn’t just want to tell Roxane how much he loves her; what he truly wants is her to love him back. Christian doesn’t want to have Roxane’s body; what he craves is her heart, but everything she says about love is meant for Cyrano. And Roxane thinks she’s in love with Christian’s gorgeous bod, but any time he opens his mouth there’s nothing there — what she really wants is Cyrano, but an honest version of him.

All three are being fake in their own ways: Cyrano is known for his audacity, but he can’t even tell someone he loves them. Christian is renowned for his chivalry and bravery, but he can’t even be himself. Roxane is seen as the ultimate in taste and grace, but she falls into the trap of surface beauty. Again, the audience is aware of all of this and it is agonizing in the best way possible!

What I love about the original 18th century story is that playwright Edmond Rostand drew from a real-life Cyrano de Bergerac, himself a playwright from the 17th century. (Cyrano was more of a rebel than a romantic and one of the very first science fiction authors ever. He lambasted government and society, wrote about going to the moon, and was generally a literary troublemaker of the best kind. And yeah, he had a big nose.) So you have a writer writing about another writer whose writing gets three characters in trouble. It’s not just a love story, it’s a love story about the written word.

It’s also a cautionary tale about how the written word can mask its source. A letter is just a letter. Every time Roxane speaks with Christian, the illusion is dispelled. You can’t fake authorship, and you can’t fake true love.

Which brings me to the point of this blog post, and it’s an imaginary scene that may have already taken place somewhere in the wild and is certain to take place thousands of times in the near future: A fan of a series of books shyly approaches an author table in the bottom floor of the Javitz Center during a big book expo. She has three books clutched to her chest. Her favorite writer of all-time is sitting there, Sharpie in hand. When it’s her turn, she gets a chance to speak with them and learns, immediately, that this person is an idiot.

AI authorship is going to run even more rampant. Because it already is rampant. A huge chunk of books going up on Amazon are written primarily or in part by AI. It’s only going to get better. And the arguments of what AI can’t do are going to increasingly sound detached from reality (AI is solving century-old math problems, designing new drugs from scratch, improving engineering and manufacturing processes, and already winning writing awards and fooling double-blind reader tests. Redirect your fake outrage in a useful direction, please). But what AI can’t do yet, and probably won’t in our lifetimes, is fool you in a face-to-face interaction. It will fail the Bergerac Test.

Bergerac is a town in France. It gets its name from the Latin roots for “fort” and “high.” A high fortress. A last bastion. The place we make our stand. The Bergerac Test is a test of honesty that can’t be twisted or faked. For those of us who agonize while watching the play, and cheer when the masks finally fall, the future with AI will mean allowing it to serve unromantic purposes, but reserve our hearts for more human arrows. The letters are the engine of the story, but the soul of the 1990 film is its opening scene: Challenged by a blowhard in a public setting, Cyrano absolutely dismantles him with a speech before a riveted crowd. It is Cyrano at his absolute best and most honest. It’s what we can compare his romantic cowardice to. There’s no faking what he is in public, when the words must be from him.

Here’s something difficult to admit, but I don’t think my writing is strong enough to explain my success. Luck played a massive role, as it does with most creative success. But there was something else at play that only the first thousand or so readers were there to watch, and it was me being my ridiculous self while publishing my first dozen or so novels. Silly dances on YouTube and Facebook to mark milestones. Readings with my sister, signings with my mother, long videos of me unboxing books or packaging up signed copies to send directly to readers. It wasn’t marketing; it was me eating up the fact that I had any kind of audience. I did meet-ups in every city I went to, all around the world. I did readings and signings all over the place. I became close friends with a ton of fans. This is what storytelling used to be like, the bards of old, hopeless romantics who are terrified but willing to risk it all for a good story.

And that will never go away. It’s been a massive part of our history; it’s in our DNA. Writing and reading novels is but a blip of this tradition. In Rostand’s time, it was about writing and performing plays. Gerard did it with film. I’m doing it with a blog post. I’ll regale you with my awful opinions in person. And the high fort of all our most human and heartfelt interactions in the future will have to go back to how it’s always been done, with a Bergerac test. Can we say what we mean to the people we are most terrified of losing? Can we do it in person? Letters be damned.

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