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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

I don’t see how that differs from any other fiction. Either the whole thing is non fiction, or it’s fictional.

I would even go so far as to label only videos of an event itself, like security recordings, to be non fiction as re-enactments and whatnot can have a lot of extra information that was not there in real life.

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It would be very difficult for any TV show or film to meet this bar for non-fiction, because even if the footage is real there's still an edit.

The Senna documentary[1] is in the grey area. It's entirely composed of archival footage - no reconstructions, no talking heads, no voiceover. But the filmmaker has still chosen which footage to include and omit and in what order to construct a narrative. I don't think that neatly falls into fiction or non-fiction in your model.

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1424432/

> Either the whole thing is non fiction, or it’s fictional.

You miss out on a lot with this way of thinking. The interesting stuff is in the middle.

What am I missing out on if I cannot tell what is and is not fiction? It seems detrimental to assume something is real and then it turns out to be fake (but I will never know).

I'm not sure if anything I say will convey the point because I think you already got what I meant, but think of Santa. During childhood it goes from reality to the middleground of "I wonder if" to later clearly being fiction. Not knowing what is what and later finding out or not is interesting in itself.

I don't think that follows. It's fine to recognize that something that isn't non-fiction is fiction, and, frankly, that's the only reasonable thing to do, since you can't know what's true and what isn't. But that doesn't mean you can't enjoy it just as much as the next person, or get something good out of it.

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