When Casey Affleck announced last week that the film he made about Joaquin Phoenix was a complete fiction–that, indeed, the whole “character” of meltdown/I’m-quitting-actor Phoenix was just the latest convincing performance for the acclaimed actor–I think some of us were genuinely surprised. As much as we all have built-in mechanisms for fakery-detection these days (because we’ve been duped so many times in our lives, growing up as we did in the advertising age), there are still bits and pieces of us that long to believe. But it’s increasingly hard to keep this capacity alive.