GOOD AND EVIL

Lehane said the underlying confusion of appearance and reality that plays out in the climax of Mystic River—which leads to no definitive “good” or “evil” characters—is also reflected in his political outlook.

“I don’t think human beings are any more dangerous than when they’re sure they’re right,” Lehane said.

Lehane elicited applause from the crowd when he emphasized his point by mocking the Bush administration’s insistence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction before last year’s invasion.

But Lehane also said he thinks society in general confuses desire for understanding with fair analysis of evidence.

“I had a conversation with a person who politically leans like me, but was convinced that Saddam somehow funded the 9/11 attacks,” Lehane said. “I said, ‘What evidence do you have?’ She said, ‘I don’t know, but I’m so mad.’”

“We’ve become a society of infotainment. We like stories, not facts,” Lehane continued. “We believe a myth, even though there’s no evidence. The idea of Mystic River—get the evidence.”

Writing a story with no archetypal characters also made the book more interesting, Lehane said.

“I always tell students, don’t write a villain who knows he’s evil, because that’s just boring,” Lehane said. “I don’t think even Hitler got up in the morning and looked himself in the mirror and said, ‘Let’s do some evil.’”

KEEPING SECRETS

Lehane said he learned the two most important aspects of writing when he was 16 years old. The first, he said, is that a writer never explains elements of a book that are not expressly written.

In keeping with this principle, Lehane bristled when one audience member asked about an ambiguous gesture that Bacon makes towards Penn in the last scene of the movie.

“There are a few things in this world that I will never explain, and this is one of those,” Lehane said. “It’s there to make you think, not for me to say, ‘Well, actually, it means this.’”