Forgive me, you're aboslutely right; the authors were aware of what they were doing in that instance. Lawrence gets difficult to talk about because of all the layers--I'm afraid I took you to mean "real life" as opposed to "filmic reality." Sorry!

It's just another curious layer to this discussion, though: that there can exist for us a separate world of Lawrence that isn't strictly "real" but that does not offend us in its fictionalization of real people.