Reality In Question

It sometimes happens that when you're hard at work making fiction, you get invaded by the feeling that what's important is happening elsewhere -- something much more powerful than the story that you have been creating, with care and obsession. Human beings today need their daily dose of fiction, it's true; without it, we would not know how to live. But it is also true that, on many occasions, the rumblings of reality that come across our TVs and computer screens are so powerful that they knock the air out of you and leave you with the feeling that a film is something insignificant in comparison.
-Pedro Almodovar, Reality and Narration 

I adore Pedro Almodovar's films, especially Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, and I don't mean to pick on the famous director when he is calling attention to an under-reported story, but to be surprised that reality is more significant than fiction?  Really, we have to rediscover this concept?    Also, do we all really "need" a daily dose of fiction?  In other words, we can't live without being fed some spin on our situation?  Of course, yes, one watches TV or reads and all of it is pure construct, even if it is a form from the Office of Personnel Management (perhaps especially so), so he is correct about the daily exposure.  But is it truly the case that we cannot deal with reality any more; that we need a daily dose of mental conditioning? Darn, we're in pretty bad shape.  Maybe it's only the intelligentsia that have become so self-referential.  That would explain a lot.  Unruly, ugly, scary, glorious, fatal reality: it doesn't come through the TV or computer screen, or even off of an old-fashioned page of paper, but it is there, waiting.