I can’t say it was by deliberate design, but the blog this year has been heavily focused on the power of storytelling as a cultural lodestar, one that reflects the changing times as much as it influences them. Like gravity, or capitalism, narrative is a governing force in our lives that mostly operates invisibly, if for no other reason than we’ve gotten so accustomed to its ubiquity.
“As a medium, stories have proven themselves great as a way of storing information and values, and then passing them on to future generations. Our children demand we tell them stories before they go to bed, so we lace those narratives with the values we want them to take with them into their dreams and their adult lives. Likewise, the stories and myths of our religions and national histories preserve and promote certain values over time. That’s one reason civilizations and their values can persist over centuries” (Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, [New York: Penguin Group, 2013], 16).
Taking those values “into our dreams,” as Rushkoff puts it, is a crucial proviso, because it underscores the subconscious way storytelling works: A good story seduces you with the promise of entertainment, incrementally winds you up into a state of suspense, and only lets you out when it’s made its point—when it’s imparted its takeaway moral. Over and over we submit to this experience, fondly recalling with friends the parts of a story that made us jump, or laugh, or cry, but seldom do we give much consideration to its underlying ethos; that sort of subtextual scrutiny, let’s face it, begins and ends in third-period English.
But if fiction is the means by which our mores and traditions are conferred, then it is also, accordingly, the way in which bad ideas are inculcated, even by trustworthy artists. Much of this is owed, quite innocently, to utilitarian narrative patterns that have, through mass-repetition, developed into accepted sociocultural precepts.
You all know the rules: sin equals death
Genre conventions are part of a pact storytellers make with their audience, a set of tacitly agreed-upon expectations: an action thriller will have violence; a slasher film will feature teenage sex; a romantic comedy will pair ideologically (and adorably) mismatched lovers. The best stories find a way of at once honoring and challenging those tropes (Scream, The Dark Knight); most, however, simply take them as an uncontested given. Commenting on the erotica blockbuster Fifty Shades Freed, comedian Bill Maher noted:
“Psychologists have to explain how in the age of #MeToo, the number-one movie in America is about a woman on a leash. Or, how in romantic comedies, there are only three plots: she married her boss; stalking is romantic; and ‘I hate you and then I love you’” (Bill Maher, “New Rule: Hollywood’s Grey Area,” Real Time with Bill Maher, February 16, 2018).
To a certain extent, given their sheer volume, archetypal scenarios are unavoidable. And most writers, I suspect, don’t promulgate them with an actively malignant agenda: I don’t imagine screenwriter J. F. Lawton, for instance, set out to make the case that prostitution is romantic when he conceived the neo-Pygmalion fairy tale Pretty Woman; that was simply an incidental if unfortunate concomitant. Artists, after all, have consumed thousands of stories, too, and are therefore as susceptible to the subliminal indoctrination of culturally ingrained—and narratively reinforced—worldviews as the rest of us. Some of our most cherished American myths even help to explain how we’ve arrived at this dangerous moment in history.
THE STRONG VIOLENT TYPE
The United States is a country forged in the fire of revolution, and, consequently, our fictions have long venerated the Violent Antihero—the man’s man who understands that rule of law by and large only stands in the way of the distribution of justice. From our Western gunslingers to our hardboiled detectives, from our superspies to our supercops, “Hollywood churns out one film after another in which the hero is a reluctant but highly skilled killer” (Matt Taibbi, “If We Want Kids to Stop Killing, the Adults Have to Stop, Too,” Rolling Stone, February 16, 2018).
“If you are looking for ransom I can tell you I don’t have money, but what I do have are a very particular set of skills.”
Our current cultural fixation, the comic-book superhero, combines the worst aspects of two of our most treasured fictive icons: the modern action hero and self-anointed messiah—the lone Chosen One who is “called” to rise up and save us from ourselves, “the super-powerful Randian wealth creator who as a secret hobby masters hand-to-hand killing techniques, and saves the world by bypassing laws and ass-whipping bad guys using awesome military technology. Christ, both Iron Man and Batman are literally military contractors during their day jobs” (ibid.).
Now, such extrajudicial vigilantism, to be perfectly fair, wouldn’t be necessary if not for another of fiction’s universal truths: All of our public institutions are hopelessly inept and/or corrupt. The major metropolitan police departments of Los Angeles (Die Hard), San Francisco (Dirty Harry), and Gotham City (Batman)? Useless. The Federal Government? Well, best-case, it’s insidiously duplicitous and pathologically self-serving (House of Cards), and that’s when it isn’t secretly controlled by the kinds of tentacled cryptocracies that supply perennial antagonism on melodramas like Scandal (B613) and The X-Files (the Syndicate).
“The ‘we’re in this together’ spirit of films from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s later gave way to a reflex shared by left and right, that villainy is associated with organization. . . .
. . . There is no help or authority that can be effectively appealed to, because those leaders are at best distracted or foolish. . . .
. . . Modern fictional heroes—often talented to a degree that seems larger than life—are shown dealing with some problem or conspiracy that no one else noticed, or confronting the dire consequences of some massive cultural error, or uncovering malfeasance on the part of society’s corrupt leaders” (David Brin, “Our Favorite Cliché: A World Filled with Idiots…, or, Why Films and Novels Routinely Depict Society and Its Citizens as Fools,” Locus Online, January 20, 2013).
Fox Mulder, after all, is a man who openly rejects scientific reasoning, his own brand of (at-least-nonviolent) go-it-alone heterodoxy, in favor of paranormal conspiracy theories that would be easily validated if not for a concerted deep-state coverup—the kind political fixers like Olivia Pope routinely orchestrate. Some of our most beloved fictional heroes have spent their careers either combatting or coordinating these nefarious cabals.
Say it with me: “Trust no one”
Need proof our institutions are nothing more than a comforting façade? Look no further than the immensely popular subgenre of postapocalyptic fiction, which seldom puts much stock in their resilience. Whether by natural disaster, pathogenic outbreak, cybernetic revolt, or nuclear holocaust, when catastrophe strikes, civilization in these dystopian fantasies reliably collapses overnight. Small bands of survivors are left to scavenge the lawless landscape, battling over dwindling resources—often with objectively cool handmade weapons and customized roadsters—instead of, ya know, pooling them. Protocols are abandoned, emergency services disbanded, any sense of ethics—or, hell, even shared interest—tossed aside without a second thought, and it’s Every Man for Himself. In the end, our fictions assure us, we all become the strong violent type.
Onetime family man and peace officer Max Rockatansky devolves into the Road Warrior
POWER AND RESPONSIBILITY
Most of the aforementioned motifs emerged over time for a simple—and perfectly benign—reason: They make for good drama. And, to be fair, Fox Mulder is no more singlehandedly responsible for our mistrust of government than Jack Bauer is for our acceptance of torture as one of democracy’s necessary tools and effective safeguards. None of these archetypes by themselves shaped public perception. But when we marinate in the aggregate of them for decades on end, when we take their questionable (and oft-repeated) assumptions with us into our dreams, they quietly rewire our folkways—our unconscious understanding of how the world works.
When comic books still functioned as simple children’s entertainment designed to teach elementary lessons in right and wrong, they were harmless enough, but “superhero movies imprint this mindset that we are not masters of our own destiny, and the best we can do is sit back and wait for Star-Lord and a fucking raccoon to sweep in and save our sorry asses. Forget hard work, government institutions, diplomacy, investment—we just need a hero to rise” (Bill Maher, “New Rule: Orange Sphincter to the Rescue,” Real Time with Bill Maher, May 19, 2017). Legions of grown adults now spend billions subsidizing that corrosive message by consuming it at the multiplex and on TV week in, week out.
But it is artists who tell those stories, and therefore artists need to be the first to scrutinize the morals they proffer, the unintended consequences of the ideas they are dramatizing. The Fast & Furious movies—critically commended for their themes of loyalty, community, family—have made billions celebrating the criminal and socially irresponsible behavior of gearhead assholes. Case in point:
Pretty cool, bro… that is, until franchise star Paul Walker—under a set of circumstances not connected to the then-in-progress production of Furious 7—died while riding shotgun in a Porsche Carrera GT that collided with a lamppost at approximately 90 MPH in a posted-45 zone. Did that needless tragedy provoke a dark night of the soul for the series’ producers about the glorification of illegal street racing they’ve propagandized and profited from?
Of course not. They simply retired Walker’s character—like the family dog sent to “live upstate”—thereby conveniently sidestepping any questions about artistic responsibility or real-world consequences of the conduct they so gleefully exalt… and onward that cash-hoovering crapfest roars. But, hey—at least Vin Diesel makes his gang say grace before they eat, right?
These shameless hypocrites only espouse principles that don’t cost them anything
A piece of fiction doesn’t even have to be as wantonly and manifestly unscrupulous as F&F to be harmful. I was on my way up Sepulveda Boulevard in Los Angeles the other day when I spied an advertisement like this one looming overhead:
The Epix television series “Deep State”
I don’t know what that show’s about, or who created it, or who stars in it, but I’ll tell you why I already hate it: Because the title alone validates the notion that there is a deep state; it legitimizes a crackpot conspiracy theory that’s recently enjoyed a troubling resurgence in mainstream popularity. Just that two-word phrase in capital letters on a billboard—DEEP STATE—lends credence to the very notion that that’s a thing, and not the utter fallacy it is in actuality.
Think hard about what every facet of your story is saying, my fellow scribes, both Big Picture and small detail. I am by no means suggesting we retire our favorite narratives and heroic models, merely that we give deeper consideration to the principles they propound, to the ideas they reinforce. Look for opportunities in your own work to challenge clichés and, by extension, staid modes of thinking.
Imagine, for instance, the quiet message of hopeful defiance The Walking Dead might’ve conveyed had Rick Grimes stubbornly continued to wear his sheriff’s uniform throughout—despite—all the series’ traumatic turns of event and crises of faith, instead of sloughing it off after the first bout of disillusionment? Change nothing else about the creative course of the show save that single implicit visual detail, and so much of its relentless nihilism is subconsciously offset (and—bonus!—its worldview is subtly imbued with nuance and complexity, to boot).
Andrew Lincoln as Rick Grimes, hero of “The Walking Dead”
Because our fictions do shape reality as much as they mirror it. Say some media messiah were to come along and tell us that all our institutions have failed us—that establishment politicians serve only their own interests; that the Fourth Estate is the enemy of the people; that there’s a deep-state conspiracy to rig the system against the God-fearin’, tax-payin’ working man—and that he alone can fix it. It wouldn’t be all that hard to accept a narrative like that, because it’s one we’ve heard before, isn’t it? It’s the one we’ve been telling ourselves for decades, and yet, remarkably, we never predicted the inevitable outcome we got until it had already attained the status of self-fulfilled prophecy.
And just like an effective work of fiction, each new plot twist in our unfolding American tragedy keeps us engaged by escalating the stakes and, correspondingly, the tension. When will this saga end? Hopefully when we finally stop customarily reiterating it.
This is well written, a lot of good lines. Some movies, like Fast and Furious, are just pure male fantasy that shouldn’t be over analyzed. Fight, drive fast, score hot babes – this would be a man’s life if he could make it happen. Alas, in reality, this doesn’t happen and has consequences. But at least for me, they’re escapism. “Wow, I would love to own that car and have that hot babe and live in that tropical paradise,” I think for two hours before I go back to sad, hum drum real life.
As for Walking Dead, I think sometimes post-apocalyptic zombie fiction sells humanity short. Sure, much of the world and its institutions and processes are destroyed. Even so, the average human today possesses more knowledge than say, a Roman emperor of the past, so if Romans were able to make a civilization, surely today’s humans can. Alas, there’s no scientific innovation or people rebuilding society. Groups don’t put their knowledge together to make things. Rather, they loot abandoned stores and you wonder why after all these years the stores haven’t run out of loot. There would definitely be jerks and villains who would take advantage of the chaos and in deference to the show, I know that, say, aspirin exists but I don’t know how to make it so I’d probably just have to loot a store to find some.
As for government conspiracies….eh, is it that art imitates life or life imitates art? The Federal government was never meant to have as much power as it does. Individual states were supposed to be like small countries, handling all of their internal issues based on what state residents want and the Federal government was supposed to lead on collective issues – like war, interstate disputes, etc. Texas and New York are different places with different people with different viewpoints and when the Feds try to run both like they’re the same, that’s how you end up with all the political conflict and strife. I don’t know that this means they’re hiding Fox Mulder’s aliens but there’s probably a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes that we don’t know.
Finally, are we at a dangerous moment in history? Eh…I don’t know. I think we, as in every human, suffer from a desire to be famous and that is creeping up in a bad way in politics, a realm where decisions really need to be made based on logic rather than emotion. Whether on news channel talk shows or on social media, there doesn’t seem to be much room for debate without personal motives being questioned. I’m not surprised on social media as its usually unskilled, untrained people, but it makes me sad when I turn on TV news and see supposedly professional people cry, flail around, yell, scream, act like dummies…I mean, holy crap. Is X law a good idea? Should it be changed? If you don’t like X, then propose Y, try to get the votes for it, and then celebrate a victory or lick your wounds after defeat and try another day. But no one understands the Constitution or political process and apparently its just easy to yell, scream, etc.
Hey, BQB! Thanks so much for the thoughtful reply. Let me see if I can respond, point by point, with as much consideration as you showed.
Over the years, I’ve discussed Fast & Furious with many friends and colleagues, and they’ve all basically said the same thing: You’re overthinking it. It’s cinematic junk food. It’s just meant to be brainless fun. What initially struck me about F&F, in the early years of the franchise, was just how horribly written and acted those movies were; I was offended by their storytelling stupidity and incompetence more than anything else. But as the series went on, and actually started to earn glowing critical notices (and racked up billion-dollar box-office receipts), I was compelled to take a more analytic look at it. I don’t have a problem with escapism, but when a series is as stupid and as sloppy as this one (note, for instance, the way Brian’s characterization inexplicably shifts from surfer-dude dunderhead in the first two movies to somber, levelheaded introspector in the later entries) and manages to be utterly morally bankrupt, I think it’s worth calling it out for that and not merely excusing it as “harmless fantasy.” If this is what passes for male wish-fulfillment, I think we can dream a lot bigger and better than this noxious cocktail of petrol and testosterone, no? (But, as I said, I’ve yet to find anyone who agrees with me on that, so take my argument for whatever it may be worth to you.)
It is absolutely stupid and nonsensical that none of our vast accumulated wisdom — our science and technologies — is invoked or applied in the aftermath of the zombie apocalypse. There are going to be challenges to rebuilding society under such conditions, sure, and there will always be self-serving autocrats with an eye toward exploiting tragedy, but there is absolutely no cause for society to slip back into the Dark Ages overnight. Except…
Except for that fact that such a back-to-basics scenario, explains media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, is the reason why we enjoy postapocalyptic fiction:
This kind of fiction, you see, is about the banishment of technology that’s made modern existence so complicated — even the helpful technologies.
On your third point: I’ve spent my entire life living in one of two places — either New York or Los Angeles. So I am admittedly out of touch with what’s going on in that vast swath of land between the coasts. To remedy that, my wife and I took a three-week, multistate road trip two years ago through the West — up through Utah and Idaho to Montana, and as far inland as South Dakota. The excursion was eye-opening, because what it made me realize is that there are vast areas of this country with extremely limited access to the basic services I’ve taken for granted my whole life, like police and firemen and paramedics. (Hell, just to get to a modest airport in some of these areas can be a six-hour drive!) And when you’re living that far out, without immediate access to governmental services, why should the government be able to tell you how to live, and what to do (or not do) on your land? This born-and-bred city boy got a very different perspective on life than he’d ever been previously exposed to.
So, for that reason, this Hollywood liberal is very much a proponent of that old conservative favorite: states’ rights. I absolutely agree with what you’ve said above. And if we’ve entered an era of federal overreach, that’s certainly a debate we should be having. But I don’t think there’s any conspiracy behind any of that. Rather than some secret shadow government operating without oversight, most of the major issues that affect daily life in America are the subject of open propaganda wars, with each side shouting its point over and over again in the hopes of winning more converts to its cause (something that goes to your last point, which I’ll address next). But we are starting to see states exerting their power by pushing back on issues like pot criminalization, and sanctuary cities, and the use of state resources to enforce Trump’s immigration policy, etc. And I suspect that if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade with the help of whoever succeeds Justice Kennedy, you’ll see more states exercising their authority yet. States’ rights might wind up being the very thing that saves us from federal overreach.
Finally, I agree with your last point, too: that we’ve become a society that values opinions over facts; that we’ve got personalities shouting the news at us rather than journalists reporting it to us (the aforementioned propaganda wars). And that’s how we got our reality-show president, which has plunged us into one needless (and self-made) crisis after another over the last year and a half. Because crises are great for ratings, and ratings are the metric of success in entertainment. But not in politics. And that we’ve reached a moment in our history where those two institutions have become so conflated is troubling, and potentially even dangerous when you consider some of the existential threats we’re facing. Politics has always been ugly and rancorous, but now more than ever we need sober, compassionate, intellectual minds working to solve our problems, and what we’ve got instead is a de facto WWE event occupying the geopolitical stage. Is that dangerous? Perhaps. It’s certainly disconcerting, and isn’t that reason enough to want to help create a new, more sustainable American narrative moving forward?
Thanks, Bookshelf, for engaging with this piece so earnestly. I haven’t in the past gone too political with my posts, either implicitly or explicitly, and I’m glad this essay has thus far been received in the intellectual spirit in which it was intended.
Sean
Oh, boy … I’m going to get myself into trouble here. But even this idea itself — “Fight, drive fast, score hot babes – this would be a man’s life if he could make it happen.” — is a product of cultural indoctrination through repeated narrative. My life, for instance, is not spent fighting, driving fast or scoring hot babes. My fantasies are not about fighting, driving fast or scoring hot babes. And if it could be handed to me on a platter for free that I’d be a skilled fighter, fast driver or hot-babe-scorer—I wouldn’t take it. But we teach each generation of American boys that something is wrong with them if this isn’t what they want—that “normal men” want these things, and therefore, those who don’t are the default: abnormal.
Likewise, “I think we, as in every human, suffer from a desire to be famous” is a relatively new, American narrative. There are entire cultures where this goal doesn’t even cross their minds in a lifetime (any more than to “fight, drive fast and score hot babes”). We’ve created this false set of “normal wishes” and then indoctrinated generations with them until it seems like it’s rooted in some sort of immutable code.
It isn’t.
I have no problem with what anyone wants or likes. But when, through personal and collective story-telling, we draw lines that “this is true, this is normal,” we begin to perpetuate narratives rather than simply describe one version of perception or tell one particular story.
I say all of this to support your point, Sean: cultural narrative is directed by our storytelling.
Cultural Indoctrination… Part of the problem in the Viet Nam war was that American leaders, from the President down, were convinced that the native South Vietnamese loved America and Freedom and hated and feared Communism, just like Americans. The leaders just could not, or refused to, grasp the concept that the average South Vietnamese had completely different priorities
One might argue that that was not the only war in world history to have had problems w/ cultural Indoctrination
Cultural Indoctrination can go so deep that we don’t even realize that is indoctrination. We become convinced that it’s natural. That “everybody thinks that way”
Another great example, Dell!
Excellent point, Dell. The 2003 invasion of Iraq — “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” as it was arrogantly called — is a perfect example: Democracy is a great thing… but, as we learned, it isn’t right for every country. But we assumed the Iraqis wanted the American way of life — that we could simply franchise democracy like a McDonald’s restaurant and it would be a crowd-pleasing success. Guess we know how that story ended. (Has it ended?)
Well said, Erik — I second every word of it.
I don’t recall at any point in my adult life, like you, ever aspiring to be, say, James Bond — burnin’ rubber, kickin’ ass, and beddin’ broads. If anything, I was drawn — particularly by my angsty teenage years — to more introspective and philosophical “action heroes,” like Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and Star Trek‘s Captain Picard. Prior to that, my imagination was fueled by a lot of pop culture I now find troubling at best — and morally repugnant at worst — for some of the values it promoted, be it wanton violence (Die Hard and Lethal Weapon and a lot of the Stallone/Schwarzenegger stuff), American Might Makes Right (G.I. Joe), misogyny (The Last Boy Scout), extractive capitalism (The Secret of My Success), and some seriously creepy (and Bill of Rights–violating) voyeuristic-men-on-innocent-woman invasions of privacy (Stakeout). It’s a funny thing, but I couldn’t actually write a lot of the very stories that inspired me to be a writer! That’s not to say I still don’t enjoy some of them on a certain level (sometimes creative, mostly nostalgic), but I sure as hell don’t subscribe to their ethos now as a grown man.
And if you look at the Fast & Furious movies, which are the Idiot Action Extravaganzas of the iGeneration era, they enthusiastically espouse a mode of (needlessly) reckless behavior without ever addressing the consequences of that lifestyle — even when it had direct real-world ramifications on the franchise itself! (The vehicular death of Paul Walker.) They didn’t want the pesky inconveniences of reality trespassing on the meathead fantasy they were selling. That’s why I feel my blood boil whenever Vin Diesel and his coterie of hypocrites pay tribute to Walker, either onscreen or off-, because it’s pure lip service: No one ever addresses the uncomfortable correlation between the way Walker died and the criminal conduct F&F celebrates and profits from. Ever. Because if they did — even for a moment — they might have to reconsider the types of stories they tell, and those no-talents aren’t about to risk their meal ticket doing that. In that sense, the producers of F&F (Diesel among them) are no different than the series’ sociopathic protagonists: They care about their family… but they don’t care about your family. I absolutely hate those movies (I’ve studied the first seven of them) and refuse to let them off the hook as mere escapism — not when they’ve raked in over $5 billion peddling their noxious message.
When I was in my twenties, I was one of those don’t-blame-the-movies kind of guys. And on a certain level, I still am: You can’t fault The Dark Knight for the actions of the perpetrator of the 2012 Aurora shooting, despite the fact that the gunman claimed to have been directly inspired by the Joker. In that instance, the movie simply became the scapegoat for a mentally deranged person who was going to do what he did with or without pop-cultural justification. Blaming it on Batman just made for a better headline.
But as I said under the POWER AND RESPONSIBILITY subheading above, it’s the gestalt of our cultural narratives that have the power to shape our mores and folkways, and while on the one hand that can give us empathy and insight into the human condition (as good stories do), it can also mean desensitizing us to things like violence and sexism through repeated simulated exposure (no different than pornography). Some of the “harmless” comedies I loved in high school, for instance — like Soapdish and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective — had a real streak of transphobia that didn’t bother me at the time; I was a sufficiently (apolitically) liberal city kid to not even be shocked by that stuff, but not yet experienced enough to appreciate how insensitive (and even offensive) it was. Nowadays, though, I find those movies nearly unwatchable for their antiquated values. I don’t blame them for being products of their times, but I’m grateful to the storytellers who envisioned a more enlightened culture, and helped bring it about through responsible storytelling. And that’s why I hold the filmmakers of F&F in contempt: They should know better and yet they don’t — or worse, they don’t care. Don’t reward their depravity with your money. Dream better than that.
It all comes down to “normalizing” the abnormal. I mean, even with YouTube, today’s youth have seen more “normalized abnormal” stuff than we ever even knew existed when we were young. I mean “Two Girls One Cup” draws a yawn anymore: “Um, yeah, who hasn’t seen that; it’s, like, ten years old.” So what would once have been a shock-inducing and rare glimpse of the bizarre is now kind of “Meh, seen it.”
I’m not against violence in books and movies. I’m not against much in books and movies. But I don’t see how anyone can deny that it affects our cultural views of normality or what we consider a range of normal experience. It’s like watching the news anymore. No one can stay shocked when shocking things are served up daily. We just sort of go, “Aw, man, that sucks. What’s for dinner?”
I don’t know that I have any recommendations beyond personal choice, which is where I always land. It’s doubtful that anything which makes people loads of money will change on a large scale. But I can close the doors to what I feel may chisel away at my own peace and empathy.
When I think about the lengths we had to go to just to maybe get our hands on a Playboy back in the day versus the unlimited, instantaneous access kids today have (via their smartphones) to the most depraved pornographic theater imaginable, I do worry — and I’m not even a parent — about how it’s rewiring their perception of healthy sexuality. But I’m sure academics far more versed than I am on the subject are studying that as I type this.
In this era of unlimited programming choices, we do indeed, Erik, need to learn to exercise the power of choice — which often means choosing to limit our exposure to certain things. Case in point: In 2013, no fewer than four shows about serial killers and/or cult murders premiered that year — Hannibal (based on The Silence of the Lambs), Bates Motel (based on Psycho), The Following (with Kevin Bacon), and Cult (which aired on the teenybopper netlet The CW). As a horror enthusiast and (now-recovering) television addict, I watched the first three of those shows regularly for the first several months they were on…
And then I stopped watching all of them. Because what I realized was this: As well-produced as the first two were (The Following was pure crap), there was only so much of that ugliness I could invite into my life each week. I had limited recreational time, and I just didn’t want to spend it all immersed in the violent world of serial killers. And I know it’s fiction, and there was certainly no danger of any of those shows “normalizing” that behavior in my mind, but I just made a choice to say Enough is enough; I didn’t want them “chiseling away at my own peace and empathy,” the way the nightly news (in this particular era, anyway) has a way of doing. That was empowering, because it made me realize I could choose to control my media-consuming habits, like quitting superheroes after a lifetime of following their adventures to diminishing returns.
I’m not opposed to violence in books or movies, either; God knows my screenplays and novels have included their share of it. But I do think artists need to consider whether they’re (even unconsciously) promoting/recycling questionable values through their work, especially in the cultural aggregate. Practicing responsible storytelling will not only make for a more enlightened culture, but stories themselves will get better as writers rely less on convenient tropes and lazy clichés. That’s called a win-win.
The first key concept of media studies is “Media Constructs Reality” as you have demonstrated here. This was an excellent read. It’s just unfortunate that the people who really need to read it probably won’t, or can’t, thanks to the anti-intellectual movement, and the spoonfeeding of the public by the likes of Fox News and their own self-serving narrative. The last time I was truly surprised at the theatre was when we went to see The Martian. I was positive that there would be some kind of government conspiracy or cover-up preventing his rescue, or that no other country would help out, but the complete opposite happened. It was still a little rah-rah, but we definitely need more subversives like this.
Thanks, mydangblog. And you’re right: In the wrong circles, I could be accused of being elitist just for posting this! Media does indeed construct reality, and the political reality we’re stuck with today is the result of twenty years worth of hate-baiting propaganda shouted at us by “an endless succession of blow-dried, shrieking dingbats like Laura Ingraham, author of Shut Up and Sing, who filled the daytime hours with rants about every conceivable cultural change being the product of an ongoing anti-American conspiracy” (Matt Taibbi, “Roger Ailes Was One of the Worst Americans Ever,” Rolling Stone, May 18, 2017). That’s one reason — though not the only one — I typically refrain from political commentary: What’s the point, really? I’m just one more voice preaching to the converted.
You know, The Martian was scribbled in my notebook entry for this post as a possible subversive exemplar to mention, but I never really found room for it in the argument I was making. What I would’ve said — and I’ll say it here, since you brought it up — was that it represents a very rare instance of intellect (mathematics, no less) being used to solve problems over fisticuffs. And all the conflict is situational, not the result of needless stupidity or convenient antagonism.
Furthermore, the mission wasn’t conducted in secret, as you so often see in science fiction (like in The Fly or Jurassic Park, not to pick on the great Jeff Goldblum!), but rather NASA was open and accountable to the public about their mistake and the steps they were taking to rectify it. And conducting the rescue op so publicly was what allowed the Chinese to offer a crucial piece of technology. The Martian is very much a we’re-in-this-together story, and if it is a little rah-rah, at least its heart is in the right place. We need more storytellers to challenge themselves to dramatize these kinds of credible nonviolent conflicts that are resolved through peer-reviewed intellect and institutional cooperation; I can’t speak for anyone else, but they make me feel good about the human condition, versus some superhero story which is just about a bunch of demigods beating the hell out of each other.
I, too, long for the kind of storytelling that teaches us that institutions can and do work—when we want them to. Sure, more often than not we have to make them work, but isn’t that the point of maintaining institutions?
I blame the slavish devotion to the depraved ideology of demented ghoul Ayn Rand, who was a serial killer’s fan-girl in her youth and never really grew up, much less out of that insane mentality. She is probably one of the worst proponents of so-called social Darwinism in that she has had the biggest and longest-lasting influence.
Now, one thing I do disagree with you on: to the extent that there is a deep state, and we are fools to deny its existence, it is no more than a collection of agencies all jockeying for a bigger share of the federal budget than its rivals, with often overlapping agendas. Their purpose is to maintain themselves and their influence within the government. And yes, as news reports have shown (Peter Strzok and Lisa Page’s text messages being but one example), some of those factions are opposed to Caligula Drumpf and some support him, but in that regard it’s no different than any other political faction-rivalries. But the mundane explanation is often the truest one, and that is most likely it. There’s no unified agenda, save for maintaining existence and pursuing common foreign policy goals. People concoct conspiracy fantasies because, as you rightly point out, media largely perpetuates cultural fantasies that are taken as truth, sometimes cynically (there’s money to be made).
Changing the cultural narrative requires storytellers willing to buck the present tradition to tell tales that show the system working, even if only under immense public pressure, and heroes relying on community for crucial support. “You may beat me, even kill me, but the fight doesn’t end with me. There will be others afterward, and we will add more to our ranks with every attempt to suppress freedom and critical thought. And eventually we’ll win, because there’s a lot more of us than there are of you!”
Thanks, Michael, for the amazing reaction — and apologies for my delayed response to it.
Rand’s Objectivist philosophies unquestionably sculpted a generation of minds in the latter twentieth century, notably conservative politicians who readily subscribed to Reagan’s “government is the problem” dictum, but they also considerably influenced our artists, too, from novelists (Ira Levin) to musicians (Neil Peart) to comic-book illustrators (Steve Ditko), which goes to what I assert above: that so many of the unquestioned beliefs and positions we hold are the offspring of unconsciously embedded propaganda. When an idea takes root, it can spread like a virus through the culture, to the point where it becomes almost impossible to trace the index case; artists become (witting or unwitting) vectors. So X-Files creator Chris Carter, for example, may or may not have read or subscribed to Rand (let’s assume for the sake of argument he didn’t), but he was nonetheless raised by her, at least to some extent, whether he was aware of it or not. We all were. With time and perspective, though, critics have identified (and documented) the impact Ayn Rand’s ideas have had on our politics, our economics, and our culture, and many artists — including Rush’s Peart — have since renounced their support of those questionable doctrines.
On the issue of the deep state: As I said in my response to Bookshelf Q. Battler above, the power jockeying that goes on in Washington — amongst politicians, agencies, corporations, and lobbies — doesn’t happen in smoke-filled, wood-paneled backrooms, because it doesn’t need to. It’s all done openly, conducted via the media, through propaganda wars. That’s what the Russian interference in the 2016 election was: a propaganda war waged via social media, with the American public unwittingly conscripted as its agents. No one denies this happened (except perhaps the beneficiary of it). There’s no Fox Mulder here — no lone voice of reason trying to expose some nefarious conspiracy. There’s only Robert Mueller, working quietly but openly on an investigation not into whether interference occurred — which is an uncontested given — only whether there were provable instances of criminal coordination with the Trump campaign. And, correspondingly, there are those seeking to undermine that investigation and discredit Mueller because it serves their personal and/or political agenda. But all of that is happening right on cable news each night, with each faction trying to change and/or control the political narrative.
With respect to our fictive narratives, there are many instances of commercial fiction — though I didn’t cite any in the essay above — that don’t rely on the “idiot plot”: The Martian, as mydangblog mentioned above. In the Line of Fire. The Fugitive. Even Jaws is about a local-government official committed to his sworn duty of public safety, who seeks help from other authorities in their particular fields to solve the crisis at hand. All of these stories operate from the premise that our institutions are tools, not magic wands, and they’re only as effective — or corrupt — as the agents who administer the particular business of those organizations. They’re all great, exciting movies that have stood the test of time. So instead of recycling lazy clichés with their convenient, ready-made conflicts, storytellers would do both the culture and society a favor by asking what kind of world they want to live in, and then representing that in their fictions. In time, as mydangblog noted, the stories we tell will shape the reality in which we live. And we know that for a fact, because it’s happened before — it’s happening right now. I say it’s time for a new story, don’t you?
Thanks for such an engrossing discussion, pal. Your insights are always welcome here.
Sean
There has yet been no credible evidence that Russia had anything to do with the 2016 election. $150,000 on Facebook ads, mostly non-political and having been purchased after the election took place, doesn’t come anywhere close to the literal billions spent between the two major campaigns and funded by dark money from all manner of places including foreign governments like Saudi Arabia and Israel that have attacked U.S. citizens (9/11, U.S.S. Liberty, respectively). But certainly there is propaganda, and we see it every day on the major networks. Lies are presented as gospel, whereas any questioning or expressed doubt is met with suspicion and false accusations.
I highly recommend sources such as Consortium News, founded by the late Robert Parry, who broke the Iran-Contra story in the 1980s. They’ve been highly skeptical of the Russia nonsense and rightly so. They’ve also reported on the conclusions reached by Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which did its own investigation and concluded that the DNC and Clinton leaks likely came from inside their respective institutions—knowing the Clintons and their sycophants, I don’t doubt they alienated someone to the point of downloading information to a thumb drive to pass off to former ambassador Craig Murray.
Now, as to influences of Rand on the wider culture, yes, she enjoyed far more than her demented, childish scrawling deserved. I tried reading ‘Atlas Shrugged’ and couldn’t even make it through the first chapter, it was so poorly written. I think it’s more likely that extreme conservatives found her so appealing because her warped views ran parallel to their own, and so they saw her philosophy as an articulation of their own.
No more apparent is this influence in Hollywood than in the Backlash films of the 1970s and 1980s. From ‘Dirty Harry’ to ‘Death Wish’ to 1983’s ‘Vigilante’ (starring Robert Forster), this genre sought to undo the rebellious, establishment-defying tone set in the previous decade’s Renaissance. And I think this was largely helped by the increasing consolidation of movie studios into fewer and fewer corporate hands. In days prior, studios were funded by Wall Street but run by moguls, who understood that in order to sell movies, you had to have people who knew how to make them. Now it’s all about cashing in on a product with little or no real thought or care put into the actual process of storytelling. It’s like buying a popular ice cream flavor, then letting someone burn the recipe because who cares if it’s any good as long as it makes a profit. And if it doesn’t, well, there’s always the next flavor. In other words, the business of film has been completely divorced from the process of film-making.
When Hollywood’s founding movie moguls — Carl Laemmle, William Fox, Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, Adolph Zukor, the Warner brothers — first broke with the Edison Trust to establish their own studios out west, they understood that there was a market for full-length feature films with narratives, and they knew how to tap into that: by producing good movies that reflected the tastes of the times. To accomplish that, they fostered relationships with visionary filmmakers like D. W. Griffith and Edwin S. Porter; they gave those artists the freedom and flexibility to make the product, and then the moguls went out and sold the product. It was a mutually beneficial relationship, and everyone understood the particular part they were being asked to play.
It’s way more complicated than this reductive summation, but here’s what happened: The businessmen that inherited those empires in the decades that followed assumed they understood storytelling, because, hey — they’d consumed a lifetime of stories, too! They got it in their heads that they were artistic, and started meddling in the process — which is how we wound up with what George Lucas calls the creative industrial complex: “There’s the corporate world, and they’re not creative — they’re lawyers, accountants and they think they’re creative.”
Then things got worse. Somewhere along the line, the agents and managers who were meant to be the liaisons between the businessmen and the artists came to think of themselves as arbiters of efficient storytelling, too — mostly because they’d thumbed through Save the Cat! that one time — and they started insinuating themselves in the creative process! I had an absolutely wretched experience with my last managers, which played no small role in my exodus from the industry.
Now more than ever, Hollywood just isn’t a creatively hospitable place. I tried — for twenty years — to get something going, but the creative industrial complex made it impossible and, more to the point, miserable. I no longer write nor go to the movies; I barely watch them and even less often enjoy them. Maybe it’s because I’m old, or maybe I’m just jaded by my experiences. I’m writing novels and blogging now, and I’m the happiest I’ve ever been, vocationally speaking. I’m looking ahead now to the future — one that doesn’t include Hollywood (the industry or the city). Life’s a lot happier when you focus on what you love, not what you loathe.
So if corporate lackeys like J. J. Abrams and Rian Johnson want Star Wars, they can have it — I’m done with it, anyway. And if Hollywood wants them, fine by me — they deserve one another. This is, undoubtedly, a lamentable period in the history of commercial cinema, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t healthy modes of creative expression out there. That’s where you’ll find me! Anyone who wants Hollywood can have it…
If movie-making IS your thing, you can get your own camera, your own actors, your own investors, and put the whole thing up on youtube. It won’t be cheap, it won’t be easy, but these are the sort of challenges that can create great works. And you have a control beyond what anyone in Hollywood can dream of.
Indeed — work outside the system. It’s a viable alternative now, no different than self-publishing. The old gatekeepers — studios, networks, record labels, publishing houses — held all the cards back in the days of yore because of their distribution capabilities. Now any one of us can produce content, avail it to the world through the Internet, and promote it via social media. No, it isn’t easy, and yes, the odds of great success are against you… but you knew that when you decided to pursue a career in arts and entertainment! But if you’ve got something to say and the drive to have it heard, then embrace the new media of a new century.
Entirely thought-provoking and illuminating post, thank you. When watching the recent special on Watergate I was struck by what several involved politicians and reporters said: The most impressive thing was how well the system of law and government in the U.S. did work in that instance. Sure, it took a few years and there was a lot of nefarious manipulation and obstructionism, but in the end our legislators stood for what was best for the country. The people rose up in protest, the media was relentless, and the issue could not be swept aside by president or his men. We have that capacity still. It is most likely now in action, pursuing its course toward justice, as people of principle stand against blatant abuse of power and disregard of humanitarian rights. We must remember ourselves at our finer hours, not focus on the nihilistic view of human unworthiness and ineffectiveness. For one, I don’t watch the shows and movies you mentioned in this post. They have no appeal to me. But then, I’m not a man. I agree completely that as authors we must constantly be cognizant of what moral our story relates… do we wish to encourage people to their highest or reiterate the flaws that everyone could fall into? Lets join to change that dark cultural narrative.
Beautifully expressed comment, Leonide — thank you. I tend to be an optimist myself about the resilience of our democracy. Trump has certainly innovated new modes of manipulation and obstructionism — I guess you have to hand it to him? — but the impassioned pushback those actions have prompted, from both the citizenry and the press, has been considerable, even inspiring. And while we all appreciate the crucial work the Special Counsel is doing, no one is waiting around for Robert Mueller to swoop in and save us (in true superhero fashion); instead, we’re all working together, as counterparts, to resist the very blatant abuses of power and disregard for human rights you cite above.
While our literary canon certainly includes its fair share of cautionary tales — what sci-fi author David Brin calls “self-preventing prophecies,” like Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, and The Handmaid’s Tale — that’s not the same thing as wantonly nihilistic fiction; if anything, it’s the antithesis of it. Nihilism begets nihilism, and that has no place in responsible storytelling. And I am by no means advocating for stories to be only about sunshine and roses! On the contrary, some of our darkest tales are our most meaningful. And meaning is what’s been missing from so many of our popular narratives lately, at least in my view.
My own forthcoming novel, Escape from Rikers Island, deals with a lot of dark elements and themes: gangs; corrupt cops; dehumanizing criminal-justice policies; institutionalized racism. But it refuses to give in to cynicism; rather, it’s about a man who walks the mean streets of New York but refuses to become mean himself. It’s not a perfect world he lives in — far, far from it — but it aspires to be better. And I was inspired to write it because I feel we need more aspirational fiction (the kind that trade in genuine emotion over cheap sentimentality) that can serve as a model for our better angels rather than exploiting some of our worst instincts and fears (which is what Fox News does, to great effect, every night).
Anyone interested in learning more about Leonide’s historical fiction is encouraged to visit her website.
In Vaal’s article 5 Televisions Shows I Want to See Happen (http://www.descendantsserial.paradoxomni.net/5-televisions-shows-i-want-to-see-happen/), the fourth one is A Post-Apocalyptic Non-Dystopia
One trope I want to see abandoned is “Heredity Is Destiny”. Related to and often crossing over with the Superhero, this one says it doesn’t matter how hard you work, or how smart you are. All that matters is your ancestry. Aragorn becomes king not because he earned it or because he led a revolution, or won the popular vote, but because he was the heir of Isildur and rightful claimant to the thrones of Arnor and Gondor. I know Lord of the Rings is about 70 years old, and built on much older traditions, but this trope is still current. The guy w/ the right bloodline is the best choice for king. He’ll turn out to be the wisest, most fair-minded, smartest king they can get. Because the blood of kings flows through his veins
Even in Star Wars, the reason Luke was so powerful in the Force was that he came from a family of powerful Force-users. The extended universe built on that, though I think the newest movies subvert that
That is indeed a great case made by Vaal for a non-dystopic postapocalyptic drama. I agree with him: There would be a shared and vested existential interest amongst the survivors to pool their resources and harness civilization’s knowledge and technologies, as BQB noted above, to rebuild society — a feat that would be complexly challenging on its own without roving bands of leather-clad sociopathic plunderers needlessly complicating matters. Thanks for posting a link to that piece, Dell.
Totally with you about the “Heroic Lineage” trope. That’s one in serious need of subversion, and the latest “revelation” about Rey in The Last Jedi isn’t remotely sufficiently subversive. (It was, in fact, merely a creative copout masquerading as a clever reversal, the latter of which legions of Rian Johnson apologists have somehow managed to convince themselves is the case in this instance.)
Star Wars is, for the most part, a Superhero narrative (only A New Hope and The Force Awakens adhere to a different story model: Golden Fleece), and it’s borrowed heavily from both that tired mythological archetype and its inverse, “Villainous Lineage,” in which a character has “evil in his DNA,” something that was exploited in some of the (now-retconned) Expanded Universe materials (Dark Empire), in which Luke succumbs to the dark side. Kylo Ren’s struggle — his hero worship of his grandfather Darth Vader — is also a variation on that theme.
As (mostly) Superhero stories, the Star Wars saga peddles that same we-need-a-hero-to-rise program as comic-book movies, because all of its social institutions — the Jedi Order, the Old Republic, the Empire, the New Republic, the First Order — are either dysfunctional, corrupt, or both. If diplomacy actually worked in Star Wars, Leia Organa would’ve never needed to hail Obi-Wan for help in the first place. (As evidence of what an abject failure she is as a diplomat, look at the way she’s still fighting the influence of the Empire thirty years after it was overthrown! If you’d failed at your job that consistently, you’d have been long since fired!) That’s the trouble with messiah narratives: a superpowered demigod with his easy fixes is always preferable to the roll-up-your-sleeves trial-and-error of institutional diplomacy. (Sci-fi author David Brin has been extensively critical of the messaging of Star Wars, particularly vis-à-vis the delicate statecraft and nuanced philosophical debate that defines Star Trek.)
I cited Bill Maher in this post as saying “superhero movies imprint this mindset that we are not masters of our own destiny,” and the “Heredity as Destiny” convention you call out, Dell, is emblematic of that: You don’t choose — rather, you’re either Chosen, or you’re not. That in no way sounds like empowerment to me.
> look at the way she’s still fighting the influence of the Empire thirty years after it was overthrown
I suspect that was lack of imagination
“Star Wars is about rebels fighting the Empire”
“What do we do now that the rebels won?”
“I dunno. Keep fighting the Empire?”
They could have had an actual counter-revolution. Though the pattern is historically accurate enough, the problem w/ that is the revolutionaries are underdogs.That might not be the best dynamic
Or, and maybe the Star Wars people don’t know this, but not every war is a civil war. Invaders from another galaxy or something. Maybe the aliens are Dark-Force users, and we need our strongest Force user, Luke, either to fight or to train the next generation. Leia and Han could be high-ranking generals or whatever. Or maybe since Leia is a Force user too, she could fight or train as well
This war could be as morally simple or complex as you like, depending on the invaders, who started what, how far do we go in a war, etc
You could even have Republic traitors or even remaining Imperial sympathizers in hiding, depending on where you want to go
Or you could just have the Republic, which is the government, rebel against the First Order, which is the government also, I guess? Whichever you prefer
I haven’t seen Return of the Skywalker, but I’ve read the plot summary and reviews, and the (evidently unexplained) resurrection of the Emperor as the “Big Bad all along!” stands as evidence, in my view, that the “creative” minds behind the sequel trilogy never had any idea who their villain was, so they cooked up a phony reveal for the (rushed) third act: Surprise — it was the original puppet master from the first six films! And from what I hear, audiences are (rightly) rejecting this shoddy piece of storytelling.
But, then, these new movies never had any idea who the protagonist was, so why should they have known who the antagonist was? For that matter, they never figured out precisely what the central conflict was; I never fully understood — and I’m not alone here — what the hell the “First Order” was vis-à-vis the Empire. (I guess you have to read the tie-in comics and play the videogames for all the answers.) At the time of its release, The Force Awakens got a lot of love, but one can plainly see the narrative cracks in that movie that eventually led to the total structural collapse of the new trilogy in Return of the Skywalker: from the pursuit of Luke as the MacGuffin (why was he so important when Rey evidently was the granddaughter of Palpatine, yet another instance of “Villainous Lineage”?), to the out-of-nowhere third-act threat of the Starkiller Base (when, once again, Palpatine supposedly had an armada of planet-obliterating of Star Destroyers secretly waiting in the wings), to the pre–A New Hope characterizations of Han and Leia (and altogether unrecognizable characterization of Luke). All The Force Awakens did was undermine any satisfaction one may have once taken from Return of the Jedi: You thought the Empire was destroyed? It wasn’t. You thought the Emperor was dead. Nope. You thought Han learned ethical cooperation, or Leia found passion outside of politics, or Luke achieved enlightenment? Go fuck yourself — of course they didn’t. And for what — a new trilogy that left no one satisfied!
I’m not suggesting all of the SWEU was entirely successful — and I in no way claim to have read all of it, just the initial wave of books published in the early nineties while I was still in high school — but they had the right idea: The Thrawn trilogy picks up five years after the events of Return of the Jedi, with Luke, Han, and Leia doing the roll-up-your-sleeves hard work of establishing the New Republic and rebuilding the Jedi Order, and confronting the logical obstacles (meaning, not the vanquished villainy of Darth Vader or Emperor Palpatine) to achieving such ambitious sociopolitical goals. Those stories moved both the characters and mythology along rather than backward, and it did so without cheapening the victories, deaths, romances, and sacrifices from the movie trilogy.
But some of the subtextual messaging of Star Wars is potentially problematic, for many of the reasons I’ve outlined above, and in the hands of an unimaginative hack like J.J. Abrams, who regurgitates rather than interrogates its folkways, you get a baldly corporate, poisonously nostalgic, morally and creatively bankrupt facsimile devoid of so much as a scintilla of the charm and wonder the series once offered in spades.
>The best stories find a way of at once honoring and challenging those tropes (Scream, The Dark Knight); most, however, simply take them as an uncontested given.
Another reason to think about, know about, and be ready to subvert if necessary, conventions : You don’t write great stories by unthinkingly following what everyone else does
Well said, Dell — short and sweet! Study mythic structure and genre conventions, and reverse-engineer as many stories as you can — particularly those in your preferred genre — using Blake Snyder’s beat sheet. The more well-read you are, and well-versed in narratology, the more likely you’ll be to innovate rather than imitate. It really comes down to a three-word piece of advice: Know your shit.
I’m with you completely on this. Seriously, picture me waving pom-poms in the school colors of your choice. 🙂
I quit watching Batman with the first Dark Knight, largely because of the vigilante glorification.
I hated westerns as a kid. I sat in the back seat of our car and cried while my parents watched them. I couldn’t stand the way Indians were killed as though they were cardboard cutouts and not people at all. Just once, I wanted everyone to sit down and work out a compromise.
Romance is a genre you touched on, but there are a lot more damaging tropes. Adultery is often glorified. And if I never read another triangle, it will be too soon.
The James Bond movies were all into the objectification of women. I know that accusation is overused, but it was blatant there.
And I am sooo sick of rape. Ick. Stop.
On a happy note, I agree with you about The Martian being exemplary.
I’ve been on a war kick lately. We need to really look at war. Look at what it costs and what is gained. Don’t follow the beat of those drums blindly. In the past, governments have often not been trustworthy in this area.
So in a sense, the only reservations I’d have about your post are on the trustworthiness of governments. I know too much history to trust my own. We have been lied to so many times, for so many different reasons, all of them related to personal goals of those who view human lives as counters. McCarthyism, Eisenhower’s involvement in Latin America, the Kennedy assassination and LBJ’s subsequent escalation of Vietnam, Richard Nixon (and Agnew), Oliver North, Monica Lewinsky, responding to 9-11 by attacking Iraq (!), the Patriot Act, and I’m not even going to touch on current politics.
Art is also a reflection. We have been forced into larger and larger federal and state governments. Far less takes place at the local level. Individuals feel marginalized, so they escape into worlds where individual achievements matter. Federal governments and the Big Brother expansions into personal liberties have many people feeling that government is a hindrance to people trying to live any kind of self-determined life. Legislators aren’t helping with their many scandals. Just their retirement packages alone are enough to piss some of us off. My trust in my government–at least with most of the people currently occupying it–is very low. And I’m not alone.
OTOH, maybe more people should actually try writing their senator. Mine both write back. One has to be careful assigning blame. It’s always tempting to heap too much in one place.
States rights…aargh, it’s terrible that it would circle back to here. Still, I have to remember that states rights was merely the lambswool used to make continued slavery more palatable.
If story is the device that humans have used since before recorded narrative to communicate important lessons, it completely makes sense that post-apocalyptic scenarios have more interest. What will we do if our government truly steps over the line and self-destructs? What will we need? How will we cope? The preppers all get hits on this very topic, and most of their sites are deadly dull. If you can work that into a narrative–well, so much the better, at least for the writer trying to peddle their work.
It’s definitely a feedback cycle, though. Art reacting to life reacting to art. It’s possible to accelerate fears that maybe would be better redirected. Most story is the quest for vicarious agency, IMO. We all try to tap into something that people are already feeling. I agree that we should reach worthwhile conclusions.
Cathleen,
Thanks so much for the impassioned reaction! The thesis for this post could certainly be expounded upon to fill a book or even a semester-long media-studies course — it no doubt has been, many times over — but “Changing the Narrative” was written with the modest intention of simply starting a broader conversation on the subject… which it clearly has based on the comments so far. I am, as always, grateful to have your enthusiastic take on the matter, too!
I hear conservatives condemn rap lyrics for violence and misogyny — and I’m not going to argue for or against that here — but, Christ almighty, let’s have a look at some of our culturally lionized white heroes, like Bond and Batman and Rambo — all of whom have been featured in Saturday-morning cartoon series, it’s worth noting — and the questionable ethics they promote.
I know you’ve been on a war kick, what with the recent release of your fantasy novelette The Golden Key, and I absolutely second your skepticism of government with respect to the endless unjustified (and often illegal) wars the United States has waged over the last half century. (To say nothing of the way concepts like states’ rights and the Second Amendment were really about ensuring continued slavery.) That shit certainly doesn’t make me proud to be an American. And rather than remarking directly on some of your insights, which I heartily agree with, I want to tie this in to a conversation we were having in the comments section of the last post. As you recall, we were talking about why the monomythic story arc isn’t resonating in our Digital Age anymore. Here’s what media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, who identified postnarrativity, has to say about that:
What Rushkoff is in effect saying here is that the Aristotelian arc no longer works because it’s been employed — by, among others, government propagandists — to tell us one too many lies. How many illegal wars got sold to us this way? By invading Iraq and toppling Saddam, a dictator harboring weapons of mass destruction, we will avenge the 9/11 attacks and spread democracy across the Middle East. Aside from “invading Iraq and toppling Saddam,” what part of any of that turned out to be true? Time and again, our government has misused narrative to deceive us, and now we don’t trust our leaders or our stories anymore.
Why do I bring this up? Well, for two reasons. First, to underscore your closing statement that art and life fuel a feedback cycle. Yes, our fictions have helped erode our faith in our public institutions… but those very institutions abused our trust with their own stories, leading to the cynicism/skepticism we see reflected in our popular entertainments. So we can’t put all the blame on Mad Max and Fox Mulder — and it is tempting (and easy) to heap too much on a single culprit, as you note. This is a complicated issue, and my essay above does not take all of its many nuances into full account. That’s important to stipulate, so I’m glad to have the opportunity in this reply.
Second: Since you and I have been talking about postnarrativity in the comments section of several of this blog’s posts over the past year, this seemed like the perfect chance to perhaps help clarify — in a way I think I’ve failed to adequately do before now — precisely why the Hero’s Journey isn’t resonating as it once did. Yeah, part of it has to do with a “hyperlinked” view of reality that Lost and Game of Thrones and Westworld have tapped into, but part of it is a repudiation of the monomyth, or at least the way it was misused throughout the twentieth century to justify a lot of morally reprehensible stuff.
Does that help shed light on the subject? I wasn’t planning to discuss postnarrativity here, but like the best comments on this blog do, you got me thinking about how lack of trust in the institution of storytelling itself helped give rise to a new form of narrative. So thank you for that. (Perhaps I’ll have to do a follow-up post focusing on that.)
I wish you a relaxing weekend, Cathleen, after what I hope was a productive week.
Sean
>Yeah, Martin Luther King Jr. was cool and I guess Gandhi was cool
Interesting how he chose two men who rebelled against the systems in which they lived
I never thought about it like that, Dell. Have you read any of Rushkoff’s work, perchance? In addition to his books, he also hosts a wonderful weekly podcast.
I actually haven’t, which is why in the post I wroteI was careful to present only YOUR conclusions about Rushkoff’s work on Post-Narrativity, and not represent anything as something he said. I read Testament a while ago, and I remember it was… odd. But in a way I liked. I’m thinking of re-reading it, and also getting Aleister & Adolf, particularly since I love Oeming’s stuff
As you said, not all comic books have to be about superheroes
Several years ago, when I was studying Save the Cat! and testing out its genres on the various movies and television shows I watched, I was hitting a wall when it came to series like Lost and Orphan Black — I couldn’t quite make them “fit” into any of the STC! classifications. It was around this time I became aware of Rushkoff when he was promoting Present Shock on The Colbert Report. I liked what he had to say in general, so I bought the book; the first chapter, “Narrative Collapse,” was revelatory, because that is where he first identified postnarrativity. Once I understood that shows like Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead adhered to a different type of narrative structure to reflect the nonlinearity of the Digital Age, everything clicked. As such, Rushkoff’s writings have had a profound influence on my worldview and my writings since.
Interestingly, he returns briefly but significantly to the subject of postnarrativity in his most recent book, Team Human, by arguing that so much of what we now consider postnarrative television — here’s looking at you, Game of Thrones — in fact wants it both ways, appropriating the unconventional structure of open-ended fiction while promising conventional resolutions await the faithful at the end:
That’s why I have such contempt for those shows (and for the Marvel Cinematic Universe): They’re neither telling us prescriptive stories nor challenging “traditional narratives and heroic, individualistic values” (ibid., 162) — they’re merely exploiting the unpredictability of postnarrativity and the promise of catharsis in Aristotelian narrativity to keep us watching, and buying:
Benioff and Weiss aren’t artists — they’re salesman. They don’t deserve their Emmys; at best they’re entitled to a Clio Award.
To your other comment: I have not read Testament or Aleister and Adolf (though I tried unsuccessfully at one point to get a copy of the latter). But should you read them, Dave, and feel compelled to do a review and/or analysis of them, I am happy to host such a post here! Let me know…
The similarities don’t end there
Both men fought against that were racist against them, advocated non-violence, were highly religious…
Of course, some of this may just be the “pattern recognition” process that makes conspiracy theories so compelling
Indeed. Both King and Gandhi, notably, are yet more proof that our pop-cultural depictions of rebels — whether it’s the archetypal John Wayne cowboy, the smart-alecky action hero, the efficiently deadly superspy, the antisocial dystopic itinerant — couldn’t be more out of sync with what real revolutionaries look like, believe, say, and do. We need more stories like theirs, to inspire more people like them.
Apropos of King, here’s a great piece Jamil Smith wrote for Rolling Stone this past week called “Before King Was a Myth, Martin Was a Man.”
>OTOH, maybe more people should actually try writing their senator.
In 2015 I couldn’t even tell you who my senators and representative were. Now their numbers are in my phone and I call them almost weekly
Politicians are like agents/managers: They work for us, not the other way around. They tend to forget that if we don’t keep them on a short leash. Know your elected officials and make sure they hear your voice. How else will they represent the interest of their constituents if we don’t expressly — and repeatedly — affirm that for them? (And vote in every election: local, state, midterm, presidential — primaries and generals. Yes, it’s a pain in the ass, but democracy, like marriage, is an ongoing project that requires constant care and upkeep. It’s never “done.”)
Thanks, Sean. Interesting take, and I look forward to the post.
However, I’m not certain we hear a whole lot of three-act storytelling as propaganda, which would weaken your case. It might be possible to make the case that using a three-act format is more of a subversive tactic, a la Uncle Tim’s Cabin. If you’re trying to undermine the dominant paradigm, you’d better have a superior story.
Just a thought. 🙂
Ugh–Uncle TOM’s Cabin. Aargh, aargh, aargh…
Hey, Cathleen. In terms of how propaganda is structured — selling you an idea, be it political or commercial or otherwise — it very much tends to follow an Aristotelian arc! Propagandists try to tap into that part of your brain that is hardwired to respond to the monomyth. “It’s the way that so many television commercials once worked: The girl gets the pimple, but by the end of the commercial, just when you think all is lost, she finds the Clearasil and the pimple magically is healed and she can go to the prom” (Molly Soat, “Digital Disruption and the Death of Storytelling,” Marketing News, April 2015, 44). Though compressed to thirty seconds, that is still very much a three-act narrative: a problem with stakes is introduced; the crisis seems unsolvable (the girl can’t adequately cover the pimple with makeup, and it’s only hours till homecoming); a solution is presented and a happy resolution reached. (My first job out of college was at an advertising agency in SoHo.)
Political propaganda is no different: A threat to the American way of life is established — be it Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction or the MS-13 gang members infiltrating our borders and raping and pillaging a path across our country — and an extreme solution is proposed to deal with it, like invading Iraq or throwing all border crossers into detention facilities. Never mind that there were no WMDs, or the detainees at the border are families fleeing gang violence; we got sold a “problem” and then, in a state of heightened tension (an All Is Lost moment), bought the proposed solution (from the very people who either manufactured the crisis or manipulated it to serve their agenda). Some of our worst policies, like the Patriot Act (what “conservative pundit” Stephen Colbert once praised as “our single most important piece of hastily written, fear-based legislation”), were sold to us via the Aristotelian story arc. Hence the reason, whether we’re consciously aware of it or not, we don’t trust storytellers anymore. And postnarrative fiction is appealing because it doesn’t do what the three-act model has always done — lead us down a single path (Why did the chicken cross the road?) with no option but to follow it to its inevitable conclusion (To get to the other side).
That’s the thing: Story is everywhere. And the kinds of fictions we gravitate to are very much a reflection of the way narrative has been abused in other venues, like politics and advertising. We no longer want to be told: Here’s the problem… X-Y-Z will happen if we don’t intervene… so this is the solution. That’s the old way of seeing the world: complication, rising action, resolution. Now we want an open range of choices, which is what postnarrative fiction offers. But as Rushkoff suggests, maybe someday “we will start to ache again for these more prescriptive narratives and, hopefully, turn to trustworthy storytellers to do it.”
>A threat to the American way of life is established … and an extreme solution is proposed to deal with it,
>Here’s the problem… X-Y-Z will happen if we don’t intervene… so this is the solution
I’m listening to the audiobook The March of Folly: From Troy to Viet Nam, by Barbara Tuchman. According to her, that is EXACTLY the story that got the US stuck in the Viet Nam war. Substitute “British” for “American”, and you have the story that led to England losing the colonies in 1776
With his Star Wars prequel trilogy, George Lucas set out to dramatize that very thing: Palpatine manufactures a crisis that puts him in a position of power; once there, he makes the case for emergency powers which he uses to assemble a special army to deal with a Separatist revolt — one he secretly orchestrated — and then overthrows the Republic with those very troops! If you can look past some of the questionable storytelling choices and Anakin’s ham-fisted character arc (not to mention some terrible acting and dialogue), there’s a pretty fascinating political melodrama underpinning the prequels. Not all of it works, but, hey — at least Lucas (unlike his successors) tried something different; at least he took inspiration from something other than the previous Star Wars movies.
Nice point, Sean. I’m not a huge fan of episodes 1-3, especially 3 (Annakin’s moral character degrades far too fast to be believable), but the series did make some poignant political statements. 🙂
As an artist who’s been heavily influenced by George Lucas, there’s so much I could say about the prequels… but given that there’s so much that’s already been said elsewhere, what’s the point? I do find it fascinating that the prequels are being reappraised — and even appreciated, academically if not always emotionally — in light of what some deem Disney’s misguided and/or failed attempt to restore luster to a beloved if somewhat battered brand.
In the ’70s and ’80s, Lucas innovated a new form of mythopoeic filmmaking — with Star Wars and Indiana Jones — by looking to the Republic serials of the ’30s and ’40s for inspiration. Later, in the ’90s and ’00s, when he produced prequels to those two franchises, he drew influence less from his passion for cinema and comparative mythology than his interest in world history and geopolitics. The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles mostly dramatized Indy’s adventures as a teenage soldier in World War I. (I wrote about the “Ireland, April 1916” episode in my St. Patty’s Day post.) Given your interest in that era, Cathleen, you may want to check it out. The series is available on DVD in three volumes under the title The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones; the second set, The War Years, deals with all the Great War intrigue, from the Somme to Verdun to the Red Baron to the Russian Revolution. (The first volume has eight-year-old Indy touring the world with his father — it’s cute but inessential — and the third deals with the postwar/college period of his life.) Both prequel series, to Star Wars and Indy, were less popular than the film trilogies they were based on, but, hey — at least Lucas was trying to branch out artistically and intellectually. That alone is worth acknowledging as we reevaluate his oeuvre.
I agree, Sean. When you try something different, some people will be upset because the story experience isn’t what they expected. OTOH, if you keep doing the same thing, the story gets too predictable. We’ve all got to search for our sweet spot between those extremes. 🙂
Indeed, Cathleen. And what makes artistic experimentation all the more challenging with a hugely successful brand like Star Wars is that it doesn’t really belong to the person who created it… it kind of belongs to the culture, to all of us. It captured our imaginations so completely that it inspired each of us to envision our own “further adventures”…
Ultimately, Lucas (who’d built an enviably successful career doing things his way, despite the creative and financial risks his earliest projects posed) underestimated just how entitled his fans were — that they weren’t going to let him stray too far from the formula they were comfortable with. He wasn’t really free to experiment with his creation, for good or ill, the way he had been on A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. So the franchise was sold and turned over to other filmmakers under the assumption that their efforts might be more warmly received — that those who grown up with the series ultimately knew what was better for it than the artist who’d created it — but that hasn’t exactly worked out to plan, either. A franchise like Star Wars carries too much cultural baggage, I think; I certainly wouldn’t want the pressure of having to write one of those movies. (Not that anyone’s asking!) New projects — ones of our own creation — allow for a far greater degree of creative potential; they don’t carry the burden of expectation.
>If movie-making IS your thing
https://nevalalee.wordpress.com/2018/08/25/the-pencil-and-paper-level/
Indeed — I second that Kubrick quote. And I think it applies to any pursuit that interests you: Get out there and do it. Studying a discipline can become a form of procrastination, and you learn more anyway from practical experience. During the summer between high school and college, I made a feature-length sequel to The Lost Boys that taught me more about the process of filmmaking than the four years of formal cinema studies that followed! My Lost Boys II saga is actually a pretty fascinating (and hilarious) one that deserves its own blog post, but I touched upon it a little bit in “Signals in the Noise.”
This link seems appropriate:
What Really Happens After the Apocalypse
https://www.tor.com/2018/11/14/what-really-happens-after-the-apocalypse/
Thought-provoking piece, Dave. Thank you for providing a link to it.
To expound on Ms. Martine’s point: Given that we are, in a way, actually in something of an apocalyptic period — our in-progress ecological transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene, on account of anthropogenic climate change — I think writers/artists have a responsibility to provide a new kind of apocalyptic fiction that serves as a model for how civilized cooperation might continue, even prosper, despite existentially challenging/threatening disruptions to the social order owed to grand-scale environmental catastrophe, pathogenic outbreak (one of the consequences of a warming world, to be certain), or any combination thereof. One might even look at this as a creative opportunity — to reinvent the genre for a world in need of reinvention itself (a topic I’ll be discussing in far more detail in my forthcoming year-end blog post).
The dystopian fiction of the eighties — Mad Max and The Terminator, for instance — was a reflection of our nuclear nightmares fueled by the Cold War. Today’s postapocalyptic fantasies — most notably The Walking Dead — is much more about our yearning for a back-to-basics existence, though that subtextual thematic has been muddied as that long-in-the-tooth series has succumbed to creative fatigue, mining conflict from contrived scenarios that pit one faction of survivors against another for ill-defined reasons, and devolving into a relentlessly nihilistic, deeply unpleasant, and altogether meaningless narrative experience in the process. Imagine if we reclaimed the genre and reconceptualized it as a means for coming to terms with our place in the Anthropocene, thereby making it both exciting and relevant again?
To that end, there is a subgenre called “cli-fi,” but it hasn’t yet, to my knowledge, produced a work popular and/or influential enough to really define it. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised if one emerges in the next decade…
And now we’re seeing something like that play out in the real world
In a forthcoming post, I’m going to talk a bit about how Hollywood has thus far failed — miserably — to incorporate environmental themes into commercial cinema/television, and I’ll be drawing from a few recent examples of books/movies/television that have actually managed to be prosocial and anti-dystopian despite the entertainment industry’s conservative proclivities. (Expect that post sometime next week.)
I know I just posted a post from Bogleech’s Tumblr…
But there is no way I could NOT post this here
I’d quote from it, but there’s too much worth quoting
https://bogleech.tumblr.com/post/713935223834001408/hate-how-all-these-apocalyptic-films-show-society
Hear, hear! I second every word of this rant! Thanks for sharing it, Dell!
With respect to this blog’s intellectual evolution, “Changing the Narrative” is a fascinating post as I appraise it now. It clearly represents the precise moment in which I became less concerned with matters of pure narrative craft, and much keener on messaging — the responsibilities we have, if any, as storytellers. I posted this particular essay two months before I trained to be an environmental activist under Vice President Gore. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, it was Mr. Gore who introduced me to the concept of moral imagination: how getting a handle on the climate crisis would mean more than just drawing down carbon emissions at speed and scale, but expanding our very sense of what a post-carbon future should look like — a more just and sustainable world for all — and then actualizing that reality through deliberate, sensible choices.
That got me thinking about how, as screenwriters, we are encouraged to develop our commercial imagination, but without consideration for — and often at the very expense of — our moral imagination. Once I understood “socially conscious” storytelling in those eye-opening terms — morally imaginative storytelling — the blog branched off in a new direction, didn’t it? It’s interesting, at least to me, to appreciate how this post represents the first tentative steps I was taking down that more conscientious path. I was wrestling with an intellectual notion, and it was Mr. Gore who helped me to bring it all into focus.
In the years that followed, I would expand my criticisms of post-apocalyptic fiction and extrajudicial vigilantes and heroic policemen and self-righteous, solitary heroes and violent antiheroes into full-length treatises of their own, but “Changing the Narrative” was my first scratch at that itch, I suppose.
I can’t say anything more profound about the post-apocalyptic genre than expressed in the excerpt you provided, Dell, and I already covered this ground extensively in my book review of Blood, Sweat & Chrome for anyone who hasn’t yet read it, but I will say that not all dystopian fiction is pure libertarian wish-fulfillment à la The Walking Dead and Mad Max and Escape from L.A., etc. Dystopian stories written with moral imagination — such as Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, Parable of the Sower — are what The Postman author David Brin describes as “self-preventing prophecies,” and they are of a noble pedigree. For more on that subject, I refer you to Brin’s article “Our Favorite Cliché: A World Filled With Idiots.”
I recently watched the HBO Max miniseries Station Eleven, which deftly avoids all of those pernicious tropes that The Walking Dead and Mad Max revel in. (I have not watched The Last of Us, so I can’t speak to that one. If you’ve seen it, I’d be curious to get your take.) In no way cynical or exploitative, Station Eleven is the anti–Walking Dead; it explores the difficult challenges inherent in starting civilization over from scratch, but without assuming those lucky enough to survive would devolve overnight into willfully violent, self-serving dicks. People are more complicated than that. The Walking Dead, by contrast, is a great example of what we were discussing just yesterday: that no-talent hacks like Robert Kirkman don’t have the maturity or perspicacity to understand the distinction between dark and deep.
So, this is interesting. I stumbled upon this recent op-ed from the New York Times called “‘The Last of Us’ Is a Very Conservative Show. Really.” Full disclosure: I haven’t watched The Last of Us, partly because I’ve never played the videogame (I’m not a gamer), but mostly because I have an immedicable case of dystopia fatigue. I just don’t give a shit about these kinds of series right now, and very much doubt I ever will again.
The article not only speaks to the fact that these stories are utter libertarian wish-fulfilment fantasies, but it makes a point I’ve been saying for a while: that conservatives hate Hollywood, because the people who make movies by-and-large self-identify as liberals and/or support Democratic candidates — and yet most commercial entertainment is embedded with deeply conservative values! Conservative fanboys flip their shit when a beloved multimedia franchise incorporates LGBTQ themes, or switches a character’s ethnicity from white to Black, but for the most part these stories propagate the same old conservative and/or patriarchal values! Some excerpts (with spoilers):
Right — exactly: Take the fuckin’ win, guys! Once again, Hollywood is preaching the “good word,” at least as far as the right wing defines it, and yet they’re too blinded with anti-woke rage to see that these shows don’t seek to expose conservative viewers to progressive values, but rather indoctrinate liberals to conservative values. Even Goldberg openly admits she enjoys the show! Years ago, I had a chance to meet Javier Grillo-Marxuach, TV writer for Charmed and Lost (among others), and he said to me that when he’s watching 24, he’s so entertained that he completely forgets that he’s a liberal — that all the values he holds dear are suspended for that hour of real-time, white-knuckle action. After all:
In her op-ed, Goldberg links to a 2015 article by conservative columnist David French called “In the Zombie World, Only the Conservative Survive”:
I completely concur with the assessment, but, unlike French, I don’t see this as a “conflict between experience and politics,” as though liberal/progressive politics are some fairytale illusion to which we’ve subscribed in defiance of what our eyes see and our ears hear. Rather, stories require the willing suspension of disbelief on the part of the audience, but that can also induce a state of suspended critical thinking, as well. Superhero stories like The Dark Knight — and, for that matter, 24 — require us to suspend our disbelief in order to be spellbound by the narrative. Okay — no problem. But if the story succeeds in entertaining us — and The Dark Knight and 24 and The X-Files and The Walking Dead and Star Wars are nothing if not supremely effective and enjoyable pieces of entertainment — we’re predisposed to view them favorably (read: uncritically) because of what we’ve received in return for our money, time, and attention.
But if, as politically committed liberals, we were to earnestly interrogate the sociocultural and/or -political values embedded in those stories, we’d be compelled to concede they are some really noxious pieces of propaganda. That sort of critical analysis is what this blog does. It’s what Mythcreants does. It’s what sci-fi author David Brin does.
Do I think Robert Kirkman has an explicit libertarian agenda? I doubt it. Rather, I suspect, like most commercial storytellers, his is an abject failure of moral imagination. He’s regurgitating the same values, the same narrative tropes, he himself has spent a lifetime consuming. When French suggests “Perhaps it’s time for a bit of self-reflection from liberal zombie fans” — and this goes for Mad Max fans and superhero fans and Buffy fans, too — he’s hoping that such introspection will ultimately inspire us to embrace our inner conservative. I absolutely echo French’s call to action… but my hope is that liberal storytellers will instead start telling more morally imaginative stories like Ted Lasso, The Orville, The Good Place, and Abbott Elementary (despite the fact that I wish Abbott weren’t a mockumentary, because it doesn’t remotely understand the rules of the genre… but that’s an argument for another day).
To that end, I’ll be publishing a new blog post later this month — to coincide with the start of summer — about Hollywood’s hero-worship of the automobile. And you can bet we’ll be interrogating the values encoded in some of the most beloved movies and media franchises of the past half century…
I’m woke as hell
But I think my muse is MAGA
Seriously, I’ve come up w/ many “good” ideas I have to reject because they’re reprehensible
I mean, I just came up w/ a group of superpowered people working for a sheriff in the Old West. There is no way this won’t be pro-fascist, no matter how hard I try. The nicer and better and more moral I make the sheriff, the more pro-fascist the story becomes!
I wanna find a hard-right Republican who keeps coming up w/ stories about collective action, and trade muses!
After I left Hollywood, I spent a few years adapting a spec screenplay I’d written — called Escape from Rikers Island — as my first novel. It’s the urban-horror story of an unarmed NYPD officer who is forced to team up with a dozen violent gangbangers — that he put behind bars — when they find themselves under lockdown at the sprawling detention center during an epidemic that mutates the inmate population into feral, cannibalistic savages. (I’ve alluded to this project in other posts.)
The original script put a ton of heat on me in Hollywood — I got so many meetings and assignment opportunities off that spec — and I was even prouder of the novel, which was a much richer treatment of the same story. But during the George Floyd protests, I had nothing short of an awakening — which inspired my essay “Forget It, Jake, It’s Tinseltown” — and I could no longer condone the glorification of the “hero detective” archetype. Even though EFRI is embedded with my progressive values — it’s critical of policies like Broken Windows and the dehumanizing practice of mass incarceration — I just couldn’t stomach the thought of putting another “solitary hero cop” story out in the world. (To say nothing of the fact that there’s an actual ongoing humanitarian crisis happening at Rikers, and it no longer felt ethical to me to exploit that setting for a genre story.)
So, that manuscript will forever remain “in the drawer.” I don’t regret it. I started work on that project in, I believe, 2010, when I was actively developing my commercial imagination — under the guidance of my managers and with the encouragement of my writers group — with little conscious regard for my moral imagination. That came later. As I mentioned in a previous comment, “Changing the Narrative” marks my first step into the waters of socially conscious storytelling; my creative approach — to say nothing of my worldview in general — has radically evolved in the five years since this was published. Developing my moral imagination has made me a much better writer — both an author and essayist. I have several pieces of fiction I hope to start publishing in 2024, and all of them have been carefully scrutinized for troublesome tropes and unintentionally questionable messaging. They are written with as much moral imagination as I can muster.
Now, while I strenuously encourage storytellers to recognize the dangers of underthinking the subtextual messaging in their work — for instance, I admire the spunky creative spirit and mythic ambitions of Robert Rodriguez’s Desperado movies even while I acknowledge he unconsciously incorporates several morally dubious narrative tropes — overthinking carries some creative pitfalls, as well. Creativity and emotional truthfulness can be retarded if the storyteller frets over which aspects of their story might be culturally insensitive or offensive, which elements may not pass the latest cultural “purity test.”
As I’ve mentioned, I’m currently writing a novel adaptation of my essay “The Lost Boys of the Bronx.” This is a story about three 17-year-old boys in 1994. Now, while none of these kids are meanspirited or cruel, and there’s nothing in the story I would in any way consider culturally or thematically exploitative, the fact remains teenagers in the 1990s occasionally invoked terminology — with particular respect to mental faculties and sexual orientation — that would by today’s standards be considered, shall we say, insensitive. None of the three of us utter those words today, and they were never used as slurs back in the day — merely benign adjectives — but the novel’s dialogue reflects the way we spoke at that time. I’m not going to have Gen X kids speak in the more measured language of Gen Z kids, because that’s not truthful. I’m going to trust the reader to understand, given the context in which some of that language is used and the time period during which the story is set, that the dialogue is not meant to be intentionally provocative, merely reflective of a particular formative experience. And I in no way view that as an abdication of my own code of moral creativity.
For all of Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s executional shortcomings, the core concept was conceived with inspiring moral imagination: It was, as is well understood now, an attempt to subvert the cliché of the helpless blonde girl who’s always the first to die in a horror movie. There’s a lot of creative inspiration to be found in, as my old mentor used to say, taking the cliché and throwing it away. (Screenwriter Kevin Williamson created an equally successful horror franchise by subverting the same trope that inspired Buffy.)
And certainly Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation, for as progressive as both shows were in their respective eras, for as much as each sought to challenge the conventional precepts of their day, occasionally reflected the myopic cultural assumptions of the time. Neither series was morally immaculate, merely morally imaginative. (Same goes for The Orville.) So, that’s my advice: exercise moral imagination, let it guide you creatively, and tell stories with the intent to entertain and enlighten, not to pass someone else’s of-the-moment purity test.