I thought I’d said everything I had to say about Los Angeles last winter. Should’ve known Hollywood would demand a sequel.
Even at the height of its considerable cultural influence, I never much cared for Sex and the City—for a very simple reason: I didn’t in any way recognize the New York it depicted.
As someone who’d grown up there, Sex seemed like a postfeminist fantasy of the city as a bastion of neoliberal materialism, conjured by someone who’d never actually been to New York or knew so much as the first thing about it. It certainly didn’t reflect the experience of any working-class New Yorkers I knew.
(It would seem the more things change, the more they stay the same: The recent SATC revival series, And Just Like That…, is reported to be full of unintentionally cringe-inducing scenes of the gals apparently interacting with Black women for the first time in their lives. Sounds on-brand.)
But this isn’t a retroactive reappraisal of a 1990s pop-cultural pacesetter—those have been exhaustively conducted elsewhere of late—merely an acknowledgment that the impression the series made on the generation of (largely) female Millennials who adored it is undeniable, legions of whom relocated to New York in early adulthood to have the full Sex and the City experience, and who, in turn, in many ways remade the city in Carrie Bradshaw’s image, for better or worse.
I can’t say as I blame those folks, really. That they were sold a load of shit isn’t their fault. Here in New York, we were just as susceptible to Hollywood’s greener-grass illusions of elsewhere. As a student in the 1990s, the Los Angeles of Beverly Hills, 90210 (1990–2000) and Baywatch (1989–2001), of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) and Clueless (1995), seemed like a fun-in-the-sun teenage paradise in stark contrast with the socially restrictive experience of my all-boys high school in the Bronx, where the only thing that ever passed for excitement were spontaneous gang beatings at the bus stop on Fordham Road.
The high-school experience depicted on “Beverly Hills, 90210” is one I think we can all relate to
The sunny schoolyards and neon-lit nighttime streets of L.A. carried the promise of good times, the kind that seemed altogether out of reach for me and my friends. The appeal of what California had to offer was so intoxicating, in fact, my two best pals and I spent an entire summer in the mid-’90s trying to make the streets of the Bronx look like Santa Cruz—a place none of us had ever been—for an amateur sequel to The Lost Boys, the ’80s cult classic about a coven of adolescent vampires who’ve (wisely) opted to spend eternity on the boardwalk. That notion unquestionably took hold of my impressionable imagination—it made me want to be a part of that culture, and tell those kinds of stories.
Accordingly, it’s fair to say it wasn’t merely the movie business that brought me to Los Angeles in my early twenties as an aspiring screenwriter, but arguably the romantic impressions of California itself imprinted upon my psyche by all those movies and TV series on which I came of age. Yet for the two decades I lived there, the city I’d always imagined L.A. to be—a place full of golden possibilities, as low-key as New York was high-strung—wasn’t the one I experienced. Not really. Not until last month, anyway.
Kyle Buchanan’s Blood, Sweat & Chrome, published by William Morrow in February, chronicles the not-to-be-believed making of George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) from conception to release through interviews with its cast and crew, and celebrates the inspiring creative imagination of the filmmakers, who defied the odds to create a contemporary classic—a movie as singularly visceral as it is stunningly visual.
But much like the nonstop action in the movie itself, the adulation expressed in the book never pauses to interrogate Miller and company’s moral imagination. Let’s fix that, shall we?
Yet my informal experiment has been about much more than seeing if some old favorites still hold up (and, by and large, they do); it’s about understanding why they worked in the first place—and what storytelling lessons might be learned from an era in which movies existed for their own sake, as complete narratives unto themselves rather than ephemeral extensions of some billion-dollar, corporately superintended brand.
In an entertainment landscape across which there is so much content, most of it deceptively devoid of coherence or meaning—a transmedia morass I’ve come to call the Multiverse of Madness—the secret to studying narrativity isn’t to watch more but rather less. To consume fewer movies and TV shows, but to watch them more selectively and mindfully. Pick a few classics and scrutinize them until you know them backwards and forwards.
In college, I spent an entire semester analyzing Citizen Kane (1941), from reading multiple drafts of its screenplay to watching it all the way through with the volume turned down just to appreciate its unconventional cinematography. That’s how you learn how stories work: Study one or two movies/novels per year… but study the shit out of them. Watch less, but do it far more attentively.
Tom Hardy as Max Rockatansky in “Mad Max: Fury Road,” the subject of “Blood, Sweat & Chrome”
That is, admittedly, a counterintuitive mindset in our Digital Age of automatic and accelerating behaviors, whereby post-credit scenes preemptively gin up anticipation for the next movie (often through homework assignments) before we’ve had a chance to digest the current one, and the autoplay feature of most streaming services encourages and enables mindless TV binge-watching.
But the quarantine, unwelcome though it may have been, did offer a pause button of sorts, and we are only now beginning to see some of the ways in which folks exploited the rare opportunity to slow down, to go deep, that it offered. One such project to emerge from that period of thoughtful reflection is entertainment journalist Kyle Buchanan’s recently published nonfiction book Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of “Mad Max: Fury Road”:
In April 2020, as the pandemic swept the planet and the movie-release calendar fell apart, I began writing an oral history of Mad Max: Fury Road for the New York Times. Without any new titles to cover, why not dive deeply into a modern classic on the verge of its fifth anniversary?
Every rewatch over those five years had confirmed to me that Fury Road is one of the all-time cinematic greats, an action movie with so much going on thematically that there’d be no shortage of things to talk about. I had also heard incredible rumors about the film’s wild making, the sort of stories that you can only tell on the record once the dust has long settled.
Kyle Buchanan, Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of “Mad Max: Fury Road” (New York: William Morrow, 2022), 337
A movie two decades in the making, Fury Road, the belated follow-up to writer/director George Miller’s dystopian action-film trilogy Mad Max (1979, 1981, 1985) starring a then-unknown Mel Gibson as a wanderer in the wasteland—the Road Warrior—began its long journey to the screen as a proposed television series in 1995 when Miller won back the rights to the franchise from Warner Bros. as part of a settlement from a breach-of-contract suit he’d filed over having been fired from Contact (1997).
Eventually inspired to do another feature instead—“What if there was a Mad Max movie that was one long chase,” Miller pondered, “and the MacGuffin was human?” (ibid., 31)—the ensuing production was plagued with one near-terminal roadblock after another. The behind-the-scenes story told in Blood, Sweat & Chrome is as thrilling, in its own way, as that of Mad Max: Fury Road itself.
Movies and TV shows—and this includes both your favorites and mine—mostly exist to remind us that ours is a man’s world. Popular entertainment in general, regardless of medium or genre or even the noble intentions of the storytellers, is almost invariably patriarchal propaganda. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Since at least as far back as the adventures of Odysseus, men have used fantasy narratives to contextualize ourselves as the solitary heroic protagonist of the world around us—a world that would be appreciably better off if only our judgment weren’t questioned or our actions thwarted by those of inferior hearts and minds. In the Book of Genesis, God creates man from the dust, gives him dominion over the Earth, then provides him with a “helper”—Eve—who proves considerably less than helpful when she defiantly feeds from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and spoils Paradise for everyone.
Such are the stories we’ve been hearing for literally thousands of years, and the reality we live in today is very much shaped by the presumption of patriarchy they propagandize. In 1949, this way of telling stories—the Hero’s Journey—was codified by comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and adopted by Hollywood as the blueprint for the blockbuster. From our Westerns (Dances with Wolves) to our policiers (Dirty Harry) to our space operas (Star Wars) to our spy thrillers (James Bond) to our teen comedies (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) to our superhero universes (Iron Man) to our mob dramas (The Sopranos) to our sitcoms (Two and a Half Men), it’s a man’s world, baby—with the rest of you there to either support us or (foolishly) stand in our way.
It’s not that there’s anything inherently wrong with escapist entertainment. It isn’t fantasy the genre that’s the problem, or even the Hero’s Journey story model, but rather the near-universal underlying patterns and motifs in our popular fictions that have unconsciously supported—that have surreptitiously sold us—the fantasy of patriarchal hegemony. As such, white men in particular have been conditioned by these cultural narratives to see ourselves as the central heroic figure in the Epic of Me—even our storytellers themselves:
While accepting the award for Outstanding Directing for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie for his work on The Queen’s Gambit, Scott Frank brushed off the “get off the stage” music not once but three times, reading a prepared speech from two full-length pages he’d shoved into his pocket and blowing past his allotted 45 seconds to speak for three minutes and 28 seconds—more than four and a half times as long as he was supposed to.
Viewers couldn’t have asked for a more perfect embodiment of white male privilege and entitlement as a visibly annoyed Frank reacted to the orchestra’s attempts to play him off by saying, “Really? No,” and making a dismissive hand gesture. The second time they started playing, he said, “Seriously, stop the music,” again waving his hand as if he were shooing away a fly and pressing on. The third time, he insisted, “I’m almost done.” Each time, when he commanded them to stop playing the music, they actually stopped the music. Who knew it was that easy?
Whether we’re aware of them or not, men have certain expectations about how the world should work: that it should work for us. After all, God gave us, not you, dominion over all living things and natural resources on Earth. But when reality conflicts with those birthrights, we grow frustrated, and rather than questioning the stories we’ve been told about our place in the world, we tell more of the same self-mythologizing horseshit—to assure ourselves, and others, of our God-given entitlements, of our singular heroism. Consider, for example, the overwhelming popularity—ten entries and counting—of the testosterone-charged Fast & Furious franchise:
These films use the concrete landscape to assert individuality and a refusal to knuckle under to authority. With the exception of Brian and perhaps Roman, these inner-city car racers don’t want to be reintegrated into society. They race cars to gain status and money, to impress sexy women, and to defy the police—just like [celebrated American NASCAR driver] Junior Johnson and the Dukes of Hazzard. But, like the conformists and suburbanites they reject, they act like everything in nature exists to be consumed and exploited.
Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) famously makes his gang say grace before they eat, an utterly meaningless gesture since, unlike obeying the law, it costs him nothing to do so, yet it nonetheless speaks volumes about his patriarchal values. He and his crew aren’t enlightened antiheroes as they believe, merely entitled gearheads who proudly and explicitly live their lives “a quarter mile at a time,” because to think beyond that would require a sense of empathy for those outside their range of awareness, as well as compel a sober consideration for the long-term consequences of their, to put it generously, socially irresponsible behaviors.
Dom appropriates Christian iconography to assert his moral authority—pure patriarchal propaganda
(And if you’re inclined to dismiss Dom’s worldview as the patently absurd pseudophilosophy of a one-dimensional action-movie street racer—nothing worth taking seriously—it’s worth remembering that Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s operating motto is “Move fast and break things,” which sounds like exactly the sort of iconoclastic rallying cry you’d expect to hear Dom growl… until you realize the thing Zuckerberg might’ve broken while becoming the fifth wealthiest person in the world is democracy itself.)
U.S. President Joe Biden’s American Jobs Plan is the politically ambitious, morally imaginative piece of legislation we need to tackle the ever-worsening climate crisis by rebuilding our country and rebooting our economy through grand-scale public-works projects. Whether we actually get it, however, comes down to how hard we—all American citizens—are willing to fight for its full passage and implementation.
In 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic cast a floodlight on the pervasive environmental injustice, wealth disparity, infrastructural neglect, and systemic racism here in the United States, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Senator Edward Markey (D-MA) introduced a fourteen-page nonbinding resolution that prescribed a holistic approach to addressing those interconnected crises known as the Green New Deal.
Often misunderstood by the public (it was about defining the problems and establishing aggressive targets for solving them, not proposing specific policy solutions, which were meant to come later), mocked by establishment Dems (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi dismissively referred to it as the “green dream”), and knavishly mischaracterized by the right (The libs are banning hamburgers!), the Green New Deal is a straightforward-enough concept undermined by inadequate messaging from its own advocates as well as reflexive outrage from conservative media. So… let’s try this again:
The idea is a simple one: in the process of transforming the infrastructure of our societies at the speed and scale that scientists have called for, humanity has a once-in-a-century chance to fix an economic model that is failing the majority of people on multiple fronts. Because the factors that are destroying our planet are also destroying people’s quality of life in many other ways, from wage stagnation to gaping inequalities to crumbling services to the breakdown of any semblance of social cohesion. Challenging these underlying forces is an opportunity to solve several interlocking crises at once.
In tackling the climate crisis, we can create hundreds of millions of good jobs around the world, invest in the most systematically excluded communities and nations, guarantee health care and child care, and much more. The result of these transformations would be economies built both to protect and to regenerate the planet’s life support systems and to respect and sustain the people who depend on them. It would also strive for something more amorphous but equally important: at a time when we find ourselves increasingly divided into hermetically sealed information bubbles, with almost no shared assumptions about what we can trust or even what is real, a Green New Deal could instill a sense of collective, higher purpose—a set of concrete goals that we are all working toward together.
Klein makes a compelling argument in On Fire, but, alas, the strongest case for a Green New Deal was presented by the pandemic itself. And after decades of incremental steps in which, time and again, Democrats invariably ceded more legislative ground than they gained—lest they be accused of supporting the kind of Big Government programs Saint Reagan had long since poisonously reframed as unpatriotic and un-American (socialism!)—the candidates seeking the nomination for president last year found themselves jockeying for the green ribbon of Most Environmentally Visionary. Despite its bumpy rollout, the Green New Deal changed the entire political conversation. As Klein noted in 2019:
The emergence of the Green New Deal means there is now not only a political framework for meeting the [recommended carbon-drawdown] targets in the United States but also a clear (if long-shot) path to turning that framework into law. The plan is pretty straightforward: elect a strong supporter of the Green New Deal in the Democratic primaries; take the White House, the House, and the Senate in 2020; and start rolling it out on day one of the new administration (the way FDR did with the original New Deal in the famous “first 100 days,” when the newly elected president pushed fifteen major bills through Congress).
Though it seems like a lifetime ago, I opened the blog this year with a post I’d titled—with entirely unintentional and unforeseen irony—“A 2020 Vision of Hope.” In it, I discussed a number of auspicious signs that America was on the cusp of finally making a meaningful commitment to addressing the climate crisis—from regional sustainability initiatives, to Gen Z activism, to carbon pricing, to the November election. So determined was our movement, it couldn’t be derailed by even a global pandemic. Over the summer, in “What Comes Next: Lessons on Democracy and Narrative from Hamilton,” I shared my enthusiasm for the promising ambition of the Biden climate plan, a document that appeared by all evidence to be a real-time reaction to the interconnected crises of global warming, economic inequality, and systemic racism—all of which reached a boiling point this year.
There is no doubt about it: The tireless work of environmental activists over the past two years moved President-elect Biden appreciably to the left on the matter of the climate crisis. Everyone here—all of you who selflessly and compassionately allocated time and energy from your busy lives to prioritize this issue, whether by training with Vice President Gore, attending a climate-strike rally, merely dialing in to this very meeting—made a difference. President-elect Biden hears our collective voice; he shares our sense of urgency.
And though the incoming president will only go so far as to say the Green New Deal provides a “crucial framework” for meeting the challenges we face, much of the language from his campaign speeches, as well as his extensively detailed climate plan, echoes phrasing from the Green New Deal verbatim—a testament to and direct consequence of the pressure and the power of our movement. In the two years since I trained under Mr. Gore, the climate breakdown has gone from a political lightning rod to a political litmus test. All of us take a share of credit for that.
More than a thousand demonstrators from the @sunrisemvmt are now sitting in at the offices of the Dem congressional leadership demanding action on a #GreenNewDeal. These young people will spend the next seven decades living in an overheated world–they have the moral high ground. pic.twitter.com/JN2EGgte6T
Like the Green New Deal, Biden’s comprehensive climate plan, which he intends to fund by rolling back the Trump tax cuts, takes a holistic approach to solving our interconnected crises by calling for a $2 trillion accelerated investment in infrastructure, transit, the power sector, housing, agriculture, and—most crucially—environmental justice, with the bulk of those resources to be deployed during his first term. The overarching goal is to set the United States on an irreversible path to achieve net-zero emissions by no later than 2050, and, in the process, facilitate a just transition by creating millions of good-paying union jobs—yet more language adopted directly from the Green New Deal.
The election of Joseph R. Biden Jr. earlier this month offered the very thing our movie franchises and television series have denied us for two decades: catharsis.
For a writer, it turns out I may suffer from a staggering lack of imagination.
I will confess to anxiously entertaining all the apocalyptic post–Election Day scenarios contemplated by even our most sober pundits and analysts: the disillusion-fueled outrage on the left should Trump eke out a narrow Electoral College win despite losing the popular vote to Biden; or, the armed militias activated by the president in the event of his loss. Like the set of a Snake Plissken movie, store windows on Fifth Avenue and Rodeo Drive were boarded up; correspondingly, I barricaded my own front and balcony doors as I watched, sick to my stomach, an endless caravan of MAGA-bannered pickup trucks roar past my home in the liberal bastion of Los Angeles the weekend before Election Day. I girded for the possibility (if not inevitability) of social breakdown, fully aware I would not be cast in the part of uber-competent dystopian hero—the Rick Grimes or Mad Max—in that story.
What I never imagined—not once, even fleetingly—was that upon receiving official word of a Biden/Harris victory, cities across the country, and the world over, would spontaneously erupt into large-scale celebration worthy of an MGM musical. Ding-dong! The witch is dead! It was a perfectly conventional—and conventionally predictable—Hollywood ending, yet I never saw it coming.
The galaxy celebrates the death of Darth Vader
Despite all the warnings I’ve issued about the unconscious maleficent messaging in our commercial fiction—stories in which messianic saviors redeem our inept/corrupt public institutions (Star Wars and superhero sagas), armed men with badges act without even the smallest measure of accountability (action movies and police procedurals), and environmental destruction/societal collapse are not merely inevitable but preferable (Mad Max: Fury Road, The Walking Dead), because apocalypse absolves us from our burdensome civic responsibilities—this election season has exposed my own susceptibility to pop-cultural conditioning.
It wasn’t merely a spirit of doomism I nursed throughout October; it was an unchallenged assumption that the interminable Trump narrative would simply do what all our stories now do: hold us in a state of real-time presentism (“We’ll have to wait and see” and “I will keep you in suspense” are common refrains from the outgoing president) rather than arrive at definitive conclusion.
The erosion of cathartic narrativity is a subject I’ve admittedly addressed a lot here on the blog since I first published “Journey’s End” over five years ago, but it’s essential to understanding how the Trump presidency came to be, and why we all felt such an atavistic sense of relief when it reached an end on November 7.
Around the turn of the millennium, storytellers mostly abandoned the Aristotelian narrative arc—with its rising tension, climax, and catharsis—in favor of “storyless” fiction with either a satirical-deconstructionist agenda (Family Guy, Community) or to emulate the kind of open-ended worldbuilding previously the exclusive province of tabletop RPGs and videogames (Game of Thrones, Westworld).
On the twenty-fifth anniversary of Christopher Vogler’s industry-standard screenwriting instructional The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, here’s an in-depth look at why the time-honored storytelling principles it propounds are existentially endangered in our postnarrative world… and why they’re needed now more than ever.
In The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell identified the “monomyth”—the universal narrative patterns and Jungian psychological archetypes that provide the shape, structure, and emotional resonance of virtually every story in the Western literary canon.
As it’s more commonly known, this is the “Hero’s Journey,” in which the status quo is disrupted, sending our protagonist on a perilous adventure—physically or emotionally or both—through a funhouse-mirror distortion of their everyday reality (think Marty McFly in 1950s Hill Valley, Dorothy in Oz) in which they encounter Mentors, Shadows, Allies, and Tricksters throughout a series of escalating challenges, culminating in a climactic test from which they finally return to the Ordinary World, ideally a bit wiser for their trouble. From the Epic of Gilgamesh to a given episode of The Big Bang Theory, the Hero’s Journey is the foundational schema of storytelling.
The stages of the Hero’s Journey
The book’s influence on the visionary young filmmakers who came of age studying it was quantum: George Lucas consciously applied Campbell’s theory to the development of Star Wars (1977), as did George Miller to Mad Max (1979), arguably transforming a pair of idiosyncratic, relatively low-budget sci-fi projects into global phenomena that are still begetting sequels over forty years later. After serving Western culture for millennia, in the waning decades of the twentieth century, the Hero’s Journey became the blueprint for the Hollywood blockbuster.
In the 1990s, a story analyst at Disney by the name of Christopher Vogler wrote and circulated a seven-page internal memo titled “A Practical Guide to The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” a screenwriter-friendly crib sheet that was notably used in the development of The Lion King (a classic Hero’s Journey if ever there was one), evolving a few years later into a full-length book of its own: The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, a twenty-fifth anniversary edition of which was published this past summer. The nearly 500-page revised volume is partitioned into four sections:
MAPPING THE JOURNEY: Here Mr. Vogler characterizes the mythic archetypes of the Hero, Mentor, Threshold Guardian, Herald, Shapeshifter, Shadow, Ally, and Trickster.
STAGES OF THE JOURNEY: Each monomythic “beat”—The Call to Adventure, Crossing the First Threshold, Approach to the Inmost Cave, etc.—is given thorough explanation and illustration.
LOOKING BACK ON THE JOURNEY: Using the tools he teaches, Mr. Vogler provides comprehensive analyses of Titanic, Pulp Fiction, The Lion King, The Shape of Water, and Lucas’ six-part Star Wars saga.
THE REST OF THE STORY: ADDITIONAL TOOLS FOR MASTERING THE CRAFT: The appendices are a series of essays on the history, nature, and cultural dynamics of the art and craft of storytelling. After 350 pages of practical technique, Mr. Vogler earns the privilege of indulging a bit of literary theory here, and his insights are fascinating. He devotes an entire chapter to the subject of catharsis, “comparing the emotional effect of a drama with the way the body rids itself of toxins and impurities” (Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, 4th ed. [Studio City, California: Michael Wiese Productions, 2020], 420). Stories, in that sense, are medicinal; their alchemical compounds have healing properties—more on this point later.
Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey codifies mythic structure for contemporary storytellers, demonstrating its form, function, and versatility through more accessible terminology than Campbell’s densely academic nomenclature, and by drawing on examples from cinematic touchstones familiar to all: The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, Titanic, etc. Like The Hero with a Thousand Faces before it, The Writer’s Journey has become, over the last quarter century, an essential catechism, affecting not merely its own generation of scribes (including yours truly), but the successive storytelling programs that stand on its shoulders, like Save the Cat!
Comparison of Vogler’s Hero’s Journey and Snyder’s “beat sheet”
But why is it essential? If Campbell and Vogler and Blake Snyder have simply put different labels on narrative principles we all intuitively comprehend from thousands of years of unconscious conditioning, why study them at all? Why not simply trust those precepts are already instinctive and immediately type FADE IN at the muse’s prompting?
Because just as a doctor requires an expert’s command of gross anatomy even if no two patients are exactly constitutionally alike, and an architect is expected to possess a mastery of structural engineering though every building is different, it behooves the storyteller—be them screenwriter, novelist, playwright, what have you—to consciously understand the fundamentals of the narrative arts:
The stages of the Hero’s Journey can be traced in all kinds of stories, not just those that feature “heroic” physical action and adventure. The protagonist of every story is the hero of a journey, even if the path leads only into his own mind or into the realm of relationships.
The way stations of the Hero’s Journey emerge naturally even when the writer in unaware of them, but some knowledge of this most ancient guide to storytelling is useful in identifying problems and telling better stories. Consider these twelve stages as a map of the Hero’s Journey, one of many ways to get from here to there, but one of the most flexible, durable, and dependable.
ibid., 7
I’ve read and reread previous versions of The Writer’s Journey endlessly, and I take new insight from it each time: An excellent primer for aspirants, it yields yet richer dividends for experienced writers—those that can readily appreciate it vis-à-vis their own work. Though this updated edition, which includes two brand-new essays in the appendices (“What’s the Big Deal?” and “It’s All About the Vibes, Man”), was certainly sufficient reason in its own right to revisit The Writer’s Journey, I had a more compelling motivation: I wanted to see for myself how Mr. Vogler makes a case for the type of conventional story arc he extols in the face of mounting evidence of its cultural irrelevance in our postnarrative era.
Less than three months out from arguably the most important presidential election in living memory, our democracy is in deep, deep shit.
Need we recap? Commuting Roger Stone. Gassing Lafayette Square. Suppressing the vote. Sabotaging the Postal Service. Floating the postponement—and actively undermining the credibility—of the November election. Sending federal agents to detain (read: abduct) protestors in Portland. And that’s just a topline best-of-Trump-2020 compilation.
This is America?
Let’s face it: The spirit of nihilism that animates MAGA was never about making America great again so much as it was burning the Republic to the ground. That’s what Trump’s supporters really voted for in 2016, and it’s the one big (if never quite explicit) campaign promise he might actually deliver on: reifying the very American carnage he once claimed exclusive qualification to redress. To wit: The nightly news plays like an apocalyptic bookend to the rousing founding-of-America story told in Hamilton.
Daveed Diggs, Okieriete Onaodowan, Anthony Ramos, and Lin-Manuel Miranda in “Hamilton”
While Lin-Manuel Miranda’s revolutionary masterpiece certainly challenges us to appreciate anew the value and purpose of democracy—a timely reminder if ever there was one—it somewhat less conspicuously does the same for an equally imperiled institution: narrative itself.
Hamilton has been described by its creator as “a story about America then, told by America now” (Edward Delman, “How Lin-Manuel Miranda Shapes History,”The Atlantic, September 29, 2015). But if the musical’s creative approach to its subject matter is unorthodox, its narrative structure is very much a conventional hero’s journey. (For my Save the Cat! scholars, it’s a “Real-Life Superhero” tale, and not, as some “experts” would have you believe, Golden Fleece.) The power in and of narrative is a central preoccupation of Hamilton; the show literally opens with a dramatic question posed to the audience:
How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a
Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten
Spot in the Caribbean by providence, impoverished, in squalor,
Grow up to be a hero and a scholar?
Alexander Hamilton is a man who imagines—who writes—his way out of poverty, and, in turn, “rewrote the game,” by “Poppin’ a squat on conventional wisdom”—meaning, the institutionalized “divine right of kings” narrative.
A strange question, I’ll concede, to emerge from an impassioned conversation about the transformative systemic overhauls required to our energy policy, our health care, and our economic ideology in the wake of the coronavirus—
—because what could the cartoon villain from the Avengers movies possibly have to do with any of that?
The answer, frustratingly, is: More than you may realize.
During a recent online confab with the leadership team of the San Fernando Valley Chapter of the Climate Reality Project, the discussion drifted momentarily from existential matters to televisional ones: What’s everybody been binge-watching?
Now, anyone who knows me—in person or through this blog—is peripherally aware of my immedicable disdain for movies and television. Yet… with no baseball this spring to occupy my time, I’ve been reluctantly compelled to sample quite a bit of scripted media to which I’d have otherwise turned up a nose. And, to my surprise, I find myself excited to share a handful of programming that, in my view, embodies creativity with a conscience. (We’ll get to those coveted endorsements shortly.)
The cast of “Schitt’s Creek” (2015–2020)
To that end, one of our Climate Reality Leaders recommended Schitt’s Creek: “The evolution of the self-absorbed yet well-meaning characters as they deal with the adversity that helps them discover what it really means to love is quite endearing,” my colleague said, “and I believe has left an impact on many who are out there now hoping for the world to refashion itself in that way.”
Schitt’s Creek is one of those shows that got away from me in our era of Peak TV, but I second the motion for more prescriptive fiction that both challenges us to be better—individually and collectively—as well as provides a model to do so. Hard as this may be to fathom for those born into a postnarrative world, but our popular entertainments used to reliably perform that public service. To wit: Earlier this month, this unflinching indictment of white privilege from a 1977 episode of Little House on the Prairie resurfaced on Twitter to considerable gape-mouthed astonishment:
Art as expression –
Not as market campaigns
Will still capture our imaginations
Given the same
State of integrity
It will surely help us along
Talk about advice unheeded. Consequently, our commercial entertainment is often embedded—however unconsciously—with culturally pernicious values, from glorifying vigilante justice (superhero sagas; revenge thrillers), to undermining trust in public institutions (the self-serving White Houses of Scandal and House of Cards were a far cry from the empathetic Bartlet administration), to romanticizing criminal sociopathy (the street-racing “rebels” of Fast & Furious) and—bonus!—thereby validating a mindset in which “environmental degradation is not only a given but a goal” (robin, “The Fast and Furious Films and Mad Max Fury Road,”Ecocinema, Media, and the Environment [blog], September 20, 2019)
“The good news is that the impacts of climate change are no longer deniable,” Penn State climate scientist Michael E. Mann said recently. “The bad news is that the impacts of climate change are no longer deniable.” Over the two decades preceding Dr. Mann’s good-news/bad-news pronouncement, when what reasonably seemed like a dire existential threat wasn’t quite getting the public attention it arguably merited (on account of, we later learned, orchestrated misinformation campaigns by Exxon and others), I was doing whatever I thought I could for the cause: swapping out my lightbulbs, carrying reusable grocery bags, voluntarily opting for a greater percentage of renewable energy sources from my local utility. And I looked to former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, having voted for him in 2000 and been inspired anew by An Inconvenient Truth, for direction—and certainly for hope.
So, when I decided to do more than simply recycle and make the occasional donation to a green group—when I sought to become an environmental activist—I knew instantly the organization I wanted to join: Vice President Gore’s Climate Reality Project. I applied to the Climate Reality Leadership Corps, and was trained by Mr. Gore in 2018.
Since that time, I’ve had no shortage of opportunities to participate in climate rallies hundreds of thousands strong (in Downtown L.A. and New York), take meetings with elected officials (also in both L.A. and New York), give public presentations, and directly help to bring U.S. counties—including our most populous—into the County Climate Coalition, a nationwide alliance of jurisdictions committed to upholding the standards of the Paris Accord. The Climate Reality Leadership Corps has opened a world of opportunities—of hope—for me.
Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore (Paramount Pictures)
And along the way something unexpected began to happen: Just as I had looked to Mr. Gore for hope—and still do—people in my life started looking to me for reasons to be hopeful. They’ve seen the coverage of climate change–caused catastrophes that have been (at long last) dominating the headlines, heard repeatedly about something called a “Green New Deal,” and—right here in L.A.—choked on the acrid, ember-speckled smoke literally right outside their front door. Friends and relatives have contacted me asking what can be done about climate change (a lot), or where they might move to avoid the worst effects of it (alas, we are all in the sacrifice zone now), and—most tellingly—if there’s any cause left for optimism on this crisis.
Recent Comments