Story Will Not Save Us
And in fact it may, in its current form, be standing in our way
This past weekend Tiff and I went to Riviera Maya to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary at an all-inclusive resort. It was a blissful and, in its way, quite productive and refining four days (more on that at a future date perhaps) that also gave me a lot of time to ponder over some things free of the constant (and beautiful) interjections from two children that we are ever subject to back home. In particular, it gave me time to further clarify some stray thoughts that I’ve been turning around in my head for quite a while regarding story and its place in modern culture and society.
What really brought this all to the fore was the plane ride down. I decided to watch Saturday Night because it felt like perfect plane viewing - low stakes, and a title I was interested in but felt no real qualms about experiencing in a less-than-optimal setting. While the film is compellingly directed and well-enough acted - everyone mostly stays on the right side of imitation, which is especially notable considering that there isn’t a single character with any more depth than a smudge of cocaine on a dressing room table - I found its distortion of reality, in particular the way that it imposed a patently artificial narrative (with all of the manufactured plot points that requires) onto the story of such a revolutionary, counter-cultural moment in American television history to be pretty galling. It goes beyond the fact that in this particular case the real story, in all its chaotic shapelessness, is more interesting than the fictionalized interpretation; it speaks to the degree to which the calcification of narrative tropes has not only flattened out cinematic storytelling into one homogenous glob of incident delivery, but also fashioned it into a tool of the establishment that exists to further impose a bourgeois way of seeing the world. It codifies not only narrative tropes but accepted wisdom, and in the case of Saturday Night it completes the process through which a show that was genuinely new and transgressive in its time has become canonized and safe, an institution that protects and enshrines corporate interests and at times coddles and legitimizes literal fascists.
I think about story a lot as a writer, a teacher, a reader, and a viewer. I have a deep appreciation for narrative as not only a method of communication, but as a vital component of human evolution. It is story that lifted us out of the mud and made us look to the heavens. Story was the very first method we had for storing and retrieving information. Everything we know about ancient cultures we know because of the stories they passed down - we have a collected and aggregated Greek mythology not because of scriptures but because of works like The Odyssey. But if one of the functions of narrative within the overall project of human development and societal evolution is to not only reflect our ideas of ourselves but to also push us forward, then it becomes necessary to throw a wrench in the works every once in a while. Breaking the rules, rethinking the form, is not only fun but essential - the only way it’s going to continue to move forward and remain relevant is if we periodically tear it apart. That’s how we learn what still works, and what needs to be changed or adjusted, but it’s also how we move forward as a people. If we keep telling the same stories in the same way, then not only will cinema as an artform stagnate (and cinema as a medium and an industry wither on the vine of irrelevance), but we will stagnate as a culture and as a species.
In order to continue to serve its vital evolutionary function, story needs to not only evolve with us but ahead of and in opposition to us in ways that invite us to grapple and contend with it, and in some cases force us to keep up with it. It also needs to mystify and confuse us, because otherwise the only function it serves is to placate. Because the problem with enshrining beliefs and narratives is that we then get to a point where we start to repeat them, and the more we do so the more they lose not only their power but their ability to guide our cultural evolution, to the point that they actually start doing the opposite and hold us perpetually in the same place. To insist on sameness, and to resist change and growth, is the basis not only of fundamentalism but of fascism.
Another thing to keep in mind is that so many of the accepted rules of storytelling that anyone in this country cherishes or is familiar with are not only specific to western thought and influence, but were also developed under the umbrella of a film industry that is entirely dedicated to commerce, which means that every rule in place is first and foremost built around commercial considerations. Cinematic storytelling has a power to move, to educate, and enrich that is perhaps beyond any other dramatic medium, but cinema did not begin as a storytelling medium. The reason it became one is because it was a way to draw audiences in, which meant that it was a way for the people making and exhibiting the films to make money. Filmic narrative was adopted not for its merit as an enabler of artistic expression - though that it is still certainly a purpose it serves - but because it was an essential part of organizing production along an industrial model similar to the production of cars.
So while it may not seem like that big of a deal that a movie about the beginnings of Saturday Night Live re-writes history so that Andy Kaufman delivers a test run of the Mighty Mouse bit in order to melt the hearts of crusty Teamsters and evil studio execs, reducing them to fits of laughter and inspiring everyone to unite under common purpose, it becomes fairly insidious in the way it neutralizes Kaufman’s confrontational style and makes him a universally-accepted force even in his own time. It makes him a cog in a machine that was always meant to exist just the way it exists. Similarly, a scene in which Gilda Radner and John Belushi get a private conversation between themselves that more or less amounts to “Gee it’s too bad we’ll be dead soon, isn’t it?” lends a retroactive sense of import to their early passings, here seen as inevitable, that robs each of them of their unique tragedies; to suggest that their deaths are somehow pre-ordained and part of an overall order is not just insulting in its artificiality but also speaks against the inherent chaos and messiness of life. It robs their deaths of the meaning of their senselessness rather than imbuing them with same.
We live in an increasingly chaotic and unstable world, and while I deeply understand the need for our stories to give us a missing sense of order, I also fear that this is an approach that invites complacency rather than necessary action. We need narratives that confront this lack of stability and order not only in their content but in their very shape and form. Part of why I cherish Twin Peaks: The Return, and laud it as perhaps this century’s greatest piece of dramatic art, is because it fulfills this rubric - 18 hours of searching that results only in further obfuscation, a withholding of the gratification that was denied its audience for 25 years left and left once again not just unfulfilled but further stymied, leaving us in a state of eternal yet intentional irresolution.
I’ve talked about the Absurdists a lot in this space, but their value lies in the fact that they were reacting to the world they lived in and communicating the experience of trying to exist in such a world not just through the stories they told but in how they told them. They were facing a new-to-them reality in which all of the institutions around them were failing, and all of the development and advancement of history had led to two world wars and the new potential with the dawn of the atomic age for human beings to destroy themselves to a degree never thought imaginable, and they were thinking that is this was what the accepted ways have brought us to, then the only way forward was to throw them out.
I would argue we’re not at that point again because we are if anything actually well past it. We turned away from their example once, and look where that’s gotten us. When was the last time we got something that felt genuinely revolutionary in form? That even tried to point an alternate way forward? Perhaps the aforementioned Peaks, which holds another lesson for us in its nigh-impenetrable idiosyncrasy.
Because beyond the aesthetic, formal, or social implications of narrative stagnation and suppuration, we live in an age in which we have more people of different identities and backgrounds who are able to create and share stories on a mass scale than ever before, and if we keep forcing them all into the same molds, not only will everything start to homogenize, but those identities and those viewpoints will be suppressed and, in the long run, filtered out of the cultural imagination. In an era in which our very government is seeking to suppress, dispose of, and erase anybody who is in any way an “other,” the only moral choice is to encourage those unique, individual, and idiosyncratic voices to be as true as possible to their own perspective and experience of the world.
It’s how we learn, connect, and grow. And as a benefit, it’s how we get more varied and interesting work. The answer is NOT to transmute everything into the same general shape, or to look to the past and the old ways for guidance, but to break free of those old ways of thinking and experiencing the world.
To move ever forward.
-cs
Postscript
I have long been considering ways for readers to show their support for this newsletter. Rather than create paid subscriptions (I certainly understand the sometimes oppressive nature of the notion of yet another in-perpetuity payment, especially in such economically uncertain times), I have opted to provide a link to buy me a coffee. This means that anyone who feels so led can send a few bucks if they like a particular piece, or just want to show some support or appreciation in general. This is, I cannot stress enough, completely optional.