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.
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