Story

Our lives — indeed, our very species — has storytelling wound into our DNA. From the earliest cave drawings, man has expressed himself in terms of story.  Ancient civilizations understood that stories are vital to understanding our place in the world, so much so that they codified storytelling and found base rules that form it.  Oral histories are a part of every culture across the globe.

Stories instill moral and ethical values.  They place joy and tragedy in context.  They preserve cultures.  At their best, they deliver the secrets and meanings of life.

As Dr. Neal Baer, the longtime showrunner of Law & Order: SVU tells in my book Inside the TV Writer’s Room, humans live story on a daily basis.  What happens when your run into a friend?  He asks what you’ve been up to.  You tell a story.

What did you do today?  You relate it in the form of a story.  Doctors tell each other the story of a patient in order to diagnose her. Lawyers attempt to tell jurors a story through direct and cross-examinations, and opening and closing statements.  Businessmen tell the story of their product.  Stock investors try to suss out a company’s story to see if it is a good investment.

Most importantly, it isn’t only the text that is important. It is also a story’s context and it’s subtext that deliver messages.  It’s those messages that are significant in this article.

Popular Culture

Popular culture is delivered to us in the form of story via books, TV, film, music, video games, and new media. Obviously, most of us are there to simply be entertained.  However, along with that entertainment comes messaging.  It may not be intentional.  Oftentimes, it isn’t (and the job of critics to tease out unexpected thematics or commentary).

So whenever we view a piece of popular culture, we should ask what messages it delivers.  What values are espoused or rejected?  What is the moral of the story?  How did the characters change?  What did they learn?   What means did they use to their ends?  Finally, how do you feel about the answers to these questions?

Because whether you like it or not, or believe it or not, the messaging of popular culture is resonating inside everyone’s conscious and subconscious mind.  And if those messages are not consonant with the things you hold dear, then it is incumbent upon you to challenge yourself.  First ask why it threatens you, and then, if appropriate, accept or reject the message.  Never reject it out of hand.  Do yourself the favor of letting yourself be challenged, in the event you make a discovery about something that never occurred to you.

Politics

Thus we come to politics.  Given the influence that story has on our everyday lives, and that popular culture is barraging us with story on a regular basis, we must remain ever vigilant as to the messaging in those stories.

Regardless of one’s ideological, moral, ethical, or religious leanings, every person should be aware of the messaging of every piece of popular culture.  The thesis here at BH is that the vast majority of those with the power of content creation are Liberals.  If you accept that thesis, then realize that Liberals control story.  Given the breadth and depth of popular culture in our daily lives, it follows that Liberal messaging is what is primarily being imparted on the masses.

What is some of that messaging? Think about movies and TV.  Corporations are evil — using unwitting poor Africans for pharmaceutical testing (Constant Gardener) or dumping toxic chemicals into nature (Erin Brockovich, A Civil Action) or responsible for the end of mankind (Rise of the Planet of the Apes). American soldiers are bloodthirsty lawbreaking maniacs (Any military film).  The CIA conducts illegal, secret operations that have nothing to do with protecting America.  Radical Muslim terrorists are never villains.  Trial lawyers are crusading do-gooders.  David Letterman and Saturday Night Live ridicule the Right 95% of the time.    Jon Stewart pretends to be centrist, but in fact jumps all over the Right far more often than the Left.

This messaging reinforces Liberal narratives — that is, Liberal stories.   These are the same narratives you see in Liberal politics.  The popular culture backs up Liberal policies, morals, ethics, values, and standards.   Liberal political candidates are the embodiments of those Liberal tenets.  The goal is to associate them in voter minds via the vehicle of popular culture.

Finally, what are voters meant to take away from a candidate’s speech, platform, or appearance?  The candidate’s story, of course.  That’s why it is imperative to understand messaging.   Not only will a politician tell his own story, he will also attempt to define the opposing party or candidate’s narrative for him.  He who controls that narrative wins.

Conclusion

Culture influences politics, and in ways the Left has understood for a long time.  The Right has sat idly by, as they did with higher education, and let an ideological movement take over one of the most important aspects of American society.  If the Right has any interest in reclaiming that ground, they must vote with their pocketbooks as well as their voices, and their votes.   Given the decline in box office admission volume and network television ratings, they are getting the message.

While the story itself is quite unnerving and will sit with you for days, what is most upsetting about the film is that it did not hit the mainstream in the way that it deserved. This is unfortunate because the story of Soraya should be heard all over the world.  

So often we hear of the injustices that occur in our world today, shake our heads and move on to our daily tasks not wholly understanding what we have just talked about.  This film doesn’t allow us to do that.  Instead, the film places a vivd and graphic picture of the suffering and torture that is occurring in our world at this very moment. This film is not about promoting political ideologies, or pushing religious dogma, but rather is about bringing awareness to a topic that is almost altogether ignored by our society, and does so with the highest of artistic integrity.  

As we seek to change the worldview of films that are made in Hollywood, it is incumbent upon us to support films like “The Stoning of Soraya M”, which simply tell a story, raise awareness, but do not preach.  If we, as viewers, want Hollywood to continue making films like this we must show the industry that these films are financially viable.  Therefore, I urge you to purchase a copy of “The Stoning of Soraya M.,” when was released yesterday on DVD.  If we are to help Hollywood to ever get back to a stage where it tells stories that are worth hearing, we can start by showing the way with a little cash.  In this town, that speaks louder than words.

Any artist wants their work to be appreciated. And most artists want to leave a lasting impression. In order to do that, you are either naturally gifted and can do that through your instinctive performance, or you can do it through an understanding of the driving forces that make it happen.

Most people fall into the second category. That does not make them lesser artists. Even the people with natural talent can improve it by honing their craft and learning new tricks.

Where all this falls into the realm of this discussion centers around what I call the point of a story.

Think of it like the business end of a sword. If a sword is dull, it has less a chance to do its job effectively. Of course, most of us writers don’t want to hurt anyone with our work. We want to entertain. Enlighten, if possible. But some have lost track of why they’re doing this. Whether intentionally or not, they are hurting people with their fiction. They are doing harm. Their sword is being put to bad use.

We’re attracted to stories because we not only want to be entertained, we want to feel something. And for a story to do that, it needs to speak to us personally. It needs to tell us something we can relate to. Something we can understand. Even if the subject matter or situation is absurd, there has to be some kind of truth in there.

The stories that stand the test of time are the ones that hit home in some way. They are the ones we can get some kind of personal insight or meaning from. The reason? Stories act to make sense of the senselessness of our existence. They’re a tool for putting reality in perspective.

Reality is a vast, complex and often scary place. If you were to bother to look up the size of certain heavenly bodies for example, you would find you could fit around a million worlds the size of the earth in our sun. And as big as our sun is, you could fit 350 million Earth suns into the star Antares. And Antares is just one of a nearly uncountable number of stars in a possibly infinite universe. Which may only be one universe in an infinite amount of parallel universes. So, yeah, we’re pretty small in relation to all that. Even George Clooney’s ego.

It’s hard enough for contemporary people to take in our crazy world, but imagine how it was for our ancestors who knew almost nothing. They had to figure out why things happened and they had to get really creative. They didn’t have Google. They had to wing it.

Fiction was invented, in part, to provide a context for life. Religion (depending on your point of view, of course) sprang from a need to lay down some ground rules so a society could function properly. People learned that certain actions had bad consequences. So they wrote down rules that said: “Don’t do that, stupid!” And when people did that anyway, they said: “Do that again and you’ll regret it!”

in 350 BC, Greek Philosopher Aristotle explained how fiction worked in The Poetics. He explained that people can relate to cause and effect in a story. This is because in real life, actions often equal some kind of result, either good or bad. And we can all relate to that.

But we can’t relate to stories where a character does something that doesn’t make sense to us. And the result of their actions makes even less sense.

We’ve all seen those movies. Throw a rock in a video store and you’ll hit one.

The problem with a lot of entertainment today is that mindset has dominated the scene that tells us illogical things. Things that don’t ring true to us living in the real world. This is because the producers who commission these stories, the editors who supervise them, the writers who slap them together are either coming from a place of unreality and delusion, or they are trying to impose some kind of vision of reality that they want to believe on the rest of us.

This often results in bad fiction. Whether it’s in comic books, plays or films, even if it comes in the lyrics of a song, or a comedian’s joke, fiction is trying to pass on a version of reality to the audience. And many creative people today are passing on a negative, defeatist or depressing message that doesn’t really offer any solutions, hope or lessons worth a damn.

Stories don’t have to be uplifting or even positive to be good. But they have to have meaning to be relevant or effective. The meaning passed along by many of today’s entertainment is neither helpful or constructive.

Some creative people today are making fiction that seeks to tear down society, through slurs and condemnation. But they offer no ideas, no constructive solutions, and for many of us, no reason to agree with them. But to young impressionable minds, this is harmful because it makes many kids think it’s a form of reality. As I said, fiction can serve to put reality in perspective. The perspective many kids are getting is one of hopelessness, anger, fear and paranoia.

Science Fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon had an axiom that 90% of everything is crap. He said that in the 1950s, so this isn’t a new problem. But if we want to make a difference and improve entertainment, we need to start focusing on solutions instead of sitting off to one side throwing bottles at the walls of the institutions we’re annoyed with.

We have to bring our convictions, values and ideas to the table. The naysayers will try to beat us down, but guess what? We don’t need their approval. Opportunities and new paths are always opening before us. The Internet is creating all kinds of exciting avenues to bring our work to the masses. When people band together they can achieve great things. Pulling our resources together we can make things happen.

Art is a calling. When you answer the call you have to bring it to make a difference. The people who were your heroes and inspiration when you started didn’t get there by playing it safe. More than likely, they broke some rules and rattled some cages.

If we’re to bring back a sense of balance and true diversity of thought to entertainment, you know what to do.