Creative Identity with JoJo Rabbit

Spoilers.

I recently watched Taika Waititi’s latest film compelled by its audacious premise. A Hitler Youth with an imaginary friend who happens to be Hitler? The conceit smacks of a demented Calvin and Hobbes but I left the theater with the movie reels spinning in my mind and spent much of the next day pondering over it and the more I thought about it, the more depth I found in the film’s message.

I think many people could not look past the Wes Anderson-esque aesthetic and the happy face placed over history’s most notorious monster. I had my own reservations that this would simply be a lazy return to late 90’s irony, subversive crudity without any substantial value, after all, does the world really need another Hitler comedy? See, a thousand years ago in the aftermath of the 2016 US elections, there seemed to be an endless conversation concerning how to represent fascists in entertainment. The argument’s two camps were split into those who believed in Mel Brook’s approach (a la The Producers’ “Springtime for Hitler” finale) of removing power from oppressive people by making them appear silly and those who believed that making something as insidious as white supremacy appear comedic rendered it harmless in the eyes of the audience thus making it easier to dismiss real-life iterations of toxic ideology (or worse, accidentally creating a friendly access point for the history-ignorant to latch onto). Jojo Rabbit somehow walks the line and does so all the way to a satisfying conclusion.

It happens about halfway through when the tone of the film takes a sudden turn from happy-go-lucky romp to a grey and anxious thriller. Waititi wants to remind you that yes, this is still a film about Nazi Germany and you will be upset several times over. There are still well-timed moments of levity, but they aren’t used as mere throwaway laughs to ease the tension so much as they are buttresses in the grand design of the film’s message.

The conflict that threads every character in this film together is one of personal identity struggling to survive a regime of oppression. The most obvious examples of this belong to Elsa, the Jewish girl living in the walls of JoJo’s house and JoJo himself, a ten-year-old fanatic of the Reich who, due to a pretty funny grenade accident, cannot become a soldier. It’s important to remember that the mechanisms of genocide work to erase not only a person, but a people and, further, a people’s culture and history. Wishing to aid the war effort, JoJo begins writing a book on how to identify a Jewish person by interviewing Elsa who gives fanciful answers to feed his imagination. They bond over this activity as well as the activity of letters JoJo writes in the voice of Elsa’s late boyfriend. It’s not unlike the plot of The Book Thief in a lot of ways but because of the lighter tone, the heaviness hits subtly here.

That’s the main story, a young girl who doesn’t fit in society because of a government-mandated Holocaust and a young boy who doesn’t fit in a murderous society because he has a gentle heart. But the more I thought about, the more I realized that the entire film is full of misfits, which scratches the core of its sentiment: that fascism dehumanizes everyone— both the perpetrators and the victims.

Rosie is not allowed to exist because she wants a legitimately free Germany– that it is not enough to be German, one must conform to the party’s ideals or perish. The disgraced (but ultimately benevolent) Captain K is not allowed to exist as an openly homosexual man, or even a proper soldier. JoJo’s friend Yoki is not allowed to exist as a young boy, displayed in a hilarious subplot of him ever getting promoted through the Wehrmacht despite his incompetence and age (Rosie tells JoJo directly that he shouldn’t be thinking about war at his age, but should be climbing trees and falling in love). Even Rebel Wilson’s Fraulein Rahm seems to quietly resent that she is not allowed a more valuable role in the war because of her sex, saying through perhaps a smile too tight, “It is a good year to be a girl.”

The method in which these characters are able to endure are through acts of creativity. As stated, Elsa and JoJo write and draw together. Rosie dances and jokes (and drinks). She also does some character acting as JoJo’s absent father with a beard made of soot to soothe the boy’s anger. Captain K is more preoccupied with designing his costume (the reveal of which is probably the most epically FABULOUS scene of drag since Hedwig) than he is planning for the American and Russian invasion. He also drinks heavily and becomes increasingly disheveled throughout the film (until he walks the catwalk battlefield with Alfie Allen’s Finkel in enthusiastic tow) and it doesn’t escape my notice that the only moral adult characters find the current climate unbearable sober.

But it’s Captain K’s final scene that puts the whole film into perspective. He gives JoJo three gifts. He reminds him that his mother was a legitimately good person. He encourages JoJo’s creativity with the book he, along with a terrifying gang of Gestapo, laughed at previously. He sacrifices himself in an act of feigned belligerence so that JoJo can go be with Elsa.

There are many themes tied up before David Bowie cinches up the credits, but Captain K’s performance probably nails most of them. Respectively: you mustn’t forget the value of a person’s individuality; art is what sustains us and brings us together, and the pursuit of art is a noble one; heroism isn’t defined by the battlefield; family is what is important, biological or not.

And it’s the final scene when Elsa finally opens the front door and experiences freedom for the first time in a long while. JoJo does too, although he is slower to realize it, as he had only just come to terms with the fact that he too was a prisoner of the Nazis. The two primary characters, who found and kept each other after the regime had taken everyone else away from them, begin to dance to Bowie’s Heroes sung in German, we end on an optimistic note.

The reason why JoJo Rabbit works now is that it shows you the daily life of Nazi Germany which ranges from boring to beautiful to horrifying and all over again. We rarely see the less dramatic depictions of wartime Germany and might find it shocking to find that it might not be all that different from life in America currently. Perhaps then, to survive with any real dignity, we must embrace each other, value art, dance when we can and take life as it comes.

I’ve got a horror novella coming out shortly and it is available to pre-order here

The End of the World as We Nevermind

A joke I’ve seen circulating social media quite often is this: “Stop writing dystopian fiction, you’re only giving the government ideas.”

The joke, I guess, is that because dystopias are often written to underline specific and problematic societal and political norms by satirically torquing those values to their ridiculous breaking point, that it eventually and unintentionally normalizes the extreme examples that the author used to point out the absurdities of modern living.

Ha. Ha.

And to that point I’ll challenge the notion that George Orwell was some kind of prophet. 1984 stands as the quintessential dystopian novel, portraying a harrowing world of an omni-present yet ambiguous authority and panopticonical surveillance. And one leaps to think that Orwell is describing the future that we now live in, given how many things line up with our modern experiences with totalitarianism and the invasive practices of the NSA. I don’t want to diminish the modern relevance of the work. It’s currently significant, but what I want to make clear is that it was as significant when Orwell wrote it. He wasn’t a prophet so much as he was a scholar of how fascism operates through the arms of bureaucracy. Nazis rewarded those who provided information about their Jewish neighbors; spy networks have almost always been a tactic of every militarily-minded society; population surveillance has been the wet dream of dictatorships everywhere (it used to look like intercepting written letters, now it’s tapping into Smart TVs and that goddamn Alexa as well as examining piles of metadata); fascists have a tendency to make their face ubiquitous with pithy catchphrases underneath; populations, as a whole, have a tendency to react to things emotionally instead of rationally (compare the 2 Minute Hate to Tweet Storms about anything). I could go on, but the point I’m making here is this: George Orwell wasn’t trying to depict the future, he was describing his present using allegorical science fiction.

Let’s back up. All the way up. We wouldn’t have dystopias without utopias. Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, a fictional travelogue that came out in the early 1500’s, describes an outsider’s perspective of an ethical, puritanical island that operates under a strict set of benevolent rules that serves everybody’s best interests.

Everybody’s best guess is that Utopia is a satire, aping medieval Europe’s more liberal tendencies. It is, in fact, it’s own dystopia. If it was considered satire by More’s contemporaries, modern thought would look at it as a fucked up 4th world country. Slavery, pre-marital bonin’ punished by a lifetime of celibacy, women strictly relegated to the role of home-making, etcetera. Utopias don’t purely exist in fiction (and don’t give me Paradiso as an example, that shit is boring as… well, not hell, because Inferno was ultimately more satisfying to read.) because there is no under-riding conflict. If that sound familiar, then GOOD. That means you read my dumb musings on conflict months ago. Have a chocolate.

And so we’re back to dystopias. How come we love them so much? And does that reason vary from culture to culture?

The most recent episode of Wizard and the Bruiser brought up an excellent point about Akira: that a dystopic representation of Tokyo (re-imagined as Neo-Tokyo, 30 years after the Akira fallout, written in the 1980’s, 30ish some years after the Atomic fallout) where parentless gangs run the streets at night while the military tries to maintain order, is reminiscent of 1950’s Japan when the country was recovering from a devastating war and the victim of two Atomic bombs dropped on two of their civilian cities. In the same way that Gojira served to sublimate the horrors of the bomb in a way audiences could emotionally process, Akira is a digestion of the chaos the country experienced while rebuilding.

In America, I believe the shared fascination with dystopias digs at two things.

The first we are often hesitant to address– this country has been devastated. The genocide of Native Americans has been traditionally shoehorned into Cowboy vs. Indians John Wayne narratives, wherein the natives are either savage murderers or aides for Manifest Destiny. There’s a collective guilt there that’s been pushed down for centuries now but no matter how many times America tries to push a traditional western through, it sings the same old story. Dystopias, if you haven’t noticed, tend to put the atrocities mankind is capable of front and center. And there’s a reason why most post-apocalyptic fiction sets back technology and infrastructure back to a familiar, nearly western setting. Various reasons, probably, but the one I’m poking at is the coping mechanism for the blood spilled on the frontier.

The second thing to address, is the culminate fear of where society is heading. A lot of that is moralistic hand-wringing, to be sure, but many of those fears are not unprecedented. Nuclear holocaust is an anxiety we currently bear day-to-day, and have since the bomb’s inception. Again, here we have a means to digest that fear in narrative form that ultimately cherishes optimism. The Road ends on an optimistic note, despite all of the horrific and tragic build-up. The Mad Max series, while exploring survivalistic depravities, tends to end its chapters on a victory. You see the gore, you still get a (hard earned) happy(ish) ending and piece by piece, a little bit of that fear of the future is smoothed out just enough so you can get out of bed in the morning.

But whether the social consciousness feels regret about the past, or anxiety about the future, the sharpest gear in the mechanics of dystopias is set in the human brain’s inability to process reality. The world’s got some beautiful shit. The rest is kind of just… shit? And it’s not hard to understand why people willingly ignore the evil in the world. We get nauseated at the sight of blood. And yet, reality persists. For mental health reasons, everyone gives the news a break and doubles down on what is truly important to them because a day feels like a year if you keep up with everything. And that’s fine. To paraphrase Camus, you can’t live in the desert your entire life, otherwise you’ll go insane. Or, to quote A Tribe Called Quest, “VH1 has a show that you can waste your time with. Guilty pleasures take the edge off reality and for a salary I’d probably do that shit sporadically.” [punctuation mine]

Reality is hard to swallow. There’s a limit of what a person can emotionally process before they turn off and numb out. While directly reporting the distressing information about how the world turns is a necessary journalistic imperative, fiction isn’t bound to the same precedent while still remaining just as relevant. Dystopian fiction offers a method of telegraphing modern and relevant social pain and institutional betrayals within the world using the element of just enough fantastical devices to keep it distant enough to process with an indirect emotional stake. Example given: as someone who studied genocide for a semester in college, more people are comfortable discussing how despicable Death Eaters are than the brutal actions of the Khmer Rouge. Dystopias sublimate the horror of reality into an easily digestible parable.

And really, where the fuck else are you going to have the delicious opportunity to have a bedraggled Ronald Reagan fight a woman in football shoulder-pads, brandishing a sword made out of knee-caps or some bullshit?

That shit doesn’t happen in westerns.

If you’d like a dystopian read that also fancies itself as a western, you can read Crimson Stain for FREE here. It takes place ten years before the events of The Least of 99 Evils in a small Texan town on the verge of a massacre.

How Stanislaw Lem Writes Allegory

A friend of mine (Hey, Zane) lent me a book, The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem, because of its parallels to The Fish Fox Boys. The Cyberiad is a collection of somewhat related short stories concerning two inventors, Trurl and Klapaucious and nearly every story is an allegory for philosophical mind experiments, a political satire or a treatise on the human condition.

Unlike other allegorical writers, Lem’s approach is hilariously heavy handed and very intentional. From the Introduction by Christopher Priest:

“Lem […] always intended that these stories could be read on two levels […]. On the surface, they are amusing and intriguing, full of novelty and wordplay, but they also contain many moral ambiguities and reflect Lem’s personal philosophy.”

And apparently, he was very frustrated with his American contemporaries, and saw the sci-fi genre as a pulpy excuse to simply make beer money (with the notable exception of Philip K Dick, who repaid this appraise by reporting Lem to the FBI, barring him from the United States). On the topic, again from the Introduction:

“[…] he had a deeply sceptical [sic] attitude to commercial science fiction, and wrote an essay in which he described American writing as ‘ill thought out, poorly written, and interested more in adventure than ideas or new literary forms.'”

But Lem also understood that there was a practical reason for allegory: subversion. While I’ll make a subtle parable out of a Fish Fox Boys chapter to disguise a philosophical idea as absurdity on the sly, Lem had to get his works through state censors– work that contained agnostic, anti-Communistic messages. So, Lem shrouded his work– amusingly– in the sci-fi genre:

“[…] Lem was beginning to understand, that functionaries of a totalitarians state are never as intelligent as all that. Lem was starting to learn that the abstract metaphors of science fiction were one way of confounding the doltish Party men with their blue pencils. They simply lacked the subtlety, the imagination, to see past the words on the page.”

What’s particularly striking about that, is that the veil is relatively thin– but also happens to include a lot of fantastical technical jargon (that’s not a typo. Again, it is as fantastical as it is deeply technical which makes it, uhm, challenging to say the least) that pummels the reader with clever word play and puns, but is essentially non-essential to the plot. Lem himself even winks at this in “The Sixth Sally,” by creating a “Demon of the Second Kind,” which drowns a pirate demanding facts by writing down inconsequential information on an endless roll of ticker tape. (The mechanic of which, I believe, was explained to be literally grabbing facts out of stagnant air particles). This also seems to allude to Lem’s belief that “information technology drowns people in a glut of low-quality information,” which is not only a relevant and apt criticism of the Internet age, but is also particularly amusing to me as it illustrates my first college essay which drew parallels between Toqueville’s Democracy of America and the society influence of Facebook.

What’s that? Sorry, I couldn’t hear you. My Auto-Horn-A-Tootinator was screaming.

Back to The Cyberiad.

There’s a certain flippancy to this style. The characters have been given the god-like power to construct anything asked of them and the effect is one of aggressive anti-realism (which again is poked at in a story about how dragon’s don’t exist. I’m going to paraphrase it the best I can and apologize for any lapse in logic. The probability of a dragon’s existence is about 0%, the certainty of dragons not existing is about 100%, meaning that there is about a 100% chance of non-existing dragons, which increases the probability of dragons having had to have existed and as such a dragon materializes. My brain hurts.) which allows for a certain sense of freedom in his storytelling– in a crafted world where you can make anything happen, you can literally tackle everything as your subject matter. And Lem does. It’s a nice reminder that fiction doesn’t need to be necessarily formulaic to be interesting. It can just be interesting. And poignant.

In this anti-realism, there is a complete bucking and subversion of traditional storytelling conventions. Frame narrative, for example, gets a lot of abuse. In a story about Trurl inventing story telling machines for a king, the machines tell a story about Trurl telling a story to a second king, and in that story a dream-maker captures a third king in a long series of dreams, the ultimate being a dream of having a dream. I’m pretty sure there are actually more layers than that. Predates Inception by 45 years. Just saying.

Here’s what this can accomplish: by putting form on the back burner, one can more directly attack the subject of satire. In one episode, there’s a planet that’s pestered by a ship outside of its orbit who won’t leave. They launch a nuclear bomb at it to no avail. Trurl sails by on his rocket and instructs them to send a letter and wait for the response, only to respond with an assault of ceaseless forms and requests for licenses until the alien ship becomes frustrated to the point of leaving voluntarily. It’s the classic “pen > sword” parable, but in a more modern and global sense, it’s the crushing intimidation of bureaucracy, which might be favorable to nuclear annihilation– and then in a further sense, it illustrates how diminished the threat of the bomb is when it’s easily nullified, and how we resort to petty global politics to achieve our nation’s wants.

When Lem wants to discuss the callousness of Stalin’s Communism, he writes about The Multitudinous– a borg-like conglomeration of many, who feels nothing when scores of itself dies or becomes enslaved– and even commits those crimes against itself for its own amusement. When Lem wants to discuss religion, he invents a drug called Altruizine, which makes the users feel automatic empathy for those around them– which of course ends in alienation, murder, grief and voyeuristic sex crimes. When discussing existentialism, Lem writes a story about a robot who came into existence the pure happenstance of an airborne jug knocking some wires and body parts into a puddle of electrolytic fluid, spending eons to become conscious only to drown shortly after the realization of self-awareness. This versatility lends itself well to discussing human absurdity. I’ll quote from the final chapter of The Cyberiad, in which a robot disguises himself as a human to win over a robot princess and explains the daily habits of human life with rigid, robotic objectivity:

“In the morning, they wet themselves in clear water, pouring it upon their limbs as well as into their interiors, for this affords them pleasure. Afterwards, they walk to and fro in a fluid and undulating way, and they slush, and they slurp, and when anything grieves them, they palpitate, and salty water streams from their eyes, and when anything cheers them, they palpitate and hiccup, but their eyes remain relatively dry. And we call the wet palpitating weeping, and the dry– laughter.” (284)

Part of the reason why I found Stanislaw Lem so refreshing is that the aesthetics in modern sci-fi are so up its own ass, actual novelty in the storytelling has fallen by the wayside. There are exceptions, certainly, but the mainstream obsession is focused on how complete a certain world looks, not necessarily the message behind it. In The Cyberiad, all of the worlds are generally placed in a feudal, medieval setting, regardless of the planet, as if to say, after all of this technology and possibility, there hasn’t been much progression in human (and robotic) behavior.

But the thing that struck me as the most profound was Lem’s awareness of the function of story. Mirroring the sentiment of the first quote of this post, Trurl escapes certain death by creating storytelling machines that relay narratives that are compelling and perceptive of the nature of being. The awareness speaks of a deep understanding of how the human mind will resist foreign ideas, but might be accepting of the narrative vehicle in which the idea travels. To quote King Genius who allowed the constructor of the storytelling devices to live:

“Go then in Peace, my friend, and continue to hide your truths, too bitter for this world, in the guise of fairy tale and fable.” (243)

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the translator Michael Kandel, who, through some miracle was able to translate The Cyberiad into English and Daniel Mróz, whose illustrations added an extra whimsical flavor, featured in the header

All the World’s A Page

During the office hours for a medieval literature class, my professor (and in case it wasn’t clear that I was a poor, poor academic, I was taking this class remedially, as I had flunked out of that same professor’s Chaucer class) told me something I’ve been turning around in my head ever since– that people in the Dark Ages read the world allegorically.

What the hell does that mean? Well, first you need to consider that folks in the olden days didn’t read words so much. Literacy was a tool reserved for Jesus nerds (clergymen) who would read, and then interpret, the Bible during mass. To be a good Christian, one has to read the Bible faithfully. So how does an illiterate farmer accomplish that?

According to my professor, a farmer dude might look at a tree and contemplate it as an allegory for Christ. He’d see the roots planted firmly in the ground, the branches leaning into the sun, and I don’t know, he’d see an apple or something. And he’d interpret that to mean by firmly grounding oneself in faith (roots), seeking truth in the God’s word (light, sun), one is rewarded (fruit, salvation).

And then he’d go stick some leeches on his butt because a barber told him that cured syph’.

Basically, the gist of it is that they saw the world as a manifestation of The Bible, that the world had the Word of God coded into its every corner.

It’s a common misconception that people in history were dumb. We have a tendency to think because we’re progressively marching towards a fairer world and have smart phones, that we’re smarter than we used to be. We’re not, exactly. Our phones are. The human brain hasn’t changed much in thousands of years (except the relatively modern trend of shrinkage). The farmer doesn’t have the tools of literacy, or a socially aware history, or access to modern medical science. We stand on the shoulders of giants.

But what I think that story speaks to is that farmer still had a critically thinking brain, and he applied it to the world around him using the lens of religion to understand and interpret that world.

Despite all of our technology, despite the lowest global illiteracy rates we’ve ever seen, I’m beginning to think that we still read the world allegorically. You’d think that it’d be the other way around– that we view something, we interpret it, and then we write our piece on it. And maybe that’s true some of the time and probably definitely true in early development. But I’m thinking that maybe our brains become wired to hold certain schemas (primed by upbringing, advantages or disadvantages, and media) about how the world works such that we interpret events before they happen– or rather, we justify events to fit our preexisting schemas.

Children do this naturally and intentionally– I personally crafted my life to reflect a reality of Calvin and Hobbes, pretended to be a pirate after watching Hook, and I would fight hundreds of invisible foes after watching 3 Ninjas. That’s until I discovered video games, after which, I made swords and shields out of errant pieces of metal lying around my house. I threw Pokéballs at bugs. I’d watch the ocean, hoping to see a dragon. I wanted these things to be real to the point that I was willing to let my imagination redirect reality into a personal narrative. At least until playtime was over.

Writers have a tendency to do this in adolescence in a very meta sense– writing fan-fiction using pre-existing fantastical universes to access their own emotions and frame their own internal struggles with something familiar. (Uncomfortable example: “Oh nooo,” said Professor Umbridge. “It seems I’ve dropped my quill.”)

Now we live in an age of information bubbles, where two polarized sides of America can watch the same news story play out and offer two completely disparate interpretations, each one validated by their home base.

How does that happen? Well, we’re all aware of the concept of confirmation bias, right? That you only seek out the information that serves your views and ignore or discredit that which opposes your views. That’s the psychological mechanic behind reading the world allegorically. It’s just that The Bible we’re priming ourselves with now includes literature, movies, the news, memes and social media. Our brains understand the world around us through what we watch and read and consume on a daily basis.

Astrology is a good example of this in action. Let’s say you’re a Libra and are interested in dating a Leo (Hey, I’m a Leo! It doesn’t matter.) because you know and love Leos. You two go out for a drink. Despite this Leo being generally uptight and reserved, you might find yourself ignoring this and focusing on what makes them appear to be gregarious and outspoken. (“They laughed at my joke! Leos love jokes! This is going to work!” or “They were such an asshole to the bartender! Classic Leo! This is going to work!”)

Or maybe your Horoscope informed you that you would find someone who had been missing from your life and advised to stay away from tenuous situations. Then a friend from high school wanders into your workplace and orders a coffee (you’re a barista in this example, because, of course you are). Later, a dispute breaks out between coworkers and you choose to separate yourself from it. You get home and remember your horoscope, and wouldn’t you know it, it came true! Didn’t it?

Well, these are examples of shoehorning a paradigm into something benign– or in the dating example, a special kind of color blindness that sees all flags as white. Not to get into too much of a tangent on the cookie-cutter advice Horoscope writers dish out (not that it’s ever bad, per se, but it’s just common sense. Avoid tenuous situations? One of the reasons human beings are still alive is our capacity for risk assessment), but wouldn’t it have also been true if you read, say, a Cancer’s ‘scope and it said something like, “You will reclaim a memory you thought you had lost and cool heads prevail under times of duress?”

When it matters, it’s when the situation isn’t so benign. Look at it from a political perspective, because apparently it’s impossible not to these days.

On the right: If your news, your friends and family, your Mark Wahlburg movies and favored political leaders are saying that Islam is a religion of war, you’re going to look at the world, afraid, and find examples to justify that fear– because examples of violence are there, and the natural tendency is to extend that example to all examples. But you’d be ignoring the 99.994% of the global Muslim population who aren’t extremists and the 94% of terroristic attacks carried out on US soil by non-Islamic extremists because that doesn’t fit the narrative.

On the left: If your news, your friends, perhaps not your parents, your comedians and favored political leaders vilify red state voters, you’re going to find examples of white supremacy, misogyny, and hate– because examples are definitely there. But you’d be ignoring the plight of former industrial workers who can’t get a job because governmental interests have left their economy to rot and their towns are in the valley of too populous yet too small to accommodate customer service jobs like cities and suburbs can. They chose the devil they didn’t know, because the last one screwed them in their perspective.

Obviously, I fall onto the left side of the spectrum. But I want everyone to recognize that our minds, beautiful machines capable of astounding works that they may be, are reactionary to precedent information which perhaps interprets the world for us, before we can even take a moment to breathe.

Psychological schemas are solid, but not unshakeable blueprints. We’re constantly updating (usually buttressing) the designs, but never lose hope that the most hateful of people can come around to a reasonable understanding as long as we remember that people are people and have always been people.

The only thing I can think to prescribe is a careful and well variegated media diet. I’m not saying you should listen to Alex Jones– I’m pretty sure no one should– but perhaps by entertaining– not necessarily believing or ascribing to– a palette of perspectives, we can understand each other’s personal allegory. Because our brains will favor a story over reality every single time.

Failing that, remember what Socrates said: “I do not think I know what I do not know.”

Reading Media Narratives

Disclaimer: I’m ignorant about a lot things. Here’s the things I’ll admit to: I dropped political science in college, not because I didn’t find it interesting but because I never showed up to the Friday discussions of International Politics. (This would be why I also failed The Philosophy of Love and Sex. Oops.) I dropped the journalism major because I failed Economics 101. (A writer who’s irresponsible with money? What kind of monkey shine is this?) I’ve also never made a quiche and don’t want to know how.

But I’m trying to understand how narrative works. We all know the basic structure, right? You have a beginning, a middle, and an end. You know what recent political slogan also shares those qualities? “Make America Great Again.” It presupposes that America was once great, it’s currently not, and will be great once more because of us. Simple. Unifying. Four words, even. It doesn’t track as well with “I’m with her,” which is inherently divisive, because if you’re not with her, you’re against her, a message cemented by the “deplorables” gaff. Hillary Clinton’s response to MAGA was “America is already great,” which is probably better stated as “America’s better than it’s ever been, statistically,” as the former doesn’t contain a story, just an ending– which apparently translated to half the country as no change.

Political and media narratives generally don’t share this three act structure– they are always written in the middle of things, without time to contextualize history or put a neatly wrapped bow on top of it. That happens after the fact, when history is canonized. These stories are written now.

It’s interesting to see it from a fiction writer’s perspective. Because we know, or are struggling to realize, that every story has a different set of triplets embedded within each of their narrative wombs. Every story has a Hero, a Villain, and (oftentimes forgotten) a Victim.

That might be why the most enduring religious (and political, it its own way) narrative of western culture is of Jesus Christ. Not only is there a Beginning (Bethlehem, three kings, shiny star, manger), a Middle (proselytizing, gathering disciples, miracles, crucifixion) and an End (resurrection, Heaven, legacy of Christianity) but the HVV trinity is also soundly in place: There’s a Hero (Jesus), a Villain (Original sin, or Satan, or Rome), and a Victim (the poor, the sick, the lame, the oppressed). This parabola and narrative conflict has been carefully crafted over centuries of canonization.

Ok. The most maligned and divisive phrase you’re going to hear for the next four years is “That’s how Trump got elected.” Without adding to that garbage fire of vitriol, I’m going to try and extrapolate Trump’s campaign message using the HVV dynamic, while also adding, in political narratives, no one will ever claim to be the villain, while claiming to be the victim is viewed as politically weak.

Trump’s campaign universe had all three characters in a neat package:

The Hero (Himself, tremendously), the Villain (The corrupt, backstabbing government insiders), and the Victim (The working class people who feel their diminishing industries have been forgotten).

Versus Clinton’s:

The Hero(es) (Clinton, women everywhere), the Villain (Trump), and The Victim (…)

That last box is left a little blank, although there were many possibilities to fill it– Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women, claimed Mexican immigrants were rapists, that Muslims were dangerous, that stop and frisk policies aren’t biased against POC, that prisoners of war were losers, you name a demographic, he– in no uncertain terms– victimized them.

Which ended up as footnotes in the debates, if brought up at all. We saw play out a game of intense political chess. Politically, she can’t shift women over from the Hero slot to the Victim role (whereas Trump, somehow, did by bringing out the women that claimed Bill Clinton had sexually harassed). Her immigration stance was relatively soft and seen as hypocritical in the shadow of Obama’s mass deportations, while any discussion about Muslims was either deferred to the Middle East as America’s Eyes and Ears, or avoided in an effort to escape the goddamn Benghazi trials. When BLM was brought up, specifically when police brutality in black communities was addressed, Clinton went for the nuanced approach that we’re all a bit racist (statistically true) opposed to Trump’s proclamation of Law and Order— because she probably would’ve backed herself in a corner taking a more aggressive approach due to her Super Predator comments.

Sidenote: Clinton’s verbiage is interesting to me because it’s similar to how I instinctively write certain scenes: Exposition, Dialogue, Exposition, EXTREME LANGUAGE CONTRARY TO THE PREVIOUS EXPOSITION TO INDICATE A SHIFT IN VALUE, Expository endcap. It’s clear that Hillary Clinton is a reader. Trump’s language is interesting to me because it’s entirely made of extreme language, in short, obscene outbursts. Kind of like LA Confidential.

Where was I? Clinton’s Victim eluded.

She let the Villain speak for himself, which to be fair, seemed like a reasonable thing to do. To her credit, Clinton appears to be a very sensible person and believed that voters would see through Trump’s narrative (and over 3 million more people did, but we’re not going into that right now), but, in retrospect, by not allowing Trump to speak for himself, he gained a firmer grasp of that narrative with a broader platform and doubled down.

Let’s get away from the election. It’s over. It was disheartening, divisive and an ugly cartoon. And it’s over.

So let’s move on to how the media, now that it’s not encumbered by the election, is now encumbered by DJ Trump’s Presidency.

Again, these narratives exist in the middle, always, and also contain the three character structure of Hero, Villain, and Victim.

On the left, this time, the Victims take the center stage because there are so many people legitimately effected by the rapid-fire executive actions of the last two weeks: Women seeking healthcare at NGO’s outside of the US, Muslims from 7 specific non-terroristic countries, Green card holders, members of the LGBTQ community, Native communities that don’t want their water poisoned, Californians who subsist on nothing but avocados, peaceful protestors, federally funded science programs, lower class individuals who can’t afford healthcare, and a hell of a lot more that I can’t remember because of the executive order blitzkrieg (the violent flurry of which might be a political strategy in and of itself– like a missile released with chaff to distract enemy fire).

The villains are obvious: Trump himself, Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions, Betsy DeVos, Sean Spicer, it goes on. The Heroes come and go. Sometimes it’s Bernie, sometimes it’s Elizabeth Warren, but as of yet no solid figure has emerged.

In conservative media circles, it takes a little detective work to figure out the moving parts. The Hero is still Trump because he’s following through with his campaign promises. The Villain role has shifted directly to Muslims, immigrants, the companies and states that oppose the muslim ban, and leftist protestors. The Victim, this time, are harassed police and business owners.

That’s if the Victim is pointed out at all. Using the Victim role while in a seat of power is generally unwise. But there’s usually an implicit Victim and it took me forever to figure it out because it’s also a misdirection. Check out this Tweet:

In a discussion that didn’t include Veterans at all, this tweet focuses its empathy towards that demographic because without a Victim, the story isn’t complete. Sometimes you have to force it. Like when Kellyanne Conway invents a massacre to justify the traveling ban. Or #Pizzagate. Or like this:

Dick Spencer is carefully assuming the role in an to attempt to make his white supremacist movement appear sympathetic and oppressed– going so far as Alt-Righters (otherwise known as nazis) goad liberals into punching them at protests. They want that video to go viral because it confirms their notion that liberals are a hypocritically violent and ironically intolerant. In other words, it villainizes liberals.

I figure it’s important to practice deconstructing media narratives now, because not only is there a good chance that the White House press corps will be primarily Breitbart affiliates within a couple of months, but also if you want to have a perspective changing dialogue, it’s key to identify which characters are in their narrative. If you can’t understand their ideology, you can at least understand their story.

So when informing yourself on current events, regardless of your political views, ask yourself the following questions:

Who’s the Hero, Villain, and (most importantly) Victim?

Why are they portrayed this way?

Where does this story fall into the broader narrative being told?

Good luck out there.

Pierre Manchot

Category: politics