DMB Digest: The Real Trumps the True
ie. Who's my neighbor?
I’m not so much into what is true as I’m into what is real, or at least what is believable. When it comes to writing fiction, creating believable characters and having them behave in believable manners is what counts. Focusing on that inevitably engenders believable plot lines, even if the world is total fantasy or science fiction.
The real world is driven by a handful of principles, or mechanisms if you will. I don’t need facts or truth to take those very real mechanisms and use them to conjure up a fascinating and/or terrifying fictional reality. That is what quality storytelling is all about. And all of us should pay more attention to this kind of quality storytelling when it comes to how we engage with the world.
What the heck am I getting at? Well, my suspicion is that most of us spend way too much time trying to discern truth over reality, which in today’s world is detrimental. We try to figure out the exact details of a matter. Who said what and when. Those things are of utmost importance if you are on a jury or trying to deliberate between your children. But when it comes to the bigger picture of how we approach life and the broader world, these details don’t really matter. What matters is the narrative. What sort of stories do we see being repeatedly told all around us?
What is believable? Because I can promise you, if a storyline strikes you as believable, it’s happening somewhere right now as you read this. Human behavior is what it has always been. Our motivations haven’t changed. Story tellers know this. And if someone can tell a believable story, someone else out there (most likely multiple someones) is acting it out. It doesn’t so much matter who the main actors are. The when or where are just troublesome details (until they impact you personally). Don’t get lost in those nasty little buggers.
I recently finished season one of a show streaming on Paramount called “Rabbit Hole.” It stars Kiefer Sutherland of “24” fame. This time around, Sutherland’s character, John Weir, has a unique mental ability to envision every possible scenario for any given situation. But this talent also serves as his Achilles heal during moments when he is unable to make sense of a complicated series of events causing him to go down the rabbit hole, so to speak, as his brain loops and loops in an effort to reconcile the irreconcilable in search of the most reasonable conclusion.
For John Weir every little fact matters. The truth is of utmost importance. Life and death importance. For the viewer, the take away has nothing to do with facts or truth. The entire story is fiction. None of the characters are real people. But the storyline is absolutely real, and it scared the bejebus out of me, as it should all of us.
In a nutshell (and without spoilers), the crux of the plot evolves around an American society that fits the following criteria that make it vulnerable to certain individuals determined to undermine its democracy:
undermine the public’s faith in the media (until truth is indiscernible)
polarize factions within society (until they stop seeing the other side as human so that human rights cease being an obstacle)
marginalize the intelligencia (people stop listening to experts)
elect a pawn in the guise of restoring order (or building a better tomorrow or making America great or blah, blah, blah).
To be clear, this is not the first time a paranoid thriller has been crafted around these mechanisms (ie. Manchurian Candidate), and it won’t be the last. But it was done really, really well. And this time, the story involved a massive tech company harnessing all the streams of personal data flowing around out there in order to strengthen the manipulative muscle of the big, bad wolf seeking to end the American experiment.
So far, American democracy has survived. So far. But it won’t forever. That’s just how the story goes. Sometimes the good guys win. Sometimes they don’t. And so we shouldn’t get caught up in the details or the partisanship nonsense. The take away from a show like “Rabbit Hole” should be the reality that entities hell bent on tearing down American democracy exist. They exist in the form of forces both on the inside and the outside. Storytellers wouldn’t be able to repeatedly tell such believable stories based on this reality if it wasn’t real.
Our data is being harnessed for malevolent purposes. Top officials in all societal institutions are corruptible and compromised. If I can write it and make you believe it, someone is doing it. All we have to do, as American citizens (or global citizens), to delay the inevitable collapse of American democracy and the institutions upon which it has been founded, is to stop being suckers for truth, and instead focus on what’s real.
All the blich-blech about Trump’s ever-expanding criminality or Biden’s increasingly obvious dementia are distractions. Don’t go down those rabbit holes. Refuse to play the role you’ve been manipulated to play. Forget the facts. Forget the details. You have neighbors and a community. Not just the ones that fly the same flags as you. All of them. Don’t be polarized. Don’t be bullied by fear mongering. The golden rule. It’s that simple.
While all these paranoid thrillers are just stories, they feel real because the mechanisms are real. Undoubtedly, every contingency John Weir can play out in his mind is a reality out there somewhere. The only thing we can do is not do the thing we are expected to do. Instead we need to be human again, and treat each other as human. It makes a boring story. But in real life, boring is what we want.
From the Desk of DMB
You might have noticed I took a week off. We spent some time as a family with family. And it was good. This week, I’ve picked right back up and have had some success drawing out one of my characters who has up to this point been mostly in the background. But for my climactic moment to work, I’m going to need all my main characters to feel real. So this week, I’ve endeavored to bring the last of the main four into better focus. So far, so good. I’ve got more work on her to accomplish next week. Then it will be all about setting up the final few scenes and pulling everything together. I’m sure a few bits and pieces will be left dangling by the time I finish the first draft, but that’s what rewrites are for. This stage of the story is exciting. I’ve pushed through the amorphous slump of the middle pages and now I can see my way to the end. I just have to make it happen. No problem…
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