Blame it on Aristotle
For several years, as a high
school English teacher, one of my favourite units to teach was Aristotle’s Poetics.
This short and ancient book is the bible of storytelling. It’s still so relevant today that, in
Hollywood, one of the hottest ticket for aspiring film writers is *Robert McKee’s Story Seminar which is his take on
successful scriptwriting based on Poetics. McKee’s approach has since been adopted by
novelists, comic book writers and story-tellers from many other genres.
Do you remember the plot graph
from grade 9 English? Inciting Incident,
rising action, complications due to inciting incident, reversal, climax, and denouement…
Is that all ringing a bell? The
terminology has changed over the years, but it all started with Aristotle, 450
BC. Or at least, Aristotle was the first
to commit it to parchment. I’m sure that
there were ancients telling stories orally and that the best ones followed the
same intuitive rules later established in Aristotle’s Poetics.
Regardless of the historical
period in question, story-telling
was not a cultural force like it is today; it was not a powerful society-shaper
like it is today. The key phrase above
being: “like it is today.” Just so that
I’m clear, I believe that storytelling has always been a cultural force. Storytelling has always been a means to preserve
and transmit religious values, an attempt to understand the meaning of human
existence or a way for tribes to elevate the importance of genealogical affiliation.
These are but to name a few. A historian might laugh at my generalizations –
and if I’ve gotten something grossly wrong, please tell me in the comment box –
but I’m simply setting up my main point.
Unless we learn to discriminate good stories from bad stories, well-told
from poorly-told, profound from shallow, we become mindless consumers of media
that, whether we like it or not, will shape our thinking and our behavior.
According to Aristotle, good storytelling hinges on some basic
premises:
Mimesis is imitation or
representation. This is the classical
notion that story should represent life as it is, as we think it is and as it should be. The key, according
to Aristotle, that Art imitating life at the highest level has all three of the
above.
Breaking down mimesis into thirds: if story merely represented life as it is, we wouldn’t consume it
(unless we were extremely voyeuristic and/or had no life). If story gave us life as we think it is, it would be expository and/or philosophical
in nature, thereby losing the magic of story that lends itself to the willing
suspension of disbelief. If story gave us
life as it should be it would devolve into the didactic and/or the romantic.
True art, a great story, gives us all three. The problem, I think, is that many
of the stories that are consumed by pop culture give us any given third of
Aristotle’s equation. That is, we have
a) a lot of thinly disguised political rants posing as stories, b) a rash in
the reality genre (which, ironically, from a media construct point of view, is
not reality at all) and c) movie theatres and bookstore shelves full of
mindless fiction.
Consider the two quotes below – the first dealing with the
publishing mogul Harlequin and the second dealing with one of the biggest money
making industries, bar none: Hollywood.
“Harlequin's success in 2012 confirms that the
company is moving toward its stated goal of being the world's leading publisher
of books for women. 92 Harlequin titles enjoyed a total of 313 weeks on the New
York Times bestseller lists in 2012 with four titles achieving the coveted #1
position. Since its inception, Harlequin has sold approximately 6.28 billion
books” (harlequin.com)
“The Hollywood industry is one of the most
powerful and influential enterprises in the world…. The goal of Hollywood, inasmuch as it is a
business, is to generate box office receipts.
Society, in return, receives the impact of Hollywood’s impressions and
the messages they instill….
“The drive for profit and social responsibility
is the paradox that faces not only the Hollywood industry but exists at the
core of every institution with a focus on economic voracity…
“What will be the evolution of Hollywood Power in
the 21st Century?” (www. lowsoninternational.com/Articles.html)
So with Hollywood and Harlequin and the like
leading the charge of modern day story-telling, what mimesis of life are we consuming? If media constructs reality, what
“reality”, what social, political and moral values are we being sold? Is it no
wonder that we – like no other age that precedes us – feel the need to find
ourselves, experience mid-life crises and think that happiness is connected to
body image, and contingent on the next thing we purchase?
Mythos (plot) involves
a unity of action and purpose and ultimately leads to a climactic reversal and
recognition. If only life were that simple… In the script of your own life, you
don’t have a singular inciting incident, a series of complications, a reversal
of fortune, and an a-ha moment after
which all is made right. Life doesn’t
mirror the linear simplicity of tragedy either. You don’t have a singular flaw
that leads to your eventual downfall. Real life is not a straight line or a
decision tree. And you are not the
master of your own fate or demise like the protagonist in a story often is.
Happiness or sadness, for some, often does start
with some inciting incident or situation.
More often, however, happiness is made in the lifelong journey of
conscious and sub-conscious movements toward others and self; mistakes and
successes in no particular order; blessings and curses; and luck and
misfortune. Man is created in the image
of God (Genesis 1:27) who is love (I John 4:8); yet the heart of man is desperately
wicked – who can understand it (Jeremiah 17:9)? That’s a tangled paradoxical
mess of hermeneutics to unravel.
Peripeteia as
anagnorisis -- an abrupt reversal of action accompanied
with the change in the protagonist. Towards the end of A Christmas Carol, for example, when Scrooge realizes when waking
from his nightmare (peripeteia) that
his last vision showed him things as they might be and not as they are, he has
the epipheny (anagnorisis) that he
can make things right. I love Charles
Dickens, but life is not like that. Real
people more often have a lot of mini successes and failures in no particular
order. We stumble through life regardless
of how intentional we are about knowing ourselves, and getting better is more
often an accumulation of unoticed good deeds performed by us and for us – and
in my mind, ultimately conditional upon the grace of God (and the recongnition
thereof) – and much less a case of us playing the role of our own story’s
protagonist with fully fledge dramatic peripeteia
and anagnorisis.
Telos is the "goal" or
endpoint of the plot. The plot embodies the telos of the drama or the epic; to
grasp the plot is to understand both the unity and the purpose of the actions
that are represented. Once, again life isn’t a singularly linear set of events. Very few of us fight through an obstacle to find that singular purpose for
which we were created and then go on to fulfill that calling on our lives.
Finally, I feel like I should make this point.
I’m not saying that pulp fiction, and mainstream Hollywood films are bad and
that serious fiction and indie films are good. I love all books and films. I
read everything from Grisham to Shakespeare; I watch foreign films, indie films
and Hollywood blockbusters. But I see all media as a construct; and I see it as
filled with implicit and explicit values; and finally I see it as something
that is ultimately driven by commerce.
As such, I hope that I’m discriminating.
This is why I loved teaching Media Studies which
we always started with a unit in Media Literacy which has 8 Key Principles, among
which are these 3: Media is a construct (there is always a wizard behind the
curtain working the media magic); Media constructs reality (because of the
volume of media we consume, it will in some way shape our view of reality); and
Media contains ideological and value messages.
One of the highest compliments that a former
student of mine paid me after taking my media studies course was to tell me one
day, “Mr. Maiolo, thanks for ruining movies for me.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Before your course, I could just watch movies
and enjoy them; now, I’m asking: What are the implicit and explicit values of
the film? Who created it? What are its
political and/or social implications?
How is it trying to influence my behaviours and attitudes?”
I feel like I couldn’t conclude without making it
clear that I’m not really blaming Aristotle.
His Poetics is a profoundly informative book. How could he possibly have anticipated the
media-driven, global village in which we live? If I was less concerned with
being clever and more concerned with being accurate, I’d have entitled this
post something like “What Would Aristotle Say if he Were Alive?”
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* the last I checked, Robert McKee’s Story Seminar – a four day
workshop – costs $825 US.
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