On narrative

If there is anything I have discovered in writing this blog, it is that I am fascinated by the power of narrative. It is the issue that I come back to, over and over, when analyzing my reactions to movies.

A motion picture, Syd Field tells us, is a story told in pictures. To write even a passable screenplay, it is necessary to comprehend and digest this definition. The story may not be everything about a movie, but it stands alongside photography itself as the two necessary foundations that make up a movie as we know it.

Part of the reason I've enjoyed writing this blog is that it feels like a break from the other side of my personality, which is consumed with current events, politics, and economics---the side that started to leak into here after I saw Watchmen, and which appeared again in the previous entry.

Lately it feels as if these two parts of my soul have been converging, and the issue of narrative strikes me as the unifying theme.

Narrative, I have learned, is powerful---very powerful. I used to hear people say this when I was in college literature classes, and at the time, I accepted it in a romantic sense, which was my nature back then. But now I have come to understand that this statement is true in a sense that is much deeper and more concrete than I could have comprehended in my early twenties.

Narrative has the power to define who we are in the most direct sense. It has the power to the delimit the contours of thoughts and feelings, not only on an individual level, but on a societal level as well.

Stories are vehicles for revelation and transformation. This is not only because they rehash archetypes deep within us. That speaks to the past. They have this power because they reach out to the new as well. This is the essence of creativity, and what drives the human spirit forward.

The canon of motion pictures, and in particular Hollywood motion pictures, is for all its deficiencies, the greatest body of art ever created and preserved by mankind. It stores the collective spirit of the American nation in the Twentieth Century. I personally believe that the preservation and furtherance of this art is the greatest source of hope for us---for all the world right now---because it is an unassailable fortress of a character of liberty and humanity that seems to have ebbed away in our current culture. Above all, this is why I am so passionate about understanding Classical cinema, and how cinema has changed in the Postmodern era.

History is a narrative as well. It is the story we tell ourselves as a nation, as a people, of how we got to where we are now.

Like any narrative, it is selective, a partial assembling of something resembling truth that may at times converge to a meaningful whole, at least fleetingly, to allow us glimpses of understanding of the great riparian flow of time in civilization.

Postmodernity asserts that this wholeness is an illusion, and that seeking it is a waste of time. Those who advocate this point-of-view assert that is arises out of greater wisdom, that it is an escape from the false paradigm of the Classical era in which truth was, falsely they claim, assumed to assemble into a comprehensible whole.

But I believe that this Postmodern view is itself a delusion. The reason is that for much of the Twentieth Century, especially over the last fifty years, the story of history we have been telling ourselves, that has been told to us, is flat out full of outrageous lies and distortions. The Postmodern era cannot converge because the pieces were never meant to fit into a whole. They were meant to confuse, to distract, and to obfuscate.

All that remains in the end is irony, which allows us temporary escape from the prison of the unconverging parade of lies.

Which brings me to where we are now. I believe that we are witnessing the collapse of the Postmodern False Narrative. The False Narrative can no longer be sustained. It has accumulated too many self-contradictions.

The characterization of 9/11 Truthers in the media is that we are all tin foil hat wearers. We are all rabidly insane, living in a swarm of delusions.

Yet almost everyone who seriously bothers to look at the hard evidence about what happened that day, and examines it with the spirit of an open mind, comes away with the same conclusion, namely that it is likely that the entire story we have been told is a fraud, and that it was probably an inside job, carried out with help from high level officials in the Bush Administration, and with domestic and foreign intelligence services.

Those of us who have made this journey know that it is not easy, because by itself, it forces one into a complete overhaul of one's interpretation of the United States, its government, and the American people. Simply put, this is not a place where most people are ready to go. It is very disturbing in many ways, and thus I have sympathy with those who are not yet ready to open their minds to the truth.

We know, however, that those who call us tin foil hat wearers are themselves the ones who have shut their minds to the truth. They are living that very same frenzied madness of falsehood. It has taken more and more effort to keep our collective hands over our ears, singing "la la la la" to keep out any bits of information that may start the process of erosion.

But it is happening. What has happened on Daily Kos over the last few days is a sign that the process is starting to accelerate. It is now stipulated that "everything we know about 9/11 is a probably a complete lie."

Yet it is still taboo to discuss what this statement might mean. To open the Pandora's box of that day, we must still agree in advance to come to the same conclusion as before. We can tinker with the edges of the picture, the essential features of the narrative must be preserved.

This is an untenable position, and it cannot last. The cracks are starting to widen. Many are going to lose their minds in the days ahead, and the entire apparatus of lies goes down in flames.

This is one reason why those of us who have made the leap are trying to reach out to those we know. It is a lot easier if you make the leap sooner, rather than later.

In the meantime, I'll keep writing about movies. I personally would not have been able to make this transition without the power of motion pictures. Art, I assert, always subverts power, even if it is created in chains. This is the nature of art.

Even as Postmodern movies had strived to elaborate the false narrative, they have exposed it and undermined it at every turn. This is the beauty of the process, the transformational magic of the Spirit that leaves me in awe, utterly humbled, and thankful that I could become aware of all this.