Storyville

Turning every issue into a drama is warping public policy.

David Link from the January 1995 issue

(Page 2 of 6)

This statement of the facts is conspicuously devoid of the suffering the law inflicted on the main characters. The tone is distanced, passive, legalistic. There is no adverbial assistance, no invoking of the human plight the individual victims of such laws endured. The point of view is that of the dispassionate Court.

It is not at all hard to imagine a far more dramatic recitation of the facts. Brown, in fact, has been criticized for its reliance on sociological materials about the psychological effects of segregation on black children. But it is a world apart from the dramatic narratives in Callins. The psychological studies show up in Brown, but the children are still only abstractions. A modern judge could easily have found room to recount some of the details that the 1954 Court subsumed into the phrase, "they have been denied admission to schools attended by white children."

We live in an age that is supersaturated with specifics, with pathos, with drama. We are now entering the second full generation that has grown to adulthood with television's relentless storytelling as its context. We are exposed to more dramas every day than any culture in history, and that familiarity has now become an expectation. We aren't just used to drama, we seldom pay attention to anything else.

But the expectation of drama makes public debate much more difficult. Our craving for stories, our perception of ourselves as audience members, undermines our ability to carry out the far more important function that we all have as democratic decision makers. As citizens who have been given a say in making our own political destiny, we need to know the facts about the issues we and our elected representatives have to decide. But the facts we need--the big picture, the statistical patterns, the relevant general principles, the hard data--are deeply buried in the dramatic stories we crave. The problem is not that we can't separate facts from fiction, the problem is we can't separate facts from drama. And it's hard to get facts these days in any other way.

"If only it had happened somewhere else, in some other country, and we'd just read about it in the papers, one could discuss it quietly, examine the question from all points of view and come to an objective conclusion....But when you're involved yourself, when you suddenly find yourself up against the brutal facts you can't help feeling directly concerned--the shock is too violent for you to stay cool and detached."

--Eugene Ionesco, Rhinoceros

In Quentin Tarantino's film, Reservoir Dogs, one of the characters, a cop, goes undercover to infiltrate a jewelry store robbery some hoods are planning. To pull off the ruse, the cop is coached by an undercover pal to tell a tale from his fabricated life, called the "Commode Story," to help convince the caper's mastermind that he is really a criminal. The cop's coach reinforces the importance of being specific--it is details that matter. The cop rehearses the story over and over, perfecting his performance, going over the minutiae.

Then, in a restaurant, we see him begin telling the tale to the people he is supposed to reassure. His audience is skeptical at first, but they listen. He draws them in as he relates the background of the drug sale, and his sudden need to go to the bathroom which sets the Commode Story in motion. Unknown to him, he relates, four cops and a drug-sniffing police dog are hanging out in the head. When he gets to this complication, the cop's audience, nodding in sympathy, is fully engaged in the story. They know what it's like.

As the undercover cop reaches the part in the story where he enters the bathroom, Tarantino cuts away from the restaurant where the story is being told, and places us in the very scene the cop is relating. Suddenly, we are in the bathroom, where the cops are prattling away; there is the police dog, a beautiful German Shepherd. The undercover cop, who in the story characterizes himself as a run-of-the-mill drug peddler, enters and freezes as he sees the dog. The dog begins barking. Tarantino then cuts back and forth between the cop telling the tale, and the tale the cop is telling.

It's a daring scene in an even more daring movie, but what is so fascinating about it is that it's about the whole process of telling dramatic stories. The undercover cop is manipulating reality to achieve a specific end, and, even as observers, we get caught up in the manipulation. When we first get into the bathroom, there is absolutely no doubt about whose point of view we are there with--a criminal's. That empathetic response is the power of drama--it alters our point of view and expands our picture of the world.

As this century draws to its close, we tell each other more stories--and as a result have more opportunities to view the world through eyes other than our own--than any other culture in history. On any given day, television alone gives us access to many hundreds of stories, either completely enacted (as in movies or fictional television shows), emerging (television news), or some combination (TV news magazines, daytime talk shows, soap operas). And that does not take into account newspapers, magazines, movies, comic books, plays, the ever-increasing events that amass into history, radio dramas, or the gossip we trade at work. The stock of stories available to nearly every one of us has spiraled into almost uncountable numbers.

Our lives are haunted or charmed, depending on your point of view, by old episodes of I Love Lucy and Hill Street Blues and The Twilight Zone, the brooding tragedy of The Godfather, and the whimsy of Tootsie. Every day, the news presses us with the immediacy and inflated importance of its reports, and even when we know we're being conned, we play along because we love the rush of a story. Television is more full of Bearded Ladies and Two-Headed Babies than any circus sideshow ever was: the Zsa Zsa Gabor cop-slapping spectacle; the day Phil Donahue wore a dress, or the guy threw the chair on Geraldo; O.J. Simpson, Tonya and Nancy, Lorena Bobbitt, Heidi Fleiss, Michael Jackson, Lyle and Erik Menendez.

But there is this difference from a circus sideshow: Today we want more than just a peek at the freak--we want to know what the life of a Bearded Lady is like, what the parents of a Two-Headed Baby were feeling when they learned the news. Our constant immersion in the sea of stories has accustomed us to the idea that everyone's point of view counts. Our desire to know the story is one part voyeurism, one part escapism, one part genuine human sympathy, but the result is reshaping us in some important ways. Nancy Kerrigan's pain, as she shouted out, "Why me?" is now part of our national consciousness. We collectively felt her pain, saw the world through her eyes. That fact has consequences.

"Faith slips--and laughs, and rallies--
Blushes, if any see--
Plucks at a twig of Evidence--
And asks a Vane, the way--
Much Gesture, from the pulpit--
Strong Hallelujahs roll--
Narcotics cannot still the Tooth
That nibbles at the soul--"
--Emily Dickinson

The dramatic style gets its vitality from the most brutal fact imaginable in a society that believes in science--the fact that certainty is impossible. Dating back to Aristotle and Plato, Western societies have had an obsession with objective reality and a correlative concern with subjectivity. But specifically since Newton, we have become mad about answers, about certainty, about science. Legal systems, theories of psychology, religions, child-rearing guides, and even artistic doctrines have been devised on "scientific" principles. Ambiguity and uncertainty are the enemy of such systems, guesswork the foe to be conquered. Absolute certitude and predictability are seen as achievable goals.