This literary trope is ruining civil discourse - The Dallas Morning News

israelob.blogspot.com

There’s a maxim in screenwriting that says a protagonist should offer some indication of virtue very early in the film. Holding the door for someone, picking up something dropped, offering some small kindness to signal the audience that they can trust the character, root for this person. The shorthand screenwriters use for this trope is “save the cat.”

In the pilot episode of the Netflix smash hit House Of Cards released in 2013, audiences met a protagonist with an endearing smile, a comfortable Carolina drawl, and Machiavellian political designs. Congressman Frank Underwood steps out of his house in the opening scene in response to a screeching noise in the street. He discovers that someone has run over his neighbors' dog. The animal is badly injured. Underwood dispatches his bodyguard to alert the neighbors, and then he stoops in the street and suffocates the dog.

That moment was not just a clever bit of inside baseball for filmmakers. It was the crystallization of an unmistakable trend in modern American storytelling. This is the age of the antihero: Don Draper the cynical, egotistical, adulterous alcoholic in Mad Men; Walter White the mild-mannered school teacher turned tyrannical drug lord in Breaking Bad. Mildred Ratched, the scheming and sadistic nurse in the brand-new Netflix prequel to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. These are heroes without virtue. In fact they are heroes whose defining characteristic is the rejection of virtue. These are protagonists who don’t save cats; they kill dogs. And their brand of cynicism is coloring our civil discourse.

Jessica Hooten Wilson said we have Fyodor Dostoyevsky to thank for this. Wilson is the Louise Cowan Scholar in Residence at the University of Dallas and author of books about Dostoyevsky and Walker Percy. She said Dostoyevsky’s novel Notes From Underground marks the beginning of the modern antihero motif. It was written against a backdrop of philosophical conflict between Enlightenment thinkers who insisted that humans are primarily defined by their thoughts, and romantic poets who imagined humans as passion centers whose deepest need is to express their inward uniqueness.

Dostoyevsky’s protagonist, known to scholars as the Underground Man, rejects both sources of identity and sets about to define himself on his own terms. But he is incapacitated by sloth and self-loathing such that he retreats to the framework of fiction only to be further tormented by the space between the stories and his reality. He conflates love with domination and sovereignty with humiliation, and descends into a sort of existential doom loop. Wilson said modern antiheroes follow a similar pattern: a model of madness brought on by the rejection of models.

“We’re at a place of completely distrusting models. There cannot be people worth uplifting,” Wilson said. “We’re so distrustful of them we think we have to constantly expose that they’re not good. But it’s impossible to not put them in front of us as models. We will end up searching for a model. We will imitate something.”

Hence Frank Underwood.

Compare that ghoulish congressman against the character who is possibly the most famous American political silver screen hero: Sen. Jefferson Smith in the 1939 classic Mr. Smith Goes To Washington. Jimmy Stewart played a doe-eyed idealist whose only platform is patriotism and a summer camp for boys. Even that sentence is cringeworthy to modern readers.

As early as 1939, Washington is the narrative seat of corruption, but the hero takes it on with no power, no brilliant legal scheme and not a single gun. Smith only has virtue, or as his love interest Clarissa Saunders calls it, “Plain decent everyday common rightness. And this country could use some of that.”

You said it, Saunders.

Independent Hollywood producer Joshua Stutzman said flaws have always helped audiences identify with protagonists, be they hero or antihero.

“That resonates with our own struggle, the things we like least about ourselves,” he said. “If it’s not blurry we haven’t created a believable world.”

Or as Emily Dickinson wrote, “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant.”

But realism can go to seed. A story in which no one beats the odds or rises above his or her circumstances may not be on-the-nose, but it also won’t be heroic.

The antihero motif isn’t new to American political stories. Citizen Kane may be the oldest and proudest example. Nor are all modern stories so cynical. Presidents Josiah Bartlet of The West Wing and Andrew Shepherd of The American President, both creations of writer Aaron Sorkin, inspired hopeful confidence that American presidents could be genuinely good. But those characters seem quaint in the year 2020.

Stutzman said even though the antihero has been around a long time, our exposure to him has increased, and that has changed our imaginations.

“The antihero is so prominent, has it desensitized us, and now it’s affecting everything including our political choices? We’re seeing so much of these characters with these horrible ways of operating and horrible ways of treating people, that now we’ve started to think that’s acceptable,” Stutzman said.

To modern audiences, the virtue of the antihero is that he’s nobody’s fool. He can’t be duped. But, as Wilson pointed out, that only makes him the dupe of a failed philosophy.

“If you’re never going to be taken advantage of, you’re never going to be vulnerable,” Wilson said. “You’re going to be Don Draper taking advantage of everyone around you.”

The stage and page have seen this shift as well as the screen. Dallas Summer Musicals is in line to host a traveling company of Sorkin’s Broadway stage adaptation of To Kill A Mockingbird. Atticus Finch is an enduring embodiment of “plain decent everyday common rightness.” That is, until 2015 when Go Set A Watchman upended the order and outed him as a racist. (That example may be anachronistic since Watchman isn’t truly a sequel, but the effect is the same.)

Likewise, modern retellings of classics from The Odyssey to Perry Mason have been populated with amoral protagonists.

Lin Manuel Miranda’s Alexander Hamilton is no antihero, but that’s owing as much to the source material as its treatment. His crowning virtue is being vocal about his opinions, a morally neutral condition which finds its contrast in the equally neutral talk-less-smile-more character of Aaron Burr.

And then there are those uniquely American creations called superheroes. Surely, the Avengers embody virtues like courage, optimism and self-sacrifice. The clean-cut Boy Scout Steve Rogers won’t even let his fellow heroes curse. But why do we cast those heroes in comic fantasy worlds? Could it be we’re so uncomfortable with virtue in the real world that we have to make some excuse for it? Could it be that our faith in great institutions has been despoiled so often that we instinctively reject invitations to hope? In the world populated with pandemics, politicians, scandals, layoffs and crime, virtue and optimism are things we must be suspicious of, as in The Wire, or laugh at, as in Ted Lasso.

Wilson said superhero virtue is more about manners than goodness. That’s why Captain America can scold his friends for cursing but turn vigilante in Civil War.

“He still doesn’t have something he’s subordinated to, other than America and power,” Wilson said. “Power is the only thing left that we can make a hero out of.”

The idea of subordination brings us back to Dostoyevsky. Years after Notes From Underground, Dostoyevsky wrote his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov. There are three brothers in the story. Ivan is the rationalist. Dmitri is the romantic. But Alyosha chooses a third way. Contra the Underground Man, Alyosha finds freedom in submitting himself to the image of God in his fellow human. In other words, he finds virtue. That makes Alyosha seem naive to other characters, the very sort of you-can’t-fool-me characters that may represent modern audiences, the very characters that are so busy “resonating” with antiheroes they miss the beauty of the story.

C.S. Lewis wrote that there are fairy tales that tell us the truth and there are fairy tales that lie to us. Like the politicians we elect, antiheroes may tell us the truth, but only if we don’t want to be lied to.

Ryan Sanders is a pastor at Irving Bible Church and an opinion writer for The Dallas Morning News.

Let's block ads! (Why?)

"discourse" - Google News
November 08, 2020 at 03:00PM
https://ift.tt/2Ih3xts

This literary trope is ruining civil discourse - The Dallas Morning News
"discourse" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2KZL2bm
https://ift.tt/2z7DUH4