It’s Just a Story
It’s Just a Story
Is it possible to read a story and not enter into it; to write a story and not become part of the script?
When I was writing my first book, my family and I were living in Cambridge, England. Our young son, who was just nine years old at the time, decided to write a book as well. So every evening after school, he would get out his pad of paper and start dreaming his plot. Needless to say, every second page was filled with some kind of crisis. One day, I came to the table where I had my material all set up and I saw him seated there as well, pen in hand, pad in front of him, the weight of the world apparently on him as tears ran down his face. I immediately put aside all I was thinking of and asked him what on earth the matter was.
“I know it, I just know it,” he said between sobs.
“Know what?” I asked gently.
“I just know the dog is going to die.”
I had to pause to process what he was talking about and realized that the world of make-believe and his make-believe characters had taken over his own will to believe. It was amazing to see in his eyes the sense of inevitability from which he wanted to escape but couldn’t, even though it was in his power to do so. Frankly, I didn’t know whether to break him out of the role of storyteller or let him know that when you write a story, it tends to take on a life all its own. Such is the immense power of the imagination when it intersects with reality. This is actually how cultures are shaped.
It is one thing for this to happen in the mind of a nine-year-old who enters the world of make-believe; quite another for it to happen in the mind of an actor employed in the billion-dollar industry of sophisticated storytelling, the biggest imagination-controlling business in the world today. If Heath Ledger couldn’t break free from the story, being close to the script and knowing he was just acting, how can the audience break free from the story when they don’t know what is going on behind the scenes?
Watching a movie with my mother-in-law is worthy of a script all its own. She sits there almost in a trance, watching every move, and often she will call out to the character, “Watch out, there’s someone hiding behind the door!” I have a lot of fun reminding her that actually the actor knows better than she does that there is someone behind the door and that he is going to get mugged, and the only reason he appears to be unaware of it is that the director has told him to look that way. Not only that, he has practiced this a few times before it looks real enough for the director. Perhaps she has a greater grasp of the imagination; and it is true that there is fun in drama, even if it ushers us into the surreal and then traps us there.
The important point I am making is worthy of repetition. If the actors themselves, aware that they are playing roles, are unable to break free from the media and the message, how is it possible for the viewer to be freed from the stranglehold of the imagination? In fact, we go even one step further than crossing the line between the imagination and reality by deifying the actors. And movies become narratives played out by gods.
What we are witnessing, at the very least, is that the propensity within us to blur the lines between what is real and what is imagined has been deliberately taken advantage of by fiction writers and especially movies. Stories can alter one’s way of viewing things. The playwright or author is no longer writing the play or story. The play or story is writing the playwright or author. And, in turn, the playwright and the play rewrite our own stories. This is the real world of our time. The world of entertainment has become the most powerful means of propaganda, and the audience is unaware of how much it is being acted upon and manipulated, paying for it not only in cash but in having its dreams stolen.