Articulation problems

I’ve been having trouble, today, fitting words to the thoughts I’ve been having. Maybe it’s because I spent too much time “in my head” over the weekend. (I never realized, until taking a personality test last week that asked how much time you spend thinking, that most people don’t spend all their time mulling things over. That’s just my natural M.O.) But here goes:

I watch all these movies about love and relationships. They follow standard archetypal lines and, with a few exceptions, you can generally tell in the first five minutes who’s going to end up with whom by the movie’s close. Each form of emotional expression has a scripted response, such as the parent/spouse telling a frightened child/spouse in a dangerous situation, “I promise we’ll make it through this.” When you watch enough TV and movies, or read enough books, you know all the situations, all the inputs, and all the expected outputs. Even when people change things on you, it’s just a minor variation on a theme.

But more and more as I watch this stuff, I’m coming to the conclusion that I don’t trust anything about it. Movies (any sort of visual scripted entertainment) and books are a form of storytelling, a way to entertain ourselves with myths and the way things should be. (Rather than how they actually are.) But the storytellers also shape our idea of what the “right endings” are, and how they should come about. A heroine who falls in love with a hero the first time she sets eyes on him will end up riding off into the sunset with him (unless it’s supposed to be a tragedy and one or the other of them dies in the course of the story).

You don’t have one where a heroine falls in love at first sight but then gets over it. If she does, it’s because her real Prince Charming was just under her nose the whole time as she “fell in love with love” and was swept off her feet by the well-spoken imposter.

No, our fiction is well-ordered and stories must be told to a certain set of guidelines. This is all well and good if we remember that these stories are just stories, just someone’s idea of how they wish things could be. It’s when you can’t distinguish reality from fiction that you start having problems.

Because each of us sees ourselves as the protagonist of our own life stories…

…no, that’s not it. Starting over:

I do a lot of learning about social interactions from what I see in pop culture. Books, movies, TV… they all help me to categorize and understand the interweavings of human social dynamics and our relationships with each other. It’s generally effective–if nothing else, you’re able to see what shared myths we participate in, here in our culture, and what we’d like to be the case.

You know there’s, True Love and there’s Destiny, kismet, also the Platonic ideal that we are mere halves of the same person wandering around, looking for the Other to complete us. The idea that anything can be forgiven when real love exists between people. The idea that if you just “let it out” when you feel something, that everything will be made right and all will be solved in the end. The idea that nothing you feel can be false, that your “gut” is always right.

None of those are true, though–or at least, they’re not always true. (Which might be worse, since it’s unpredictable.) What feels like True Love generally can be recognized as infatuation, a few years later. And one person’s love for someone else may or may not be returned, for no reasons that anyone can seem to determine. You can feel spiritually drawn to someone, and yet they feel none of it in return. And “happily ever after” actually takes a LOT of work, and often isn’t happy at all.

But in a culture where stories have replaced the community as our sources of learning by example, I think we’re not able to recognize a lot of myths for the falsehoods that they are.

Back when novels were… well, novel… in the mid-1800s and such, reading fiction was considered in pious circles to be a no-no. You were reading “a pack of lies” and filling up your head with foolishness. Instead, you should do good honest work… because idle hands are the Devil’s playground… (am I mixing up anachronistic cliches here?)

I wonder if those well-intentioned Puritans weren’t on to something. I think that, much as a diet of cakes and chocolate would be unhealthy for the body, a diet of pure entertainment is unhealthy for mental and social development. We’ve lost our ability to negotiate between the wish-world of adolescent fantasy and the meat and potatoes world of genuine reality. What is real? What is a fantasy? Where does what I wish to be true leave off and what I know to be true begin?

I’m still not sure where I’m going with this line of thought… I feel as though I’ve grasped the edges of an insight that could be all-important, but I’m not sure what the shape of the finished insight is going to be. More later, I guess!