The Plot-Driven Society
The new season of 24 is under way. 24 is an odd phenomenon: although it is simplistic, nonsensical, and frequently riddled with notions that anybody outside of the Bush White House and Fox News would reject (torture: fine and good as long as the good guys do it; nuclear blasts: not really a threat if they don't happen in town), it is addictive.
It's the ticking clock. It pops up at commercial breaks and assorted other intervals. And the quick cuts between various story lines. Everything moves plenty fast so there's no time or incentive to stop and think about it.
Same is true of John Grisham's novels (or at least the two I managed to read): cardboard characters and plot holes big enough to fly a 747 through whizz past in a frenzy of page-turning.
This is what writer types call plot-driven fiction: events so fast and furious that mere niceties like character development, theme, or even reason and sense may be left by the wayside. The best authors of plot-driven fiction don't neglect those other aspects, but it seems that those things must slow them down just enough, because the 24s and The Firms of this world tend to be more popular. It's popcorn for the mind, and it races right through you without wasting any time being digested.
Fine if that's what entertains you. The problem is when it infects more critical aspects of our lives.
Someone (I've forgotten who, or where) said that the candidacies of John Kerry and Al Gore were both doomed by their use of subordinate clauses. (Both campaigns had other problems than their sentence structure, IMO, but that's beside the point for this discussion.) Why follow a complex sentence--a complex thought--when it is so much easier to grasp a simple declarative sentence, especially one that expresses a simple, unnuanced, black-and-white concept?
Keep throwing new images at people, new sound bytes or new threats, and they will tend to follow along with them like a 24 plotline. No time to stop and go back and reexamine the foundation of the notion, the background of the story, the meaning of it all, whether an argument holds together under close examination.
Some people can handle large quantities of stimuli and critically assess them all (I think first of my friend and Clarion classmate Cory Doctorow), but most people are sufficiently wrapped up in the minutiae of daily living--that ticking clock is the limited number of hours in the day to accomplish work, family, household, and personal responsibilities--that it just flows through them without stopping for analysis. And so we have become the plot-driven society.
Notice too that in 24 you get a lot of ineffectual and/or corrupt leaders? Probably not a coincidence. For 24 the plots depend on it; while here in the plot-driven society it's just a side effect. When candidates' cases are made in snippets and 30-second ads, and analysis of their positions and arguments is left to talking heads whose ratings depend on being just as catchy and concise, the niceties of substance can easily slip past unexamined. A plot-driven culture will select for the candidate who can survive best in that environment--who keeps his arguments concise and easy to grab onto, and doesn't slow us down or overcomplicate our already overfull lives.
If that's the society we want to be, then so be it.
But I am one of those dinosaurs who, while enjoying a page-turner now and again as a sweet treat, prefers substance. I enjoy a book or film or TV show I can sink my teeth into, with some substance and subtext, the kind of thing you get something new from on repeated reading or watching. (Rob is currently reading Finnegans Wake in one of his classes, which is just about the pinnacle of substantial reading, and may well exceed my ability to stick with it. More power to those who do.) And I would like to be able to vote for candidates whose entire worldviews are not summarizable in a sentence, who understand that issues are complex and demonstrate their willingness to grapple with those complexities. But in a plot-driven society, even the candidates who may fit that bill are compelled to hide their substance behind repetition of easily digestible metaphors and catch phrases in order to compete.
And we as a nation are the poorer for it.
It's the ticking clock. It pops up at commercial breaks and assorted other intervals. And the quick cuts between various story lines. Everything moves plenty fast so there's no time or incentive to stop and think about it.
Same is true of John Grisham's novels (or at least the two I managed to read): cardboard characters and plot holes big enough to fly a 747 through whizz past in a frenzy of page-turning.
This is what writer types call plot-driven fiction: events so fast and furious that mere niceties like character development, theme, or even reason and sense may be left by the wayside. The best authors of plot-driven fiction don't neglect those other aspects, but it seems that those things must slow them down just enough, because the 24s and The Firms of this world tend to be more popular. It's popcorn for the mind, and it races right through you without wasting any time being digested.
Fine if that's what entertains you. The problem is when it infects more critical aspects of our lives.
Someone (I've forgotten who, or where) said that the candidacies of John Kerry and Al Gore were both doomed by their use of subordinate clauses. (Both campaigns had other problems than their sentence structure, IMO, but that's beside the point for this discussion.) Why follow a complex sentence--a complex thought--when it is so much easier to grasp a simple declarative sentence, especially one that expresses a simple, unnuanced, black-and-white concept?
Keep throwing new images at people, new sound bytes or new threats, and they will tend to follow along with them like a 24 plotline. No time to stop and go back and reexamine the foundation of the notion, the background of the story, the meaning of it all, whether an argument holds together under close examination.
Some people can handle large quantities of stimuli and critically assess them all (I think first of my friend and Clarion classmate Cory Doctorow), but most people are sufficiently wrapped up in the minutiae of daily living--that ticking clock is the limited number of hours in the day to accomplish work, family, household, and personal responsibilities--that it just flows through them without stopping for analysis. And so we have become the plot-driven society.
Notice too that in 24 you get a lot of ineffectual and/or corrupt leaders? Probably not a coincidence. For 24 the plots depend on it; while here in the plot-driven society it's just a side effect. When candidates' cases are made in snippets and 30-second ads, and analysis of their positions and arguments is left to talking heads whose ratings depend on being just as catchy and concise, the niceties of substance can easily slip past unexamined. A plot-driven culture will select for the candidate who can survive best in that environment--who keeps his arguments concise and easy to grab onto, and doesn't slow us down or overcomplicate our already overfull lives.
If that's the society we want to be, then so be it.
But I am one of those dinosaurs who, while enjoying a page-turner now and again as a sweet treat, prefers substance. I enjoy a book or film or TV show I can sink my teeth into, with some substance and subtext, the kind of thing you get something new from on repeated reading or watching. (Rob is currently reading Finnegans Wake in one of his classes, which is just about the pinnacle of substantial reading, and may well exceed my ability to stick with it. More power to those who do.) And I would like to be able to vote for candidates whose entire worldviews are not summarizable in a sentence, who understand that issues are complex and demonstrate their willingness to grapple with those complexities. But in a plot-driven society, even the candidates who may fit that bill are compelled to hide their substance behind repetition of easily digestible metaphors and catch phrases in order to compete.
And we as a nation are the poorer for it.
posted by Maines at 1:27 AM
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