Deep Thought: The Stories We Tell, the Answers We Seek
Created | Updated Apr 29, 2023
Deep Thought: The Stories We Tell, the Answers We Seek
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there was a shady lawyer… |
I've just finished watching the end of Better Call Saul, the US television series about the strip mall lawyer who got in over his head with the drug dealers in Breaking Bad. The ending was sad, but hopeful, and as uplifting in its own way as a Sunday School lesson. The two series, created by Vince Gilligan, are studies in practical ethics.
That's not why most people like them. Most people like them because of the outrageous situations and at times over-the-top violence. But I like them for the moral philosophy.
I also like the stories because the first series, Breaking Bad, is a classic tragedy that would have been recognisable to Sophocles – once you explained to him what an Erlenmeyer flask was. Walter White's pride is a tragic flaw. If the ancient Athenians were writing this stuff the only thing they'd have added would have been an epilogue in Hades with White alongside Sisyphus, Midas, and Prometheus in some form of eternal torment.
Gilligan has said he's not sure he believes in heaven but can't not believe in hell. His characters are consistent, well-motivated, and suffer the consequences of their actions. If a character manages to come out alive, and has learned anything at all, that character has earned it. I recommend for your consideration the hard-won escape of Jesse Pinkman in the subsequent film El Camino (also part of the franchise), or the exemplary heroics of Nacho Vargas in Better Call Saul. This is fine stuff.
It also makes me realise how terrible most television dramas are.
Understandably, television drama – and here I include streaming services because that's our delivery system these days – is geared to the lowest common denominator in entertainment tastes for the most part. That means no hard-core porn, no unironic cannibalism, and no outright snuff movies. It also means no intellectual stuff unless it's well-camouflaged. No fair searching for meaning on the public's dime: consistent, repeatable, emotionally satisfying vicarious thrills are what are called for, and plenty of them.
This isn't new. It's been going on for thousands of years. How do I know? I've, er, studied these things. No, seriously, I had to: I was studying dead medieval languages, and other than the Bible and religious tracts, there's not much else to read besides these potboilers, a lot of which rhymed. You really like movies and serials with castles and dragons and such? I don't, largely because I've spent way too many hours translating the same junk out of Middle High German. That's all anybody read back in 1250: sword and sorcery. Exactly the same stuff. It was so common that by 1600, a satirist by the name of Cervantes used the trope of over-the-top fantasy fandom to write a satirical masterpiece.
As far as I can tell, humans in all times and places, probably all the way back to the Palaeolithic, have had exactly the same concerns and told exactly the same stories. One way to know this is to check out the Thompson Folk Index. It's a classification list of story motifs. If you're ever trying to write a novel or script and you get stuck for a plot, just look up the Thompson Folk Index.
J21.5. Do not leave the highway.
See? There's the plot for Deliverance right there. Just add banjos.
Think about Herakles. The cult is ancient in the Mediterranean region – and any WWF wrestler could pick up the lion skin any time and be a hit as the demigod. Some themes are made to last.
Which means, of course, that if you have the temerity to try and use literature or drama to probe deeper into the human condition you are facing an uphill battle. Frankly, hardly anybody wants you to. Mostly, you'll just make them mad.
If you want to go on and do it anyway, you'll have to get around the resistance of the public to anything that looks suspiciously like a New Idea. In that case it's a good idea to disguise your message well. I recommend an extra dose of violence. Satire? You can obscure your intentions with absurdist humour.
Take Breaking Bad. If you haven't seen it yet, it's a longish and horrible tragedy involving drug dealers in the desert, but it begins innocuously enough with a high school chemistry teacher finding out he has inoperable cancer. You aren't two episodes into the show, though, before a partially-dissolved corpse falls through a ceiling in the worst-possible illustration of the maxim, 'You should have paid more attention in class.' This scene distracts nicely from the real moral of the story, which is: there is a fragile social contract which holds the world together, one which humans violate at their peril. A terrible price is paid for transgressing the rules – and that price is paid by innocent and guilty alike.
Back in the early 19th Century, and again in the early 20th Century, there were trends that boosted literacy and the availability of printed entertainment. Both times, the observant student of media would notice a tendency of some people – the ones who considered themselves serious and educated – to criticise other people, people they considered less serious than themselves, for reading too many novels or too much magazine fiction. And they'd have a point: 99% of that stuff is junk. Always has been, always will be.
You have to really sift through all that to find the 1% – the sneaky buzzard who's figured out how to use those ancient garbage story templates to search for meaning among the dross. I think they're worth the search, but then I would. Your mileage may vary.
Anyway, the whole saga's on Netflix if you're interested. The last season of Better Call Saul has Carol Burnett as a guest star, which is also a plus. Amazing work for an actor who first starred on Broadway in the 1950s.
