On philosophy and storytellingText by Justin E. H. Smith
The Matrix © 1999–2003 by Jamie Zawinski
Philosophers – into whose guild life has thrown me, for better or worse – have generally not been particularly interested in storytelling as a defining feature of human existence. They prefer to stick with the standard Linnaean definition of our species as Homo sapiens, the knowing man, rather than the alternative coined by ethnologist Kurt Ranke in 1967: Homo narrans, the man who narrates.
When reflection on the nature of reality gets too close to a reflection on narrative, many philosophers balk, pull back, and redefine their terms. In his 1947 book Meaning and Necessity: A Study in Semantics and Modal Logic, Rudolf Carnap preferred to speak not of “possible worlds”, but rather of “state descriptions”. A possible world is something you spin out in a science-fiction novel; a state description is a sober cataloguing with no hint of wonder. Yet for the great modal theorist G.W. Leibniz, who coined the phrase “possible worlds” in his Theodicy of 1710, these were conceived in direct connection to the imaginative output of the proto-science-fiction authors of his era, who wondered, among other things, whether if each star was the centre of its own world, with habitable planets orbiting it, were those planets’ inhabitants bound by such things as original sin and the possibility of redemption in Christ? Do the narratives that structure our own world, in other words, maintain their validity across worlds?
It is perhaps significant that the Wachowski sisters’ The Matrix (1999) is widely hailed as the great philosophical blockbuster of recent generations, while the nearly contemporaneous Jim Carrey vehicle, Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998), is generally not recognised as philosophically relevant at all. The former film is an iteration on the thought experiment that runs as a connecting thread through all of Western epistemology, from Plato’s cave allegory to René Descartes’ evil deceiver to Gilbert Harman’s brain in a vat, conceived in 1973. It wants to know how we can know that the bare contents of our perceptions are real, how we can know whether we aren’t being systematically deceived in taking our ordinary sensory experience for the world itself. Weir’s film by contrast does not have nearly so distinguished an ancestry in Western philosophical tradition, even if its central conceit is one that binds Western culture much more intimately to universal human patterns. It is a reflection not on the relationship between our bare perceptions and reality, but between narrative and reality.
One of the reasons why the Truman question – what if our existence is a narrative construction? – is not one that interests philosophers is that the default position for most people, in most places and times, is that this is precisely what it is. The idea is so deep in us as not to seem to give rise to any “sceptical problem” that philosophers can be called in to resolve in the way that Descartes, Kant, and others resolved the problem of the existence of the external world. It’s a problem too deep to be noticed as a problem, which is perhaps just a way of saying it isn’t a problem at all.
Philosophy, or at least the nerd-adjacent, largely Anglophone analytic tradition that trained me up, takes the bare percepts of non-narrative virtual reality to be its sort of problem.
Climatic staircase in the sky scene from Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998)
Consequently those intellectually downstream from the academy – notably Elon Musk, via key mediating figures such as Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom† – end up wondering whether reality itself is a video game. Such games can of course themselves have narrative structure, but when philosophers and their tech-world fanboys wonder whether reality is a video game, they are conceiving reality as a bare percept without narrativity. Even so-called continental philosophy attends most sharply to literature when literature attends most sharply to the phenomenology of conscious experience, and so begins to drift away from its classical purview of straightforward storytelling. Consider, for example, how much attention is paid by thinkers in this tradition to Marcel Proust’s psychologically penetrating oeuvre, and how little to conventional genre fiction.
The Truman Show is a particularly convoluted sort of fiction, as it concerns a form of popular entertainment – “reality” television – that is purportedly not narrative, but rather a direct transmission of real life. This genre rose over the course of the 1990s, most notably with an MTV production whose name should have set off philosophical alarm bells: The Real World, which first aired in 1992 and went on for 33 consecutive seasons. There was nothing particularly noumenal about the lives of the vapid young Americans put on display there, and if the initial reason for the proliferation of copycat series on other networks seems to have been nothing more than cost-cutting, this does not mean that the only lessons we can learn by studying “reality” TV are of the financial kind.
Certainly, the production budget drops considerably when you no longer have to pay professional actors, and can instead make use of real people who have been made to believe that exposure is its own sort of remuneration. Initially, money was also saved on the presumption that the new genre, in fidelity to “reality”, would not require that special class of Hollywood creatures who are not quite stars, but certainly not commoners either: the writers.
Today, the early contributions to reality TV look like pure cinéma-vérité compared to their descendants, which have slowly but surely re-upped their production budgets, sprouted writers’ rooms of their own, and plugged their “real” cast of human characters into pre-conceived scenarios much in the same way one or several dogs have helped unconsciously to realise the complex plot conceits of the various instalments in the Benji film franchise (1974–). Financial calculation forced producers to reckon with “reality”, but when this approach proved profitable, soon enough a new layer of narrativity was again superadded to the artless life-dramas of the volunteers.
The Truman Show appeared at just the moment when reality television was establishing its predominance, and it captured the disconcerting Benji-like possibility of our lives. It does not ask whether our lives themselves have been scripted, but rather whether our direct, raw, “real” experience has been shot, edited and repackaged with a narratively compelling force that it does not itself possess.
The film imagines the situation of its protagonist as something of a metaphysical horror, a dystopian entrapment akin to that of the British Prisoner series (1967). A lot, however, has changed since 1998. The subsequent decades, in fact, have witnessed the emergence of a new form of life in which young people long to break into the dome from which Truman managed to escape, or at least to conceptualise their own lives as occuring on an all-encompassing Truman-style “set”.
It did not take long at all for the expression “jump the shark” – from a late episode of Happy Days (1974–1984) in which the Fonz flies on waterskis over the head of one such apex predator, a stunt widely seen as marking the moment this sitcom’s writers had grown either too desperate or too lazy for the show to have much of a future – to migrate in popular usage from the description of other sitcoms (“30 Rock has jumped the shark”) to the characterisation of our own lives (“Let’s be honest,” a girlfriend might now say to her unresponsive man, “our relationship has jumped the shark”).
The real jump, of course, was from the realm of narrative entertainment to “reality”, and here Happy Days provided just one of many formulae for the expression of a desire to be saved by “the writers”. That this was in fact a new species of polytheism was somewhat concealed by the irony with which it was typically expressed, though of course the same thing could be said about nearly every ideological construction that has appeared in the present century, from the tankies’ inscrutable celebration of the Tiananmen Square massacre to “Weird Catholic Twitter’s” call for a post-democratic global government by a council of bishops.
Over the course of the 2010s, in short, it became common for young people on social media to seek narrative cohesion for their own lives, ironically or otherwise, from entertainments that, unlike lived “reality”, had been carefully crafted and predetermined by a roomful of writers. This process is signalled, for example, in the common meme depicting a college freshman sitting in a new dorm, saying or thinking something to the effect that “this show’s new season is just beginning”, where “the show”, sadly, is the kid’s own small life. The sort of people who would likely never commit in earnest to the reality of the fates or the gods now joke instead about the transcendental scenarists who shape their own lived reality.
The so-called “Cogito argument” of René Descartes (1596-1650) holds that we can have certain knowledge of the fact that we exist from the fact that we are thinking. The world as we perceive it could be the deception of an evil deceiver, but we would have to exist first, in order to be deceived.
The Benji franchise, recently rebooted by Netflix, was launched by a 1974 film about the adventures of the eponymous golden retriever, who rescues two children from his adoptive family when they are kidnapped.
This habit is more revealing than it might appear. Other than the formidable Dick Van Dyke Show decades ago, and a few other small exceptions, up until the last few years the public has not seemed to have been generally aware that TV shows had writers at all. When Homer Simpson said something funny in 1995, it was Homer himself who said it, or may as well have been for all we cared to think about the matter. Now by contrast it is common in online chatter about TV shows to hear speculation and authoritative assertions about who was in the writers’ room for a particular episode of a particular show, what that individual writer’s sensibilities are, and so on.
The desire to frame our lives in terms borrowed from our shared cultural epics, our myths and legends, is not new. Joan Didion observed that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live”, and this is not just to say that fiction gives solace, but rather that there is no conceivable idea of a human life that is not structured by a common cultural repository of shared fictions. A cynical philosopher such as Jean-Paul Sartre will see this structuring as “inauthentic”: when the Parisian waiter is “trying too hard” to actually be a waiter, for example, and imitating the gestures that accompany his idea of what a waiter ought to be, an idea in turn traduced down to him from movies, novels and other artistic representations. But it is difficult to imagine what a human culture would look like without such shared representations.
When the pool of representations was rather more limited and standardised – the Gospels, the lives of the saints, assorted animal fables – it was easy to see how the invocation of these representations generally amounted to a simple accounting for actions and circumstances: such and such man is a “good Samaritan”; such and such burden is “the cross I bear”; so and so’s hen “laid a golden egg”; and so on.
Today, however, these literary forms – the epic, the edifying biography, the moral tale, the fable – have all been collapsed into the generic category of “content”. We are thus at a doubly curious juncture, where TV writers have been elevated in the popular imagination to the role of ersatz demiurges, and at the same time the writers themselves have largely shirked the traditional quasi-divine role fulfilled by any storyteller or practitioner of narrative art, shifting instead to the work of mere content production. In this work, any narrative dimension in the final product is strictly speaking incidental. Narrative adorns content in the same way faves adorn a tweet; both function only to maximise “user engagement”, and if either appears to be tailored to the specific affective or aesthetic expectations of the “user”, this is only an appearance.
If this assessment sounds exaggerated, consider Amazon’s recent acquisition of MGM for $8.45 billion. Jeff Bezos now holds the rights to numerous treasures of 20th-century entertainment, not least Albert R. Broccoli’s almost boutique-style James Bond films with their iconic, mythos-incanting musical opening numbers. Bezos has explicitly stated his intention to “reimagine and redevelop that I.P. [sic] for the 21st century.”
The Real World series (1992–), also recently rebooted, followed a group of strangers living together in a house and is regarded as the origin of reality television as a form.
In his allegory of the cave, Plato describes the philosopher as a man who has escaped from a cave whose inhabitants believe reality to be shapes and shadows projected onto the cave’s wall. While the philosopher understands that the shadows are not reality, those in the cave know no other reality, and thus have no desire ever to leave.
On the surface, his idea of what a “good plot” looks like would seem to make 21st-century content scarcely different from the most archaic and deep-rooted elements of myth and lore. He thinks there needs to be a heroic protagonist, a compelling antagonist, moral choices, civilisational high stakes, humour, betrayal, violence. “I know what it takes to make a great show,” Bezos has confidently said. “This should not be that hard. All of these iconic shows have these basic things in common.”
The problem is that Bezos’s purpose in returning to a formalised, almost neo-structuralist schema of all possible storytelling is not at all to revive the incantatory power of cliché to move us into the ritual time of storytelling. It is rather to streamline and dynamise the finished product, exactly as if it were shipping times Bezos were seeking to perfect, rather than the timing of a hero’s escape from a pit of conventional quicksand.
And so the college freshman imagining his life as a show seems doubly sad: he turns to the closest thing we have to new narrative art in order to frame his own life and make it meaningful, but the primary instances our culture yields up to him to help with this framing are in fact only content being passed off as narrative art.
Still from Dziga Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera (1929)
It is no wonder, then, that what he will likely end up doing, after the passing and briefly stimulating thought of life itself as a TV show, is to go back to doomscrolling and vain namechecking until sleep takes over.
Nick Pinkerton, in my view the greatest film critic working today, has recently been studying the new genre of “livestreaming”, which emerged from a technology initially developed so that young men might share their video-game playing online, but which they soon enough realised could also be taken out into “the real world” to show not just themselves at their screens, but themselves, up to no good, wheresoever they might decide to roam.
What their livestreams show us, mostly, is ample, painful, gruelling evidence for the non-existence of God: brute, senseless, neo-Jackass nihilism of the sort young men have always been best at envisioning and enacting. Yet, as Pinkerton also discerns, the livestreamers get closest in our present bleak moment to the spirit of Dziga Vertov’s revolutionary kino-pravda and such masterpieces as his Man with a Movie Camera (1929), to the “kiss” of reality by the lens, which nearly every other genre of entertainment today, including “reality” television, has effaced by CGI and countless other vulgar artifices.
There is a peculiar paradox here. Cinema seems to move closest to its essence at those moments in its long, strange history when it sheds its writers altogether, and shows us something that is not exactly reality – for even our unaided eyes do not show us that – but that compels us through its showing to wonder at reality rather than taking it for granted. The livestreamers are likely for the most part illiterate and could not write if they tried, and yet they are busily creating dark, dirty sub-worlds within our familiar world in accordance with their unconscious demiurgic nature.
Meanwhile those who make up in OCD symptoms what they lack in jouissance turn desperately to Netflix and HBO in the hope of validation, looking for new series to binge-watch with plot lines that they can borrow for themselves. But these plot lines were not created with such a purpose in mind, as Bezos’s frank discussion of his expansion into the storytelling industry shows. These stories are not told “in order to live”, at least not in order for their consumers to live. They are told in order to enrich the very few.
And so while the livestreamers revel in meaninglessness, the consumers of pure content find themselves faced with the same cosmological-existential worry first articulated by Blaise Pascal, Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, and others at the beginning of the modern period, who looked out at the open universe and marvelled at the plurality of worlds: narratives do not retain their validity across worlds. You can obsess all you like over Girls or Emily in Paris or Better Call Saul or any of the other “new TV” hailed as “good”, even “revolutionary”, by the critics, but this will never be enough to live.
The stories we tell ourselves in order to live, if that is the effect they are to have, will not be the ones for which we must constantly hit “refresh” in order to go on consuming, but the ones we carry inside of us like lights. ◉
