Friday, September 29, 2006
Americans and Narrative
We love a good story don't we? I mean one of the biggest industries in this great nation, the entertainment business, is, at its base, storytelling. What's amazing is we tell the same story, over and over and over again. Movies are the ultimate story telling medium.
Did you know there is a basic outline, called a "narrative structure" for virtually every movie that's made. And in this day and age where the purpose of writing a novel is to get a movie deal, you can bet even novels follow that structure. Amongst screenwriters, that structure has been outlined and capsulized in a book called The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writer's by Christopher Vogel.
In the book, Vogler shows how the outline at the left here is used over and over and over in successful movie after successful movie. If you want to know what the steps are, read the book, but the point is, we love this story. We are fed this story in 90 to 120 minutes bites routinely, and we spend billions of dollars to be so told.
What I find most fascinating; however, is how history has come to be told along the same outlines. Consider WWII - cast us the United States as the reluctant hero and Churchill and England as the mentor. If you have ever read Churchill's multi-volume history of WWII, that is essentially the story he tells. In fact, on relfection, I am willing to give Churchill the title "great Communicator" over Reagan, because he won WWII by casting the narrative of the war in precisely this fashion and kept both the UK and the US focused on reaching the narrative's end.
But in the end that is also what Reagan did, only instead of maintaining focus on the narrative, Reagan restored it. We lost the narrative as the press retold Vietnam. We got lost in the details and forgot the goals. Ronald Reagan, with his well developed Hollywood sensibilities, reminded us of the narrative, maybe even refashioned it, did a little script consulting and lifted us out of the plot minutae, and before you knew it, the decades old Cold War was at an end.
It seems that as Americans we need the narrative, we need the story to finish what we start. In this age of the 24-hour News Channel, it is natural that the story would compress. Thus in the narrative that is the GWOT, we find ourselves in peril of once again becoming lost in the plot minutae, this time much faster than during the Cold War.
If Bush has a weakness as a war leader, it is that he lacks the ability to maintain the narrative. He fights the fight wonderfully, but he does not tell the story well. At the moment, this war has no Churchill, no Reagan. From whence shall such come? The crop of new leadership queing up in the UK and here contains many able leaders, but no great story tellers as of yet.
Well, as this is the age of the 24 hour news channel, so this is the age of the new media. Maybe the new media is the place to maintain the narrative of the GWOT? There are great blogs out there covering different aspects of the total story. But right now I don't know anyone that is crafting all that into the total narrative. Maybe it's time for the White House to start a blog - there are many able bloggers out there that could do the job well.
An executive like W is not supposed to be able to do everything, he is supposed to build an organization that does. This is one gap in the organization this President has built. He has not put together a team that maintains the narrative. Maybe he should put the new medium to use to do so, particularly in light of the fact that the traditional media is interested only in busting the narrative.
Related Tags: media, narrative, history, story, blogging, GWOT
Did you know there is a basic outline, called a "narrative structure" for virtually every movie that's made. And in this day and age where the purpose of writing a novel is to get a movie deal, you can bet even novels follow that structure. Amongst screenwriters, that structure has been outlined and capsulized in a book called The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writer's by Christopher Vogel.
In the book, Vogler shows how the outline at the left here is used over and over and over in successful movie after successful movie. If you want to know what the steps are, read the book, but the point is, we love this story. We are fed this story in 90 to 120 minutes bites routinely, and we spend billions of dollars to be so told.What I find most fascinating; however, is how history has come to be told along the same outlines. Consider WWII - cast us the United States as the reluctant hero and Churchill and England as the mentor. If you have ever read Churchill's multi-volume history of WWII, that is essentially the story he tells. In fact, on relfection, I am willing to give Churchill the title "great Communicator" over Reagan, because he won WWII by casting the narrative of the war in precisely this fashion and kept both the UK and the US focused on reaching the narrative's end.
But in the end that is also what Reagan did, only instead of maintaining focus on the narrative, Reagan restored it. We lost the narrative as the press retold Vietnam. We got lost in the details and forgot the goals. Ronald Reagan, with his well developed Hollywood sensibilities, reminded us of the narrative, maybe even refashioned it, did a little script consulting and lifted us out of the plot minutae, and before you knew it, the decades old Cold War was at an end.
It seems that as Americans we need the narrative, we need the story to finish what we start. In this age of the 24-hour News Channel, it is natural that the story would compress. Thus in the narrative that is the GWOT, we find ourselves in peril of once again becoming lost in the plot minutae, this time much faster than during the Cold War.
If Bush has a weakness as a war leader, it is that he lacks the ability to maintain the narrative. He fights the fight wonderfully, but he does not tell the story well. At the moment, this war has no Churchill, no Reagan. From whence shall such come? The crop of new leadership queing up in the UK and here contains many able leaders, but no great story tellers as of yet.
Well, as this is the age of the 24 hour news channel, so this is the age of the new media. Maybe the new media is the place to maintain the narrative of the GWOT? There are great blogs out there covering different aspects of the total story. But right now I don't know anyone that is crafting all that into the total narrative. Maybe it's time for the White House to start a blog - there are many able bloggers out there that could do the job well.
An executive like W is not supposed to be able to do everything, he is supposed to build an organization that does. This is one gap in the organization this President has built. He has not put together a team that maintains the narrative. Maybe he should put the new medium to use to do so, particularly in light of the fact that the traditional media is interested only in busting the narrative.
Related Tags: media, narrative, history, story, blogging, GWOT
