When the Journey of Life Means Nothing At All

I have recently read a not terribly good novel.  To protect the guilty, I I won't name the book, but part of the reason for reading it was to distinguish more clearly the particular qualities of Tolstoy Lied (blogged here).  I finished Tolstoy Lied feeling certain, first, that I could never write to that level of quality, and second, that a great novel requires much more than unusually good writing (because Tolstoy Lied, for all its attributes, will never be a great novel).  This recent read left me with the thought, "I could do that!"

I suspect that is what the author thought too, though instead of reaching that conclusion after reading a mediocre novel, she reached it after watching a mediocre action flick.  The novel has become the poor man's cinema: if you don't have access to the capitol and connections to create a movie, you can write a book instead.

The primary feature of these made-for-movies novels is that the climax and resolution of the story are conflated, and both are offered with considerably less detail than the build up.  The reader can envision the credits rolling up as they dump their popcorn on the theater floor and caste a sidelong glance at the sole movie goer who has been brought to tears.  Reality television also conflates climax and resolution, or more accurately it attempts to present climax as resolution.  Resolution is swept under the rug: the B-list career that follows the American Idol appearance will not be televised.  On the front end, a lifetime of artistic development and accomplishment are compressed into a few weeks.

But artists have always been dreamers.  Viewed as more insidious by me and my fat friends is Biggest Loser, where the contestants go from fat to svelte in one season.  They then disappear to that dark corner where the fat grows; 99% of people who lose 75 pounds or more regain it within 5 years even if they lost it on TV.

The peculiar heroism of the action movie, the determined heroism of the artist and the everyday heroism of the successful loser are turned into compressed actions devoid of decision and meaning.  This is not a template for heroism that the reader or viewer can apply to his or her own life.  When it comes to heroism, these dramas and plot lines that anyone could write turn into patterns of heroism that no one can live.

In the novel, the fatally ill heroine takes a few courageous steps that dramatically change the last days of her life and of the lives of those who she leaved behind.  At one point, she pointedly decides that she doesn't want to know the future effect of one of her decisions.  The reader never knows just why she made that decision to start with.  After her death, nothing has changed that much.  A few pawns have moved here and there on the chessboard, but how they feel and the possibility that in fact everything has been changed isn't communicated. Soft focus and cue the credits.

I'm not requiring all entertainment to be intellectually nuanced; shallow entertainment has existed since time immemorial and the very best entertainment --think Shakespeare-- is so true to life that it can be enjoyed as pure story or as something more.  I do think that the failures that I have highlighted in current entertainment are peculiar to our time.  In contrast, consider The Three Stooges.  Not serious work at all, but work that showed a simplified pattern of stimulus, reaction, and resolution.  Indeed, the extreme simplification was part of the comedy.  On the highbrow side post-modernism played with the link-up of those three items, but you can only play with them if you have their structure to launch off from.  Our current popular art seems to be losing the link-up.  As much as that is failing to tell our society something, it is also telling of something in our society that is failing.