Narratives of Grace

“We normally think of history as one catastrophe after another, war followed by war, outrage by outrage — almost as if history were nothing more than all the narratives of human pain, assembled in sequence. And surely this is, often enough, an adequate description. But history is also the narratives of grace, the recountings of those blessed and inexplicable moments when someone did something for someone else, saved a life, bestowed a gift, gave something beyond what was required by circumstance.”

~ Thomas Cahill

People Love Narrative

“It’s hard to define the human experience. We constantly try to understand it. That’s why people love narrative: There’s a beginning, a middle, and an end.”

~ Julianne Moore, from InStyle Magazine, March 2011

Shared Narratives

 

“We find a direct collision between availability and what's possible through availability, and a fundamental human need—which we've been hearing about a lot—the need to create shared narratives. We're very good at creating personal narratives, but it's the shared narratives that make us a culture. And when you're standing with someone, and you're on your mobile device, effectively what you're saying to them is, You are not as important as, literally, almost anything that could come to me through this device.”

~ Renny Gleeson, from a very brief TED Talk on antisocial phone tricks

To Be the Other

“People live in bubbles unaware of each other. Each side has its narrative, each side has its dreams and sees the other as threatening those dreams. But if you enter the other’s bubble, you see his dreams, his inner world and his values. Our idea was to make the audience experience what it meant to be the other.”

~ Yaron Shani, discussing Ajami, the film that he and Scandar Copti co-directed, from “One Conflict, Many Views, No Actors,” by Ethan Bronner, New York Times (1/31/10).

We Underestimate the Power of Entertainment Narratives

Diane Winston in conversation with Krista Tippett, "TV and
Parables of Our Time," Speaking of Faith (July 16, 2009):

"...something that really strikes me if I watch both Battlestar
Galactica and Lost is that you see those characters grow from
victims to survivors. And the interesting thing is, is can we
take this in better as entertainment than as news?

If we read another article in Newsweek about Israeli and
Palestinian children at a summer camp getting along is that
going to make us believe that change is possible? Or maybe you
need that and you need shows like Battlestar Galactica and Lost
to show you that change is possible.

I guess that I think we underestimate the power of entertainment narratives to influence the way we look at the
world and I think storytelling, when it's good storytelling,
you know, orients us to possibilities and helps us structure
the way we look at things. So the power of the narrative is
that it takes on a life of its own for folks. But I don't know.
Maybe if Ronald D. Moore took over the UN we'd all be getting
along better. You think?"

Creating a Sense of Self

Elvis Mitchell: I guess the thing I find so fascinating about both of these films (Brick, The Brothers Bloom) is that there’s this kind of willful quality to create a narrative, or in the case of Bloom, even a fiction in which you live your life. And then the emotional truth comes in…

Rian Johnson: …I really do believe that to a certain extent, that’s what we do. You sit down with someone. You want to know about them. You ask them the story of their life. That’s how we create, even down to the fundamentals of creating a sense of self. We kind of build this narrative day-to-day, and write this story for ourselves. And that’s how we—even for ourselves—define who we are, I think.”

Discussing The Brothers Bloom on KCRW’s The Treatment (May 13, 2009).

What is it about?

“A novel is a long answer to the question ‘What is it about?’ I think it should be possible to give a short answer - in other words, I believe a novel should have a thematic and narrative unity that can be described. Each of my novels corresponds to a particular phase or aspect of my own life: for example, going to the University of California at the height of the Student Revolution, being an English Catholic at a period of great change in the Church, getting on to the international academic conference circuit; but this does not mean they are autobiographical in any simple, straightforward sense. I begin with a hunch that what I have experienced or observed has some representative (i.e., more than merely private) significance that could be brought out by means of a fictional story. To begin the novel I need to discover the structural idea that will generate the story: two professors passing each other over the North Pole on their way to exchange jobs, for example, or a parallel between the antics of globetrotting academics and the adventures of the knights of chivalric romance. I seem to have a fondness for binary structures, which predates my interest, as a literary critic, in structuralism. I use comedy to explore serious subjects, and find Mikhail Bakhtin 's idea that the novel is an inherently carnivalesque form, subverting monologic ideologies by laughter and a polyphony of discourses, immensely appealing. I am fascinated by the power of narrative, when skillfully managed, to keep the reader turning the pages, but I also aim to write novels that will stand up to being read more than once.”

~ David Lodge

The Unrelieved Tension of Compassion and Kindness

"There's a kind of tension created there that I was sort of after. It made some people very uncomfortable. The people who don't like the film, often that's what it's connected to. We're used to fantasies of unrelieved violence. We're used to that. I know I am. But we're seldom exposed to the unrelieved tension of compassion and kindness without sentimentality. And I think that creates a tension in a viewer. You're like, Okay, when is he going to cut the doll up and throw it in the lake? When is somebody going to murder somebody?"'

-- Nancy Oliver, Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Lars and the Real Girl in conversation with Elvis Mitchell on KCRW's The Treatment (2.20.08)

Leaving Church

Bianca Montage

A Treatment of Our Own Life

"Every American may be working on a screenplay, but we are also continually updating a treatment of our own life — and the way in which we visualize each scene not only shapes how we think about ourselves, but how we behave, new studies find. By better understanding how life stories are built, this work suggests, people may be able to alter their own narrative, in small ways and perhaps large ones."

--Benedict Carey, This Is Your Life (and How You Tell It), New York Times, 5/22/07.