Fictional realities

This may sound a little strange coming from a retired English geek. I did, after all, spend five years of my misspent thirties reading enormous samplings of the best literature humans have to offer in class after class after class at the local state university. In off hours and late into not-a-few nights I’ve even tried to create the next generation of the stuff. I spent most of my teens hiding in my room reading everything Heinlein, Asimov, Clark, and half a dozen other literary geniuses wrote. So I will understand if you are taken aback when I say that fiction is among the most pernicious evils of the modern world.

Not that fiction doesn’t have its place. Jesus himself used fiction -- parables -- to convey truths. “A sower went forth to sow…” “A certain man had two sons…” The sower and that certain man probably never existed, but Jesus used his stories to point the listener toward realities they could not have grasped in other ways. This is a legitimate and noble use of fiction. Later examples of fiction used this way might include Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair. One was used to convey the realities of slavery in the Old South. The other graphically displayed the horrific conditions and filth of the meatpacking industry in nineteenth century Chicago. What makes this kind of fiction valuable is that, while it in itself is not true, it points toward truth and directs people to see what’s really already before them. Both novels were useful in correcting the conditions they addressed.

Such exceptions aside, fiction, on its face, is a lie. It artfully persuades the consumer to believe a lie; it creates and upholds a world that does not and cannot exist. Unless a work of fiction functions as a tool to show you the truth, it will automatically inveigle you with a lie.

Let me be clear. I’m not talking about novels and short stories only, though the principle applies to them as well. On a hugely larger scale, our society is soaked with movies, videos, and television, all of which work the same way as the novel of the month, only more so.

                                                                                                                          
Christian watchdog organizations like Media Research Center tend to react to television and movies that are blatantly profane or erotic. While that’s all well and good, it completely misses a much more profound problem; the multi-sensory destruction of reality. Reading can lull you into a fantasy world full of teenaged warlocks and cheap detectives, but you can break the spell literally with the blink of an eye. Electronic media is more pernicious by weight of the fact that it makes the lie more believable. For example, a few weeks ago I watched a small part of a soap opera while I was looking for the remote. No foul language was used and there was nothing overly prurient about the scene. But it featured a hunky young actor who, according to the dialog, worked nightshifts at a factory. He was talking with a female actor who I presume was his girlfriend and they were standing in his brick- and mahogany-drenched loft apartment full of designer and antique furniture. Huh. I don’t know about where you live, but here in the Midwest, that apartment would pull down $900-$1200 a month. The décor alone was worth a year’s salary for the average factory grunt. The two of them were talking about going out to dinner. I sincerely hope the young lady was buying, because here in the real world, that guy was B-R-O-K-E. The scene conveyed a lie -- that you can be wealthy on a factory worker’s pay -- far more effectively than the written word, without saying a word. If you’re like me, you have to wonder how many gullible teens watched and assumed that fancy loft apartments and high end décor is the norm for factory workers.

We internalize lies like that so easily! We see the bouncy mom in sitcoms who can juggle three precocious kids, a day job as a brain surgeon, a side job as a taxi driver, and a surreally stupid husband, yet still dresses like a Vogue model, keeps house like Martha Stewart, cooks like a Food Network chef, and spouts one-liners like Leno. Sure. I know lots of people like that. Don’t you? Yet every time we see it on TV, even though we know better, we feel pushed to perform at that level. We internalize that standard. And when we can’t reach that high mark, we feel depressed, frustrated and disappointed in ourselves. We’ve bought a lie. It may not be a coincidence that divorce rates have doubled in the 60 years since we invited televisions into our living rooms.

Impossibly high standards are only half of the issue. The other side of the coin is the crass and contentious mindset that passes for humor in much of TV fiction. It’s hilarious when the TV kid rolls his eyes, kicks his smart mouth into gear, and does an end-run around mom and dad to get his way. It’s not so cute when our kids do it. Where do you suppose they learned that? From the 28 hours of television the average child watches each week, perhaps?

                               

Another great lie that fiction brings us is simplicity -- and complexity. Andy and Barney always resolve their issues in 30 minutes, minus commercials. Ah, those were the good old days! Nowadays, the folks on Lost can’t figure out where they are in four seasons and can’t seem to resolve any issue that arises on their castaway island, ever. Neither of these connects to the real world. Unlike Barney and Hurley, our lives are not scripted. Real life doesn’t come with sound tracks. Most often, it is mundane and ordinary. Its dramatic moments -- when they happen -- come without warning and pass without fanfare. Often they don’t leave us with neatly tied-up ends. A child falls ill and there is no miracle cure. The old car sputters to its death on the freeway and the guy who stops to help isn’t an expert mechanic. Maybe, no one stops at all and you have to walk longer than the duration of an episode just to get help. A relationship sours and it takes real work and perseverance -- sometimes for decades -- to restore. Perhaps the child struggles through years of surgeries and treatments, in which time we learn courage and perseverance and faith. Perhaps we drag the clunker to the junkyard, scrape together enough money for a slightly better clunker -- and learn to change the oil. Perhaps after years of missing someone we get a phone call, a soft voice asking to come home, and we learn that prayer does move hearts, even miles away. Yet some part of us has come to expect miracle cures and expert mechanics and wondrous rescues because we see them constantly on TV.

USA reports that there are now more televisions in American than people. Apple sold its 100 millionth iPod in 2007. It’s hard to find a teenager -- or many adults, for that matter -- without one plugged into their ears. We can now download whole television series to our phones and watch them while in line at the bank. The surreal, the fictional, the phony, are everywhere. Perhaps the most frightening fallout of this deluge of phoniness is that much of a whole generation now is more comfortable with unreality than with reality.

I once worked at a job with many creative, intelligent twenty-somethings. Most of them were quite comfortable with the technical aspects of computers and software. They could talk at length about who did what in this or that television show or which was the coolest band around. About two-thirds of them were experts at killing aliens or Nazis with fancy “Vulcans” on their keyboards. They could quote long sections of Star Wars dialog and relate detailed histories of various superheroes and villains. But they couldn’t cook a meal or sew on a button. Most would only stare at you blankly if you mentioned 401ks. They had only some vague idea about how cars worked, though most of them drove one. If asked a philosophical or spiritual question, they would shake their heads and walk away, as if trying to retreat from a dream. The real world was a strange and difficult place for them. They longed to rush home at 5 p.m., plug in and play in the bright fantasy worlds someone else had made for them. In the meantime, they texted one another from cube to cube to catch up on the fantasies they didn’t have time for the night before.

Fiction lies. But God is the god of truth. He works in the real world. He is capable of dealing with the real problems of real people. Superman or Spidey -- or, for that matter, Jack Shepard -- can never save us. Jesus already has. We cannot be made better by painting false realities and trying to pretend them real. That path will only lead to disappointment, frustration and destruction. We must learn to turn off the flood of fantasy, unplug from the manufactured fiction, and embrace the world as it is, as God has given it to us. Only then can we let God work through us to change the world around us in a very real and positive way. That, not Luke Skywalker, is our great hope.