It's finally happening!
Like a good twenty-something from the modern era, I get most of my news from the Daily Show, the Colbert Report, and now John Oliver's new show (side note: I might have questioned whether I was ready for yet another show of the exact same format until it first aired, and I fit it into my tv-watching routine as if it had always been there). So it was this morning, while watching last night's Colbert Report, that I heard that the ice caps are now unavoidably, irreparably, going to collapse. What a relief!
Not that this is anything like a real solution to the problem of climate change. Don't infer from my relief that I believe we should continue on our way, passing these points-of-no-return until our planet crumbles to nothing like a dried-out sandcastle. Colbert makes this same point, in his usual satirical style: though one of the most frequently cautioned effects of climate change has occurred, all is not lost, and we should not as a consequence remain apathetic towards the environment.
Yet it is a relief, and it's a funny feeling, which is what motivated me to write in the first place.
In life, and in fiction, there are these foreboding things -- these ominous signs that something terrible will happen -- which build to a climax where either something bad does happen, or it doesn't, and it's crisis averted. More often than not in fiction we're treated to the happier of these two outcomes: with only paltry sacrifice, the evil is vanquished and everything returns to normal. But sometimes the story opts for the alternative: bad, irreparable things happen to the protagonist; real sacrifices are made, and nothing is quite the same in the aftermath.
But let me take a moment to define these two alternatives in more depth; because the difference between them isn't so much the quantity of bad that is allowed to happen in the story, but how much those bad things defy formula, and thus your expectations of what could happen. In a horror movie, for example, you come in expecting that almost any character could die; even the protagonist will either remain unscathed, or die at the end of the story. What you don't expect is for the protagonist to lose an arm, or become paralyzed from the waist down. Paradoxically this kind of sacrifice is too real, too heavy -- even when compared to the protagonist's actual death -- to occur in most horror films. So, when ominous signs abound in a story, you may quiet some of your anxiety with the knowledge that certain events most likely will not happen -- a phenomenon sometimes called 'plot armour' -- the specifics of this protection being defined by the genre.
The latter of the two aforementioned alternatives, then, occurs when a story defies formula, breaking the tacit agreement between writer and viewer that some bad things are off-limits. This can have a disquieting effect, first because we allow ourselves to become more attached to characters we think are protected by plot armour, and second because it is quite jarring to be derailed from the tracks of regular movie formula. Expectations defied, the story becomes more real in the sense that we can't be nearly so sure what will happen next. Consequently, I tend to prefer stories that have some elements of formula defiance; they're often more memorable, more daring, more interesting, and most importantly, they engender some rare feelings.
Plot armour doesn't keep us from feeling anxious for characters. I'd argue that these characters are the ones we allow ourselves to invest in the most, and so we feel the most anxiety for them when they are placed in danger. Plus, writers are very good at making disaster appear imminent, plotting a character's path inexorably toward tragedy, upping the ante to the point where only deus ex machina, or a very clever bit of writing can save them. In this moment we, as the viewer, hoping that the story won't resort to divine intervention, and unable to think of the planned clever escape, are truly worried for the plot-protected character. There's a sort-of cognitive dissonance that needs to be resolved: we believe that the character will escape, but we don't know how, and as the situation becomes increasingly dire, we ache for its final resolution.
Thing is, it's not so different in real life. We have real-life narratives with real-life characters that we view as protected by the same sort of plot-armour. The privileged among us, of which I count myself, and much of the Western world, manage to move through life maintaining the illusion that the world is just, that bad things happen only to bad people, and that everything will work out in the end. We strive to view the world as a narrative that makes sense, where things happen for a reason, where there is order. Thus, us optimists, when we are moved inexorably toward tragedy, plead for the same resolution -- we staunchly maintain the belief that everything will work out, but we don't know how, or when.
And what happens in the movies when the bad thing really does happen? The first thing is a quiet release; the dissonance has been resolved, just not in the way we had hoped. We can finally stop racking our brains for a solution to the protagonist's difficulty. And in some ways this outcome is the more relieving of the two; because once something is lost it can't be lost again. We've just been put through an ordeal because of this character, we care about them, and as a consequence we now understand acutely that their existence is a liability to us. But if they cease to exist, then they're not a liability any more. We won't have to worry about them ever again.
There's a lesson in these formula defying stories. We relate to plot-protected characters in the same way as we relate to the people in our lives -- believing that they must survive, that they must be okay in the end. And when that illusion is broken, it can bring us out of our own narratives; it can make us realize assumptions we take for granted -- about our safety, about the safety of those we love, about our life trajectories -- are grounded in nothing but blind optimism. This is an experience intrinsic to the feeling of loss, and, should one experience actual loss, exposure to these kinds of stories may lay the groundwork for understanding the experience.
To return to the tangential matter of climate change with which I began, perhaps a greater exposure to the formula defying narrative would be helpful here. Perhaps we need a little less optimism in our lives if we are to believe that we really are destroying our planet. That, or we could wait until we experience more real life loss -- until we lose enough geological and environmental things -- and we at last realize that our optimism is unfounded.
