Feels to me lately like EVERYTHING is about narrative. In the Los Angeles Times, today’s Calendar section was almost all about narrative. In a post-fact world, we can’t agree on reality, so the only thing left for determining “truth,” for deciding how to act and how to react, is which story is most compelling.
Trump wants people’s votes and adulation, so he is always trying to sell a narrative in which he is the smartest, most powerful, richest, most successful man in the world. The facts are clearly otherwise, so he can’t quite pull it off. Sarah Cooper, a recent sensation on social media as reported on page E1 of today’s Times, has done a very clever thing with Trump’s situation. She lip-syncs his speeches, which, when delivered in his made-up-on-the-fly, running-over-the-listener way, sound incomprehensible, and acts out with her body and facial expressions the internal emotions that must be fueling the ridiculous things he says. In addition, she is a young woman of color, while Trump is an old white man. The new context she thus creates for his words make them hilarious. It also clearly reveals Trump as feeling scared, weak, and stupid behind his bluster and bragging. She has successfully blown up the narrative he is trying to create.
The problem with there no longer being some form of agreed upon reality is that which stories people find compelling are going to vary by individuals and the narratives and contexts they have known in the past. Authoritarian types will prefer Trump’s narrative no matter what; more liberal minded people will not find his story appealing at all. As a nation, we end up totally split again.
A review of “The High Note,” also on page E1, discusses the meaning of a movie about two women trying to succeed in the male-dominated music business. One of the stars of the film, Tracee Ellis Ross, is quoted, “I also loved the fact that this is a movie about two women that aren’t against each other and that ultimately end up helping and supporting each other.” Director Nisha Ganatra said, “I think it’s important to have more portrayals of women helping each other and show that, while we help each other, we both rise. And in helping our fellow women, we even end up helping ourselves.” These two women see the value in replacing a common, cultural narrative that women are competitive (see “The Real Housewives” and “The Bachelor” franchises for obvious examples) with a story that women help each other to everyone’s benefit.
A review of “An Elegant Woman” by Martha McPhee on page E3 discusses this novel in terms of its treatment of the American myth of upward mobility, as it is about a woman who lied about her past in order to get ahead and the consequences for her children and grandchildren. The reviewer quotes this amazing sentence by Martha McPhee: “Hokum, blarney, fabulation, ballyhoo arrive not on the local but by means of the express, the high-priority freight train, of narration, bypassing the nitty-gritty whistle-stops, where the peculiar knock of fact can be heard.” The reviewer, Mark Athitakis, concludes, “Invention is the sort of thing that keeps a lot of families going. Novelists and Instagrammers too.” And bloggers interested in narrative.
