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Sociological Story-telling vs. Psychological
Hmmm...I snagged this from elsi, and I was expecting to disagree with it. Mainly because the sociological/political read on stories -- often can come across as sanctimonious posturing from armchair social activists. But, this doesn't, it wasn't at all what I expected and I found myself nodding along with it. It does a good job of explaining why many people fell for the narrative in the books and series (not everyone, obviously), and why The Wire was so effective and innovative.
Scientific American Observations -- the Real Reason Fans Hate the Last Season of Game of Thrones
[I know not everyone does. Because I've seen their responses to. And debated it with them. The debates sort of fell into...:
The paint is off-white.
It's cream.
It's clearly off-white.
It's clearly cream, see the yellow in there.
There's no yellow in that, you are color-blind.
You are an idiot, and I'm done, let's go see Silence of the Lambs instead.
This by the way was the argument I had with my brother while painting our parents basement ages ago. We had to buy another pint of paint, because we'd run out, and were arguing over what color to buy. Online arguments with people about television series often remind me of arguments I've had with my brother over the years. At a certain point, I just give up and walk away. During this argument, we took a break and went to see Silence of the Lambs -- which we sort of agreed with one another with, but also didn't. He analyzed it from one angle, and I from another.]
Anyhow..outtakes from the article (which is why I prefer printed articles to podcasts - I can show you what grabbed me).
In sociological storytelling, the characters have personal stories and agency, of course, but those are also greatly shaped by institutions and events around them. The incentives for characters’ behavior come noticeably from these external forces, too, and even strongly influence their inner life.
People then fit their internal narrative to align with their incentives, justifying and rationalizing their behavior along the way. (Thus the famous Upton Sinclair quip: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”)
The overly personal mode of storytelling or analysis leaves us bereft of deeper comprehension of events and history. Understanding Hitler’s personality alone will not tell us much about rise of fascism, for example. Not that it didn’t matter, but a different demagogue would probably have appeared to take his place in Germany in between the two bloody world wars in the 20th century. Hence, the answer to “would you kill baby Hitler?,” sometimes presented as an ethical time-travel challenge, should be “no,” because it would very likely not matter much. It is not a true dilemma.
We also have a bias for the individual as the locus of agency in interpreting our own everyday life and the behavior of others. We tend to seek internal, psychological explanations for the behavior of those around us while making situational excuses for our own. This is such a common way of looking at the world that social psychologists have a word for it: the fundamental attribution error.
When someone wrongs us, we tend to think they are evil, misguided or selfish: a personalized explanation. But when we misbehave, we are better at recognizing the external pressures on us that shape our actions: a situational understanding. If you snap at a coworker, for example, you may rationalize your behavior by remembering that you had difficulty sleeping last night and had financial struggles this month. You’re not evil, just stressed! The coworker who snaps at you, however, is more likely to be interpreted as a jerk, without going through the same kind of rationalization. This is convenient for our peace of mind, and fits with our domain of knowledge, too. We know what pressures us, but not necessarily others.
That tension between internal stories and desires, psychology and external pressures, institutions, norms and events was exactly what Game of Thrones showed us for many of its characters, creating rich tapestries of psychology but also behavior that was neither saintly nor fully evil at any one point. It was something more than that: you could understand why even the characters undertaking evil acts were doing what they did, how their good intentions got subverted, and how incentives structured behavior. The complexity made it much richer than a simplistic morality tale, where unadulterated good fights with evil.
The hallmark of sociological storytelling is if it can encourage us to put ourselves in the place of any character, not just the main hero/heroine, and imagine ourselves making similar choices. “Yeah, I can see myself doing that under such circumstances” is a way into a broader, deeper understanding. It’s not just empathy: we of course empathize with victims and good people, not with evildoers.
But if we can better understand how and why characters make their choices, we can also think about how to structure our world that encourages better choices for everyone. The alternative is an often futile appeal to the better angels of our nature. It’s not that they don’t exist, but they exist along with baser and lesser motives. The question isn’t to identify the few angels but to make it easier for everyone to make the choices that, collectively, would lead us all to a better place.
Another example of sociological TV drama with a similarly enthusiastic fan following is David Simon’s The Wire, which followed the trajectory of a variety of actors in Baltimore, ranging from African-Americans in the impoverished and neglected inner city trying to survive, to police officers to journalists to unionized dock workers to city officials and teachers. That show, too, killed off its main characters regularly, without losing its audience. Interestingly, the star of each season was an institution more than a person. The second season, for example, focused on the demise of the unionized working class in the U.S.; the fourth highlighted schools; and the final season focused on the role of journalism and mass media.
Luckily for The Wire, creative control never shifted to the standard Hollywood narrative writers who would have given us individuals to root for or hate without being able to fully understand the circumstances that shape them. One thing that’s striking about The Wire is how one could understand all the characters, not just the good ones (and in fact, none of them were just good or bad). When that’s the case, you know you’re watching a sociological story.
Although I'd argue that in Game, there are a few characters that lean too far one way. That said, the books, and to some degree the early portion of the series, does a good job of explaining Ramsay Bolton -- who is as much a product of his environment and sociological structure as Jon Snow and Samwell Tarly. The difference though is -- unlike Tarly and Jon, he wasn't sent to the Wall, but instead provided with the task of acting as his father's enforcer to obtain his father's pleasure, and power. He couldn't have it outright -- since he was illegitmate, and you had to be legitimate in that world and as such, he was no more than just another of his father's hounds. The idea of being powerless in the sociological structure is a heavy them in both Game of Thrones and The Wire, and I agree the Wire executes it better -- in part because it's only five seasons, and it is more focused. Game of Thrones attempts to do too much.
Another outtake:
Whether done well or badly, the psychological/internal genre leaves us unable to understand and react to social change. Arguably, the dominance of the psychological and hero/antihero narrative is also the reason we are having such a difficult time dealing with the current historic technology transition. So this essay is more than about one TV show with dragons.
And..
The preference for the individual and psychological narrative is understandable: the story is easier to tell as we gravitate toward identifying with the hero or hating the antihero, at the personal level. We are, after all, also persons!
In German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s classic play, Life of Galileo, Andrea, a former pupil of Galileo, visits him after he recants his seminal findings under pressure from the Catholic Church. Galileo gives Andrea his notebooks, asking him to spread the knowledge they contain. Andrea celebrates this, saying “unhappy is the land that breeds no hero.” Galileo corrects him: “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.”
Well-run societies don’t need heroes, and the way to keep terrible impulses in check isn’t to dethrone antiheros and replace them with good people. Unfortunately, most of our storytelling—in fiction and also in mass media nonfiction—remains stuck in the hero/antihero narrative. It’s a pity Game of Thrones did not manage to conclude its last season in its original vein. In a historic moment that requires a lot of institution building and incentive changing (technological challenges, climate change, inequality and accountability) we need all the sociological imagination we can get, and fantasy dragons or not, it was nice to have a show that encouraged just that while it lasted.
I'd argue that the Avengers stories tried to arc above that -- in that there wasn't just one group or an individual hero, but many heroes, all of which had done horrible things or morally ambiguous ones at various points. They don't completely, but you do see the influence of the instution and the individuals struggling within it. Captain America is a product of the military institution, he is a military experiment gone right -- and he slowly realizes the flaws within that institution and that while it had been created to fight fascism, there are strains of fascism within it. Tony Stark, Ironman, is a product of his father's weapon manufacturing business -- which he'd initially created to defend the world, but as Tony discovers kills more people and causes more warlords to be made. These are individuals railing against the very systems that created them -- systems such as the defense industry, and the military. Which is why the series is so popular, because that feeling of powerlessness against a military industrial complex -- is a familiar one. This is a sociological story not just a psychological one. The focus on both is not on their parents, although Tony's is more than any other character with the exception of Thor, but on the institutions.
And I'd agree one of the things I'd loved most about Game of Thrones was that structure, and that structure has not been maintained since S7...it even began to slowly break apart in that season I think. It's not in evidence at all now.
Scientific American Observations -- the Real Reason Fans Hate the Last Season of Game of Thrones
[I know not everyone does. Because I've seen their responses to. And debated it with them. The debates sort of fell into...:
The paint is off-white.
It's cream.
It's clearly off-white.
It's clearly cream, see the yellow in there.
There's no yellow in that, you are color-blind.
You are an idiot, and I'm done, let's go see Silence of the Lambs instead.
This by the way was the argument I had with my brother while painting our parents basement ages ago. We had to buy another pint of paint, because we'd run out, and were arguing over what color to buy. Online arguments with people about television series often remind me of arguments I've had with my brother over the years. At a certain point, I just give up and walk away. During this argument, we took a break and went to see Silence of the Lambs -- which we sort of agreed with one another with, but also didn't. He analyzed it from one angle, and I from another.]
Anyhow..outtakes from the article (which is why I prefer printed articles to podcasts - I can show you what grabbed me).
In sociological storytelling, the characters have personal stories and agency, of course, but those are also greatly shaped by institutions and events around them. The incentives for characters’ behavior come noticeably from these external forces, too, and even strongly influence their inner life.
People then fit their internal narrative to align with their incentives, justifying and rationalizing their behavior along the way. (Thus the famous Upton Sinclair quip: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”)
The overly personal mode of storytelling or analysis leaves us bereft of deeper comprehension of events and history. Understanding Hitler’s personality alone will not tell us much about rise of fascism, for example. Not that it didn’t matter, but a different demagogue would probably have appeared to take his place in Germany in between the two bloody world wars in the 20th century. Hence, the answer to “would you kill baby Hitler?,” sometimes presented as an ethical time-travel challenge, should be “no,” because it would very likely not matter much. It is not a true dilemma.
We also have a bias for the individual as the locus of agency in interpreting our own everyday life and the behavior of others. We tend to seek internal, psychological explanations for the behavior of those around us while making situational excuses for our own. This is such a common way of looking at the world that social psychologists have a word for it: the fundamental attribution error.
When someone wrongs us, we tend to think they are evil, misguided or selfish: a personalized explanation. But when we misbehave, we are better at recognizing the external pressures on us that shape our actions: a situational understanding. If you snap at a coworker, for example, you may rationalize your behavior by remembering that you had difficulty sleeping last night and had financial struggles this month. You’re not evil, just stressed! The coworker who snaps at you, however, is more likely to be interpreted as a jerk, without going through the same kind of rationalization. This is convenient for our peace of mind, and fits with our domain of knowledge, too. We know what pressures us, but not necessarily others.
That tension between internal stories and desires, psychology and external pressures, institutions, norms and events was exactly what Game of Thrones showed us for many of its characters, creating rich tapestries of psychology but also behavior that was neither saintly nor fully evil at any one point. It was something more than that: you could understand why even the characters undertaking evil acts were doing what they did, how their good intentions got subverted, and how incentives structured behavior. The complexity made it much richer than a simplistic morality tale, where unadulterated good fights with evil.
The hallmark of sociological storytelling is if it can encourage us to put ourselves in the place of any character, not just the main hero/heroine, and imagine ourselves making similar choices. “Yeah, I can see myself doing that under such circumstances” is a way into a broader, deeper understanding. It’s not just empathy: we of course empathize with victims and good people, not with evildoers.
But if we can better understand how and why characters make their choices, we can also think about how to structure our world that encourages better choices for everyone. The alternative is an often futile appeal to the better angels of our nature. It’s not that they don’t exist, but they exist along with baser and lesser motives. The question isn’t to identify the few angels but to make it easier for everyone to make the choices that, collectively, would lead us all to a better place.
Another example of sociological TV drama with a similarly enthusiastic fan following is David Simon’s The Wire, which followed the trajectory of a variety of actors in Baltimore, ranging from African-Americans in the impoverished and neglected inner city trying to survive, to police officers to journalists to unionized dock workers to city officials and teachers. That show, too, killed off its main characters regularly, without losing its audience. Interestingly, the star of each season was an institution more than a person. The second season, for example, focused on the demise of the unionized working class in the U.S.; the fourth highlighted schools; and the final season focused on the role of journalism and mass media.
Luckily for The Wire, creative control never shifted to the standard Hollywood narrative writers who would have given us individuals to root for or hate without being able to fully understand the circumstances that shape them. One thing that’s striking about The Wire is how one could understand all the characters, not just the good ones (and in fact, none of them were just good or bad). When that’s the case, you know you’re watching a sociological story.
Although I'd argue that in Game, there are a few characters that lean too far one way. That said, the books, and to some degree the early portion of the series, does a good job of explaining Ramsay Bolton -- who is as much a product of his environment and sociological structure as Jon Snow and Samwell Tarly. The difference though is -- unlike Tarly and Jon, he wasn't sent to the Wall, but instead provided with the task of acting as his father's enforcer to obtain his father's pleasure, and power. He couldn't have it outright -- since he was illegitmate, and you had to be legitimate in that world and as such, he was no more than just another of his father's hounds. The idea of being powerless in the sociological structure is a heavy them in both Game of Thrones and The Wire, and I agree the Wire executes it better -- in part because it's only five seasons, and it is more focused. Game of Thrones attempts to do too much.
Another outtake:
Whether done well or badly, the psychological/internal genre leaves us unable to understand and react to social change. Arguably, the dominance of the psychological and hero/antihero narrative is also the reason we are having such a difficult time dealing with the current historic technology transition. So this essay is more than about one TV show with dragons.
And..
The preference for the individual and psychological narrative is understandable: the story is easier to tell as we gravitate toward identifying with the hero or hating the antihero, at the personal level. We are, after all, also persons!
In German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s classic play, Life of Galileo, Andrea, a former pupil of Galileo, visits him after he recants his seminal findings under pressure from the Catholic Church. Galileo gives Andrea his notebooks, asking him to spread the knowledge they contain. Andrea celebrates this, saying “unhappy is the land that breeds no hero.” Galileo corrects him: “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.”
Well-run societies don’t need heroes, and the way to keep terrible impulses in check isn’t to dethrone antiheros and replace them with good people. Unfortunately, most of our storytelling—in fiction and also in mass media nonfiction—remains stuck in the hero/antihero narrative. It’s a pity Game of Thrones did not manage to conclude its last season in its original vein. In a historic moment that requires a lot of institution building and incentive changing (technological challenges, climate change, inequality and accountability) we need all the sociological imagination we can get, and fantasy dragons or not, it was nice to have a show that encouraged just that while it lasted.
I'd argue that the Avengers stories tried to arc above that -- in that there wasn't just one group or an individual hero, but many heroes, all of which had done horrible things or morally ambiguous ones at various points. They don't completely, but you do see the influence of the instution and the individuals struggling within it. Captain America is a product of the military institution, he is a military experiment gone right -- and he slowly realizes the flaws within that institution and that while it had been created to fight fascism, there are strains of fascism within it. Tony Stark, Ironman, is a product of his father's weapon manufacturing business -- which he'd initially created to defend the world, but as Tony discovers kills more people and causes more warlords to be made. These are individuals railing against the very systems that created them -- systems such as the defense industry, and the military. Which is why the series is so popular, because that feeling of powerlessness against a military industrial complex -- is a familiar one. This is a sociological story not just a psychological one. The focus on both is not on their parents, although Tony's is more than any other character with the exception of Thor, but on the institutions.
And I'd agree one of the things I'd loved most about Game of Thrones was that structure, and that structure has not been maintained since S7...it even began to slowly break apart in that season I think. It's not in evidence at all now.
no subject
I keep falling back to Tolstoy, so excuse me for that. What's being discussed here specifically as sociological and psychological story telling, might explain the sharp difference between those who adore either Anna Karenina or War and Peace. It's a lot rarer to find those who really appreciate both equally. Personally I like War and Peace. I'd put it in the psychological telling camp. It's full of characters, but it's possible to follow anyone of several of them through the book and get a deep understanding of their internal state. For me, Anna Karenina is full of shallow characters with very little depth, but the whole book is about problems arising more from society than from inside any character or group of characters. It's not that I don't enjoy stories that are 80% politics and 20% about individuals. But the purely social pressures inside a 120+ year-ago society don't personally resonate with me. But I would be very foolish not to recognize that the same thing becomes very interesting for other people. On the other hand, society per se in War and Peace is kind of a silly game, that characters of any importance spend little energy trying to accommodate. Personal reactions are important in the book, what 'everybody' thinks isn't very important.
no subject
There's a huge difference between adapting a 1500 page book and a 15 page outline. And the show-runners in question think differently the novelist does.
I think some of the same thing happened with West Wing - when Aaron Sorkin left, and with Buffy when Greenwalt left, and then Whedon took off to play more heavily with Firefly. But in a different way. Since D+D are the show-runners of GoT throughout, except they had GRR Marting writing episodes and strongly influencing it up until roughly the 5th season, when they realized they were going to run out of source material and jumped off book. Also budgeting issues, they simply couldn't do the scope that Martin had done. GoT is close to impossible a series to reproduce on screen.
Although -- it probably has the richest and most complicated characters that I've ever seen in a work of fantasy fiction or historical fiction for that matter. Martin literally gives people from every walk of life, and I do mean everyone (similar to Hugo's Les Miserables and Dickens in that way), a point of view chapter. We get chapters from squires and working men on the street, whores, blacksmiths, etc. That's why it's grueling. It's also what distinguishes it from the television series or later years of the series. The first three years of the series -- we do get the pov of the man and woman on the street. The latter years not so much. I think that's the sociological perspective the article was trying to highlight.
I keep falling back to Tolstoy, so excuse me for that. What's being discussed here specifically as sociological and psychological story telling, might explain the sharp difference between those who adore either Anna Karenina or War and Peace. It's a lot rarer to find those who really appreciate both equally. Personally I like War and Peace. I'd put it in the psychological telling camp. It's full of characters, but it's possible to follow anyone of several of them through the book and get a deep understanding of their internal state. For me, Anna Karenina is full of shallow characters with very little depth, but the whole book is about problems arising more from society than from inside any character or group of characters.
Interesting. I'd have thought it was the opposite. (I haven't been able to get into either -- not that I've actually really tried. Just as you haven't bothered with the Song of Ice and Fire series aka Game of Thrones, I didn't with War & Peace or Anna Karenia. Possibly for the same reasons. LOL!)
Song of Ice and Fire is..not like Anna Karenia at all. The characters are far from shallowly rendered. Actually both examples the writer gives in the article above involve characters that are extremely nuanced, and from various walks of life. It's hard to describe to someone who hasn't read or seen them?
In The Wire, we look at the case of trying to break up a drug ring from multiple perspectives, the cops, the drug dealers, the kids in the projects, the unions, the press, the schools, the political leaders -- and we get inside their heads, and inside the system itself. It basically makes what you described above regarding War & Peace seem well..sort of boilerplate in comparison. It's intricately done. And each character is capable of horrible and good things at the same time. Same with Game of Thrones...we have a character in Game of Thrones who throws a young boy out a window, then later defends the woman who has been guarding him, and is his captor, dragging him in chains across the countryside -- against a bear, and he loses a hand protecting her from getting raped. All in the effort to fulfill a promise to save the daughters of the woman who captured him from his sister. Yet it makes sense. His motives make sense. In both cases they are out of a sense of honor, and integrity. A duty to family and to his own code. The sociological system he is caged within, results in him having to make hard choices. He's a Knight, who has to protect a mad king at all costs -- but when said king threatens to burn his family alive and burns people alive in front of him, he slays the king. Is it honorable? Yes and know. It's also a blend of sociological and psychological views. Then we have this honorable man, who at the very beginning of S1, with his young sons in tow, beheads two deserters from the Wall. He doesn't listen to their warnings about the White Walkers or walking dead, or question their fear -- he just kills them for deserting. This honorable man takes his friend up on his offer to be hand to the king and investigates a murder -- which was in reality committed by the person who tricked him into investigating it, in order to pit him against the Queen's family. He falls into that individual's trap, just as the man who'd been murdered had prior to him. He thinks the man was murdered because he discovered Robert Barathon's true heir -- when in reality the man was murdered by his wife (the honorable man's sister-in-law) and her lover. Because of this -- he winds up getting beheaded by the Queen, after his friend is killed in a hunting accident. And his family is thrown into war. Was he truly an honorable man?
The series whips around on itself. There's a young girl who decides to make vengeance her calling and becomes an assassin, was this justified by what she went through? Is she a hero? It's not clear.
That level of characterization and depth is rare in fantasy novels, and in television series.
no subject
Yes, not enough of them have transcripts.
It was definitely an interesting read even though I am also not watching GoT. I think that one thing not really considered enough in the article (although this is not its focus) is the effect that money has on storytelling. For example, the fact that TV shows have a certain number of act breaks (and writers will be the first to complain about how the increasing number of ad breaks has disrupted storytelling by making it impossible to have long scenes anymore) was created purely for money.
The fact that they have generally had small main casts was also due to money. The fact that they kept on a central character was also due to money (generally because it was assumed the show could not continue without them, which was often true since shows were built around stars or partners).
Large casts were generally evident only in soap operas which had to film too often for small casts and which required many more ongoing storylines. The compensation was that the jobs paid much more poorly and that there was generally much more filming accomplished in a single day, allowing for lower overall budgets.
But book adaptations are problematic because many books, especially in a sci fi or fantasy genre, have large casts. And especially stories which depend on settings rather than characters (such as procedurals or epics) actually benefit from larger casts because the franchise becomes more important than the individual actors, and they can be rotated in and out as needed.
So there are longstanding reasons why Hollywood writes like it does. Another reason, I would argue, is simply the capitalistic residue of individualism which prioritizes a few people over a society in terms of writing and thinking. Institutional issues are complicated and often throw into relief the essential unfairness of many people's situations. It's a lot easier to leave them out of stories entirely by having a narrow focus in storytelling. It's therefore considered "less political" by also being less realistic. The Wire, after all, was pulled from real life events. GoT was focused on world building.
"Well-run societies don’t need heroes" is indeed an important truism to remember in life.
no subject
Shoot the dictator and prevent the war? But the dictator is merely the tip of the whole festering boil of social pus from which dictators emerge; shoot one, and there’ll be another one along in a minute. Shoot him too? Why not shoot everyone and invade Poland?
Of course, even if removing Hitler was the answer we still don't have to kill baby Hitler. We can just remove him from his more or less abusive parents and rehome him to somebody who will give him lots of love and also art lessons.
no subject
And going further, if we could re-home many of these people, would we be rid of fascism? The question I think at the bottom of that is...what causes the fascism to begin with? It wasn't Hitler. He's the symptom. So what caused the disease?
no subject
I think it's a bit more complex than "toxic combination of RWA followers and leaders" - the particular social and economic conditions had to be right for them to reach critical mass and take over - but.
no subject
No, I haven't -- thank you for the recommendation.
Agreed. Far more complicated. A lot of has to do with how humanity has evolved over time and the importance based on authoritarian structure in regards to tribe, family, religion, work, education etc.