It didn’t take long for the initial reports out of Miami to turn into a roar of “Zombie Apocalypse!” People didn’t even wait to hear the details. Give us a man eating another man’s face and we will run with it, even if it requires us to make a joke out of what looks like a tragedy in the cold light of day. Why?
Because we need stories. As zombies love brains, as meat loves salt, people love narrative. We thrive on narrative, because it holds back chaos. It introduces order and meaning and structure. Narrative is at the heart of religion, for example. Humans invented religion to explain things they didn’t understand. Not sure what lightning is? Make a story about a god who uses it to punish people. Voila! Order out of chaos. Not sure what happens after we die? Frightened by the uncertainty? A good story explains away the uncertainty. Don’t worry, you’ll come to a river, where you’ll have to pay a boatmen to ferry you across. If you’ve been good, you’ll go to a beautiful meadow. If you’ve been bad, you’ll go to terrible place of torment.
Without narrative, we have to stare down the chaos of life. Instead of zombie apocalypse and its offer of freedom and survival of the cleverest, we end up with some unfortunate man with a patchy history of bad and desperate behavior who took a drug and did terrible thing, and it means nothing. That’s one of the scariest phrases in the English language–it means nothing. That’s why as crazy as it sounds, we like the idea of “zombie apocalypse” better than we like the sound of “random act of gruesome violence.”
Fear of meaninglessness is why people start charities. To honor a loved one who died of cancer. To protect people from the fate of a loved one killed in a drunk driving accident or a kidnapping or some other horrible, random act. The stunned and wounded people the dead leave behind want death to mean something. They don’t want it to be brutish and random and meaningless.
And so narrative becomes the savior. Random horrible death becomes a story. The cancer victim becomes a valiant hero whose death will encourage others to walk for a cure! (Until bad PR causes problems with that narrative.) The guy with his face eaten off, he’s the start of the long-awaited zombie apocalypse!
This is why I laugh at people who bemoan the encroachments of reality television. As though it were reality. Other people complain that reality television is scripted. The outrage! You mean the producers are manipulating the show to produce more drama? They’re–dare I say it–crafting a narrative? Kim & Kris weren’t really in love? They were just acting?
Our love of narrative is the reason we will never tire of telling stories. Books aren’t dead. Cinema isn’t dying. Yes, it’s probably going to change, but not so much we won’t be able to recognize it. Sleep for a thousand years and return to civilization and there will still be stories you recognize. In fact, they’re likely to be the same stories told a thousand years ago, even if we use new technologies to tell them. Stories will never end, because we need them to understand our own chaotic lives.
You mean it’s not real?!?! NOOOOOOOO!!!!!
To my mind, one of the more interesting things about “reality tv” is that it’s all about the self-narrative. The characters create themselves as the show goes on. Like deeply imbedded improvisation. I know that as a culture we like to dismiss reality tv stars as narcissists, but imagine what it would be like to have a TV crew filming your life. Think of the ways that your life could be manipulated to tell a cohesive narrative arc. Think of how you would want to create and reveal your own character. For extra credit, consider what kinds of freedom to do and say what you want might be born out that scripted narrative. Show your work.
Bryn Greenwood 
My objection to reality TV isn’t the narcissism so much as the trail of innocent victims they leave in their wake. Those poor Gosselin children are going to be in therapy the rest of their lives, through no fault of their own. And the producers of the show will have as much to answer for on Judgment Day as their moronic parents will.
I want to quibble a little with your explanation of why people start charities, but I’m having a hard time figuring out how to explain my point of view. So I’ll have to think on it a bit. Hmm…
I suspect that’s part of the narcissism, the willingness to leave a trail of innocent victims. I have never seen an episode of that show, just because the thought of sticking young children into that is monstrous. I can only imagine the teen mom shows are worse.
And I don’t claim that fear of meaninglessness is the ONLY reason people start charities in the name of deceased loved ones. I think it’s just the prime motivator. If it weren’t, they might have started the charity before the person died.
Bryn, you have a way with words that expresses so many things that I think about, but can’t quite explain. Thank you for this post. Very well done.
Yes and yes. I’m too tired to be more coherent than that, but basically I second everything in here. Well said.
OMG. If they put a TV crew in our house, we’d end up as an episode on ‘Hoarders.’ I’d get the role of the concerned but hapless family member, while the camera lovingly panned over the mess in our living room and in my parents’ bedroom (shudder). Meanwhile, my parents would provide the freak show, with Mom squealing, “Who are THOSE PEOPLE? WHO?”
I read in some literary-criticism journal that our need for storytelling is how we got religion. With postmodernism, which gets rid of narrative, we don’t need storytelling or religion anymore. It’s all chaos, zombies, and the Kardashians.
I think post-modernism was a fancy pants literary idea that didn’t work for the vast majority of people. That’s why we still have religion and “reality” tv is mostly scripted. Poor post-modernists. Nobody really liked their game.
The song, “Dirty Laundry” comes to mind. Well-wriiten and well-thought out, Bryn. I always like to know what’s churning in that mind of yours.
I have a very ambivalent attitude about being observed. I think I want to be the man behind the curtain, crafting the narrative!
Very cool post Bryn. I think our fascination with reality tv has a lot to do with our need for a narrative as well as our need to look at the ‘dirt’ in other people’s back yards so we can sit back and think ‘huh, I might not be perfect but at least I’m not as bad as…’ and trip along on our merry way, with the worry of putting effort into self improvement safely tucked into a back corner of our minds.
Yes, I think people do find a kind of comfort in the madness of reality tv. Which is part of the allure of forced narrative on reality tv. The writers and producers engineer certain outcomes to meet the audience’s desire for a kind karmic equilibrium.