Hollywood has always been the preserve of middle brow sensitivities. Charlie Chaplin was sentimental; the very talky dramas of the Thirties and Forties testified to the sanctity of middle class life (think of “The Best Years of Our Lives”); the Seventies, given their taste for epics, translated the gangster film into a family tragedy (think of “The Godfather” trio of movies). And so it goes on, people without much education treating Hollywood as their canon of great literature, quoting “Casablanca” or”The Wizard of Oz” as part of the collective wisdom they have absorbed into their own heads, using those stories and phrases to capture events in their own fantasy and actual lives, just as Shakespeare or Dickens serve that function for a more educated audience. And so it is fair to ask a deep aesthetic question after this year’s Oscars, which made Koreans the latest group to move into the spotlight, just as in the past Hollywood acceptance marked the passage of Jews, Italians and African Americans into the assimilated parts of the nation, even if women, one such group vieing for inclusion, still consider themselves as having a way to go, however much the women’s point of view has driven story lines from at least the Thirties Warner Brothers’ musicals to the Nora Ephron romantic comedies of the Nineties.
The question is: how do the mechanics of storytelling allow wisdom to arise from art even if the artists who create this art seem smug and narrow-- or are they? Consider Sam Mendes’ “1917”, widely considered a shoe-in for best picture but which didn’t make it, the picture a creditable piece of work even if truly middlebrow in its assumptions about the way life works. Consider the ways in which it created its effects on its audience and that will tell you of what storytelling consists.
The first principle of storytelling is that each story has a clear intent, a purpose which its characters are out to fulfill or arrive at. In “The Odyssey”, Odesseus wants to get home so that he can reclaim Penelope and his kingdom. That was known from the beginning. In Jane Austen novels, all the young and not so young women want to get married or resent not having done so. Hamlet can’t decide whether he wants to be a fop or an ex-fop who is dabbling in dynastic politics. In “Fort Apache”, Henry Fonda plays the colonel who is willing to take risks and endanger his regiment so that he can take on the Indians. That is his character flaw, just as Macbeth’s is a willingness to plunge on to increase his titles and power. So stories have clearly defined arcs, at least most of the time, and that is true of “1917”, where two soldiers are sent on a mission to deliver a message to stop an attack, which takes on resonance because there were so many attacks in World War I that were not held back and that led to needless slaughter. The storyline is therefore the premise that allows the story to unfold even if it need not qualify as the intellectual import of the story or the emotional impact the story will convey.
A second element of storytelling is providing information about the characters and their setting while the story is itself getting told. I, for one, am always surprised that, in “the Odyssey'', Helen has been restored as Queen to Menaleus, in spite of what she had done by running off with Paris. The incident doesn’t do much to move on the plot but it does suggest that Odysseus is a straggler, still living in a wartime world to which everyone else has bid good riddance. That is an insight into the epic as a whole. Similarly, we learn from “Henry V” how it is that an Englishman courts a Frenchwoman when he knows she has to marry him anyway. He praises her in French, which is charming and establishes him as a sophisticate. That is information.
Information is provided in “1917” mostly through visuals. We learn that trenches were much better built and higher than I had been led to believe-- though I don’t know how much to trust that information because it had the alternative function of making walks through the trenches, both British and German, more visually appealing than having those crowded with feces and men hunched over. There is also an expansiveness in the portrayal of the battlefield. It is vast and there are long vistas over pastureland, a lot of time spent in the light rather than in the night, another bit of knowledge I had taken away with me from other World War I movies. Again, are these facts or movie-making? In novels, I look for authentication. Dickens teaches you how to be a pickpocket and Melville how to be a whaler. What gives Mendes his authenticity?
Storytelling also involves intercutting set pieces, which are things that need to be included if the story is to be what it is purported to be. And so musicals of the Forties and Fifties always included a ballet. Well, in great literature based on legends, there always has to be an idyll of romance to break up the heroic story line, the author of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” very neatly pulling off that trick by making a dalliance actually an important test of the hero, though I am still not sure why-- just to show that Sir Gawain has passions aside from his quest and that those passions are therefore illegitimate? In “1917”, there seems to be a languid time when the soldier moves through a ruined city that looks like a church and finds a solitary woman taking care of a baby and he provides her with milk that he fortuitously has in his canteen so that she can feed the baby, and then he moves on, anxious not to linger because there is a time deadline on his quest. The allusion to religion and to family life provides some relief to the pace and serves to temporarily reduce tension, which may have been why Mendes did it, though it is also the case that his movie could not fulfill its epic scope if it did not have such a pause or distraction. Moreover, this invocation of allegory is another way in which stories are told. “Ulysses” would survive as a tale of a day in Dublin even if Joyce hadn’t chosen the Homeric frame.
Then, storytelling also includes decisive events. These are ones which change the storyline or our interpretation of what has been happening. Brutus comes to be thought of as a murderer rather than as a defender of the Republic because he was a partner in the assasination of Caesar. In drama, a change in meaning accompanies a decisive event, as in the case of Brutus, but sometimes the decisive event does not require such an accompanying transformation. Just Countess Olenska showing up back in New York society is enough to alter the story in Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence'', quite aside from what makes her intriguing to Newbold Archer. In “1917”, a decisive yet not meaningful event takes place when the German plane ploughs into the barn in front of which our two heroes were standing. That eventually leads to the death of one of them, the other soldier going on with the mission alone, whether out of loyalty to his friend or to the larger cause. The scene, which is stolen from a similar plane crash in “The English Patient”, is calamitous but unforced. It did not have to happen but war is when unlikely things take place. And so we move forward to the residue of the story, which is that war is chaotic and not at all dramatically satisfying, even if our remaining hero survives his ordeal.
A fifth element of storytelling is dramatic dialogue. That also alters the trajectory of the story but it deserves being separated from decisive events because it is very different in that it intrudes an abstract understanding a character has into the scheme of events, and so is as if the character were outside the story in that he or she is impelled forward by an idea, just as happens in real life where to utter something is to take a stand and to have consequences follow from it even if the utterance is misspoken or mistaken or glib or conventional or outrageous. People live by what they say, That is the glory of the Nineteenth Century novel where so many people have so many important things to say, those remarks transforming their lives and the understanding of the reader as well. That includes characters who are gruff or inarticulate, so that even Melville’s Bartleby is decisive when he says only “I prefer not” and this reader, for one, wished to be as elemental and forceful as that character.
In “1917”, the decisive dialogue is delivered in at least three places, and by officers, one of whom very compassionately tells the soldier who has just lost his friend “not to dwell on it”, that doing no good at all to anyone. A second officer had told the two buddies not to give their message to the commanding officer unless there were other people in the room because some officers just love to go to battle, and the officer who receives the message hesitates before ordering the attack to stand down, suggesting that he was so tempted but had the sense to obey, however much he had, by necessity, given his emotions over to the attack mode.
The viewer has by this time come to the gravamen of “1917”, which is not, as some critics have suggested, to reduce the movie to the cliche that soldiers lose their innocence. In fact the soldier who survived had already been at the Battle of the Somme and sold the medal he got there for a bottle of wine. He had no innocence to lose. Rather, it is that military units remain cohesive in the face of staggering losses past and expected, that officers are humane and practical rather than the martinet Adolphe Menjou is in Kubrick’s “Paths of Glory”, and that ordinary soldiers remain true to their duty even if they could evade it. They want to do the honorable thing. That is what is amazing about wars: not that units or societies fall apart but that they remain coherent. That is the lesson of the First World War and it carries through until today. The enemy does not give up unless it has been forced to by force of arms. That is true of Vietnam, of Afghanistan, of the Israeli-Palestinian hundred years war.
So meaning does emerge from storytelling, and part of the reason for that are the five elements of storytelling that I have pointed to. There is the basic story line, set at the beginning, which just gets played out, and so the ending is somehow there in the beginning and so the message is clear if you just have ears to listen. There is the information provided in the course of storytelling that provides the texture of the experience and that may be the most important thing to carry away, as happens in every war movie because it is the experience of military life that a viewer or reader comes to appreciate as the meaning of the movie or novel. There are the the sometime more overtly allegorical allusions in the midst of the literary or cinema form that orient the reader and viewer to what is going on and so provide context or even what the experience is about in that it is nothing more than the working out of conventions, as happens in many a romantic comedy, such as “Bringing Up Baby” or romantic tragedy, like “Jane Eyre”. There are the dramatic intrusion of events, which turn the tables on the plot, as they do in “The Count of Monte Cristo”, as well as supplying the revenge motive which haunts the rest of the novel, or else are just happenstance where the characters must pick up the pieces and figure out how to make a new story out of things, as happens in “Mice and Men”, when the two young men turn from being hangers on to being fugitives. There is dialogue, which is a thing onto itself, sometimes reflecting dynamics in the story already there and sometimes altering them, as happens when Huck is able to see through how fakers try to use language to their advantage and will not allow himself to be fooled again by talk. All put together, they allow a novel or a movie or some other fiction to become a coherent whole and so convey itself to the audience, and that is its meaning, whether or not that is appreciated the first time out or after having ruminated over a work for sixty or more years. These effects are to some extent independent of the storyteller in that they work on their own, giving weight to a literary or filmic experience though, of course, some writers and filmmakers are better able to exploit these resources for emotion and meaning.