{"id":2741,"date":"2002-12-20T21:33:53","date_gmt":"2002-12-20T21:33:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/staging.armedliberal.com\/?p=498"},"modified":"2002-12-20T21:33:53","modified_gmt":"2002-12-20T21:33:53","slug":"the-world-is-more-complex-than-your-thoughts-about-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=2741","title":{"rendered":"THE WORLD IS MORE COMPLEX THAN YOUR THOUGHTS ABOUT IT"},"content":{"rendered":"

(and a free movie review)<\/i>
\nI really disliked the movie \u0091Far From Heaven<\/a>\u0092. There were a couple of reasons why (for one, I\u0092m as tired of the assumption that the white professional guy is always the bad guy as I am of the use of Arab or Central American cannon fodder in action movies), but the overall reason was simple: I didn\u0092t believe in any of the people, and it was a human drama. I almost<\/u> believed in the Julianne Moore character, but I felt like I could see the strings dangling from the puppeteer\u0092s hands above, trying to animate her and everyone else in the film.
\nOne of the features I see in bad writing is the fact that the characters exactly fit the page (or screen); one of the things that I like in showing a good character (I\u0092ll use Julianne Moore in Magnolia as an example) is that they are bigger than the screen, that they are more complex, that what we are seeing is not the whole person but a facet of them, a slice through their life.
\nHemingway has the famous dictum that authors should write a chapter about their characters and then pull it out and throw it away, to create space in the character’s life that isn’t seen on the page.
\nIn FFH, I didn\u0092t get that feeling about any of the characters. Each was simply there to advance a plot point or demonstrate a theme in the movie, never to take a natural breath. Dennis Quaid was there to demonstrate the hollowness of the Man In The Grey Flannel Suit while Dennis Hasbert was the Noble Savage, simultaneously beset and preternatural in his calm control.
\nI\u0092ll leave FFH by pointing out that if they had eliminated the anachronisms and left the structure of relationships the same\u0085but made them more subdued, more in keeping with the likely reality of how closeted gays and interracial couples (surprise, there were both in 1950\u0092s America) really acted, the tension of yearning of the characters real feelings would have been offset by the structure of convention and societal disapproval in ways that we would have believed.
\nAnd because we would have believed in the characters, we would have felt the impact much more strongly.
\nBut instead, we were presented with simplified ideas of characters, people rendered down to an essence designed to further the thematic and philosophical bent of their author.
\nSimilarly, in much political and philosophical thought, people are reduced to one- or two-dimensional caricatures, and the complexity of the work is similarly reduced.
\nThis is partly just a basic human characteristic, because people tend to fit what they see into what they already know. When participants in the \u0091shoot\/don\u0092t shoot\u0092 study below saw a black man carrying a cell phone, they \u0091knew\u0092 it was a gun, and responded accordingly.
\nWe understand the world, I\u0092ve come to believe in pattern and narrative, and it\u0092s difficult at best for us to adopt new ones. But the patterns are inherently reductive of the true richness and ambiguity of much of what happens. So we get stuck when the world throws up facts that don\u0092t comfortably fit into our preconceptions. I \u0091knew\u0092 my Republican co-worker was conservative, \u0091knew\u0092 that he had strong feelings about racial issues and policy in the U.S., and so when I met his (African American) wife I had a stunning moment where I had to watch my carefully created \u0091story\u0092 about him and race collapse.
\nIn politics, we do the same thing. We expect our leaders to be simple paragons, our issues to be neat, internally consistent and bounded, and facts as they unavoidably come to light to fit into the neat models we\u0092ve made of the world.
\nWe\u0092re wrong.
\nWe have to stop expecting and start seeing, to stop trying to fit messy, complex, breathing people into neat pigeonholes that will advance the narratives we\u0092re trying to impose on the world and our fellow human beings.
\nNow I know that this may be seen as dangerously close to the perpetual European diplomatic quest for \u0091nuance\u0092. It\u0092s not.
\nIt\u0092s a desire to find a way of talking about politics that doesn\u0092t have the shallowness of a bad movie.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(and a free movie review) I really disliked the movie \u0091Far From Heaven\u0092. There were a couple of reasons why (for one, I\u0092m as tired of the assumption that the white professional guy is always the bad guy as I am of the use of Arab or Central American cannon fodder in action movies), but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2741"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2741\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}