The Moral Manuals

Being such a big fan of fantasy and science fiction, it always strikes me how most people have a distorted image of my artistic tastes. It is difficult for them to understand why I enjoy certain movies, books or TV shows, and loathe others, as if all of those things were pretty much the same. They also confuse fantasy with make-believe, and tend to think that people who enjoy fantastic stories live in a paraller universe to protect themselves from the hardships of the real world. And this is not true.

I’d like to talk about this subject, but I am terribly sleepy and afraid to go to sleep before writing this. I’m pretty sure I’ll forget everything I have to say on the subject, so from now on I’ll just activate my “stream of consciousness” mode and just let the ideas flow. I hope in the end all will make sense.

Here we go.

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Isn’t life hard? Don’t you wish it came with instructions? Well, if you feel like this, you are not alone.

Our parents can’t teach us everything. You can’t always ask someone what to do. Growing up means having to do shit all by yourself. And you can’t write down every single possible problem you will have to face. When problems appear, you need a role model you can be inspired by.

Fairy tales are aimed at kids and teach them the basics of how to survive their childhood. Obey your parents, don’t talk to strangers, don’t lie, stay away from the forest. Be kind and polite to everyone, and maybe you won’t be eaten by a witch.

Growing up, we face different problems that fairy tales didn’t talk about. We seek advice from more mature stories. Back in the good old days, boys and girls could rely on more complex stories for people their age, and later, as adults, they could finally read the classics, and go for an entire life of discoveries and reflection.

Unless, of course, they were too lazy or too poor to read such books. In this case, they could seek comfort on the oldest moral manual known to eurocentric western society: the Bible.

But the Bible is a little bit old. It’s been written 2.000 years ago, and many of the moral standards represented in its tales involve slavery, murder, sexism, homofobia and other behaviors considered undesirable by our modern society.

Gladly, we all live in a modern XXI Century society and can rely on new role models more suitable for our time and age. We can rely on television.

Well, it’s not so simple. For example: I’ve been watching “The Twilight Zone” all my life. If I ever encounter aliens, or fall into the 5th Dimension, I will know exactly how to act. But what if my father dies, or my wife leaves me? What if I lose my job, or find out I have cancer? How could “Star Trek” help me with this?

That is why most people prefer to watch “normal” TV shows, where supposedly normal people live supposedly real problems in an extremely supposed real world.

Shows like Beverly Hills 90210 rely on a strange formula that still work today. Its characters are blatant stereotypes supposed to make viewers relate to them, and go through fictional problems that create tension and drama. Problem is, the whole thing is so shallow it should better be called melodrama. The difference between drama and melodrama is that, even though in both formats the characters act and feel, in melodramas the reasons behind their actions and feelings is almost non-existant. Nothing serious is on stake, they just laugh or die because that’s what they do.

TV shows of that kind work pretty much the same way: stereotypical characters are induced to go through a certain “realistic” problem, solving it by the end of the season. You will have a character becoming addicted in drugs, the other being raped, the other will cheat on his wife, the other will get pregnant, the other will have cancer, and so on. In the next season, the problems trade places, and the character who had cancer in the last season, this time will commit a crime, while the guy who cheated on his wife will now become addicted to drugs, and so on.

By the end of 9th season, every single character in the series will have been raped, drugged, pregnant, sick with cancer, and the whole thing should feel pretty much like a Lars Von Trier movie with a Radiohead soundtrack. But it doesn’t: everybody is always smiling and saying dumb reassuring things to serve us as a good example.

Frankly, I learned more about being a man from Mr. Spock and Don Draper than with any of those stupid TV shows your mom loves.

As kids stop reading both the Bible and good books, and their parents want to be their friends and never say “no” to them, generation after generation are being raised with stupid role models to follow, worried only about the special effects on a movie and not caring about the psychological side of things. What would be left of me if I had been raised with movies like “Transformers 2″ or “Twilight”? What kind of adult is Harry Potter teaching your kids to be?

One of the basic principles of storytelling is “building character”. These two little words contain a powerful double meaning. Building a character is not only creating a fictional person: it is also the construction of character inside of the reader, viewer or listener to your story. In order to build our own character, we need other characters to actually give us something to build our own character with.

In his play “As You Like It”, act 2, scene 7, William Shakespeare speaks through his character Jaques, saying something that became quite of a clichée, but very few people actually stop to think about what it really means:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;