The movie The Sixth Sense came out in 1999. It sold almost $300 million in theater tickets alone in America. It was a smash hit around the world, too, earning almost $700 million. The following year, as a DVD and VHS tape, the movie was seen by more than 80 million viewers. It was the year’s top-seller.

If you were one of those millions who saw the movie, would you give away the surprise ending to those who haven’t seen it?

Most people would find it impossible. They would be stunned at the notion: What? Give away The Ending? They reject it instantly.

Now consider the world we live in. Pick up the nearest newspaper, or use your remote to get a 24/7 all-news cable network. The record will show that we humans will slaughter whole peoples for religion or honor, for bigotry or hatred, for the principle of the thing or just for the hell of it. Animals and plants aren’t safe from us, either. Look at the endangered species list or those already extinct. And that news is so overwhelming, it’s no news at all.

But we won’t tell a stranger how The Sixth Sense ends.

We didn’t tell a stranger how a fictional story ends.

Humanity has scruples when it comes to blabbing The End.

Wow. That’s bizarre. Really bizarre. Isn’t it?

We the audience come to the story as innocents. Only “we” start at the beginning, for the author can start wherever he or she wishes and later fashion a beginning. It is all so new to us. We are so impatient, we finish our popcorn before the movie starts.

Yet, for us, the most important part of any story is "The End,” because that’s when we get to see "The End” and that’s when we get the opportunity to react to its “Meaning.” We the audience get a chance to shift our perspectives on “Life” and see "Life" in a different way than we expected to see it. We suck down stories and treasure them more than jewels because they are sustenance for our souls.

We need help in comprehending the incomprehensible and so we seek out closure. We want conflicts resolved and the loose ends of a story tied-up. We want answers to the questions that life poses.

Albert Camus in The Rebel states,

Perhaps . . . we should better understand human suffering if we knew that it was eternal. It appears that great minds are sometimes less horrified by suffering than by the fact that it does not endure. In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day. One morning, after many dark nights of despair, an irrepressible longing to live will announce to us the fact that all is finished and that suffering has no more meaning than happiness.

Notice our rage when the salesclerk inadvertently gives away the ending the whodunit we were looking forward to reading in bed tonight. We become so outraged -- we won’t buy the book.

Notice how frustrated we react when a story we're watching flashes "To Be Continued" on the screen. We holler to an empty room, “Nobody told me it was a two-parter!”

Learning is a change in perception, a change in behavior.

We need stories because we need to reflect upon our own lives. We see others handle these situations, these problems, and we connect with them and reflect upon our own lives. We need stories to learn our lives.

Camus adds,

What, in fact, is a novel but a universe in which action is endowed with form, where final words are pronounced, where people possess one another completely, and where life assumes the aspect of destiny. The world of the novel is only a rectification of the world we live in, in pursuance of man's deepest wishes. For the world is undoubtedly the same one we know. The suffering, the illusion, the love are the same. The heroes speak our language, have our weaknesses and our strength. Their universe is neither more beautiful nor more enlightening than ours. But they, at least, pursue their destinies to the bitter end and there are no more fascinating heroes than those who indulge their passions to the fullest.

Without closure, the stress stays unrelieved.

Fiction offers "a culminating point,” says Camus.

"Real life" does have a culminating point, as does "reel life." But with "reel life" we can analyze the import of, the significance of, that particular life, whereas in "real life" we're dead and gone from the scene. Just as Hamlet calls death "the undiscovered country from which no man has returned -- “

Camus continues: "Even if the novel describes only nostalgia, despair, frustration, it still creates a form of salvation. Despairing literature is a contradiction in terms.”

***

Children want to hear the same bedtime story over and over again because they are subconsciously learning how the story is structured. That is, they are learning how the universe is governed. To a child, the universe is chaos. It has no beginning and no end and no motivation. Each child knows none of the rules. No child knows why adults do what they do. All of that is beyond a child's comprehension, beyond his range of critical thinking.

Give a toddler a cup and a supply of water. Yes, you gain a mess. But watch the child experiment. The child has the same intensity of any corporate research scientist on the brink of discovery. The child is learning the properties of water, the possibilities of water, the potential of water, the future care and management of water.

Watch a child watch Saturday morning cartoons and be spellbound when you notice that children rarely laugh at the animation. A child is exploring, no, seeing reality's boundaries by exploring the fantasy and the imagination. The child is learning what is not possible in our universe. Children see little that is funny in this animated world. They are too busy absorbing.

Older children watch / read superhero stories to see that superheroes have limitations, too. In most of our fairytales, the stories have rules. The trolls, the fairies, the elves, the leprechauns all act according to the rules. Their behavior is consistent and predictable. If leprechauns operated by human's versions of the rules, they would be extinct (or at least endangered.)

Stories let us reflect on what we may have experienced and may help us figure out what these experiences mean to us.

For the audience, one way of understanding chunks of reality is by imposing a plot or structure upon events. Robert Frost called plot "a loose harness,” like a set of reins to guide the horse. Who has the reins in a nation’s collective unconscious, its Master Story?

Aristotle said stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. The concept of bookends -- a beginning and an end -- removes our POVS from the moving continuum of the Here and Now and its exaggerations help us see the forest for the trees.

Time is a river. We stand on the banks of the river and we can imagine the headwaters and we can imagine the delta by the sea.

Meaning is all.

Fiction puts it all out there. Each of us in our own consciousness . . . in our own sense of awareness of our Being . . . catches what we can.

We deal with what we can deal with. We cope with what we can cope with. We comprehend what we can comprehend.

We know endings are arbitrary.

But we want a handful, or two handfuls, just to give us an idea how it works. We want something to grasp.

Listen, we're in a hurry elsewhere. Everybody else wants a piece of our time. We gots other things to do. But we are willing to sit down and listen to your story. We want no distractions. We want to fall into your story and be lost in a dreamland we've not been to before. We want to feel love and fear, sorrow and grief, because those emotions are a part of our lives, too, and we recognize them.

We want to feel wonder and enchantment. We want an ending because . . .

Because we gotta go now.

Let's look at Life. It starts every morning and runs straight through to the end of the day, doesn't it? If it weren't for sleep, we'd never stop running onward.

Life is a "motion.”

No end in sight, right?

The End is not Nigh.

Part of the benefits of taking a vacation is "to get away from it all."

Shakespeare even urged us to take vacations in his romantic comedy As You Like It. "Come let’s kill some venison!" says the Duke.

Life, as we know it, is the Never-ending Story. Oh, we end, but Life goes on without us. (Which pisses each of us off no end!)

A vacation is a story inserted into our never-ending lives. A vacation, as everyone who has ever taken one will attest, has a very definite beginning, middle, and end. It puts a framework, or a border, or bookends around our daily existence. The health aspect of a vacation is that we can catch up to the physical energy.

Our lives are encircled by stories. Athletic events are stories of conflicts with beginnings, middles and ends. Sports highlights on the news, on the other hand, are events reduced to their Turning Points in the conflict and the Final Score.

A "motion picture" is a story.

News is a snapshot of the "motion.”

Newscasts on the contrary are not. What we see on the broadcasts are touchstones of continuing stories, moments captured and already useless and obsolete. ("Who wants yesterday's papers?" the Rolling Stones once sang.) They are snapshots from a motion picture.

The media gives us no overview of the event.

We get no overview of "the story.”

Our lives seem incremental, like mazes. Each day is a new twist or turn inside the labyrinth of life. We can see a few feet ahead, a few feet behind us. For almost all of us, our memories have both a shelf life and a half-life.

Stories are vitally important to us. They give us not just new perspectives, but perspectives we cannot live without. They give us sanity.

Labyrinths are experienced as two-dimensional. The maze disappears when one is lifted above it. When one goes horizontal, one goes three-dimensional. Seen three-dimensionally, the maze becomes recognizably two-dimensional, a road map in and a road map out.

Stories -- selected fictions -- lift us out of the maze of daily life.

How does the story end?

How does the individual get defined by his or her relationship to society?

The novel and its first cousins the movie and the play deliver a story to an audience, its readers. Each explores and defines the relationship of an individual to his or her society. The story may be a comment upon the society as experienced by the individual.

We are defined in terms of the Master Narrative.

The Master Narrative is made up of millions (billions?) of individual stories. These all constellate into patterns, selected fictions, and the sum total is an arbitrary configuration.

A Master Narrative is a group of related thoughts or feelings clustered around a central idea. It is a suggested outline.

The dominant narrative can surface in the work of a storyteller who is not even aware of it, and who might even repudiate it if only he noticed it. In effect, the storyteller has become a courier of culture, an unwitting pawn in a polemic.

The dominant narrative interprets the world so you don't have to. The dominant narrative dictates principles, thus constructs a foundation to stand upon.

The dominant narrative forms character. A Navy jet pilot refuses to bail out and rides his flaming machine into an empty field rather than a crowded schoolyard, for instant.

The Western Narrative is vastly different than the Islamic Narrative. The young girl Jasmine in the Disney cartoon Aladdin is offered to the villain in marriage and cries out, "I'd rather die!" But she's acting very westernized for a land of arranged marriages. Would a Western audience relate to her plight if she were more Islamic?

***

Go into any movie theater. Watch us, not the movie. See us in our least self-conscious moments, when the masks we wear for the world are dropped (so we think) for the security afforded by the darkness of the theater. Be amazed at the rainbow of expressions skittering across our faces as the story moves inexorably toward Aristotle’s Recognition and Reversal.

We leave the theater drained and paradoxically satisfied.

If we aren’t drained, we’re not satisfied.

In truth, we the audience are famished for lives of meaning and for explanations that make sense. We the audience have gone without, have had little chance in our collective everyday life to express itself. We crave more experiences. We seek out, whether in a Neolithic cave in southern France or in a modern museum or a contemporary novel or a Hollywood movie, more sensory overload. Sensory overload -- the gasp of "awe" and wonder we experience -- is critical and important for our collective well-being.

The fantasy replenishes our souls.

Fantasyland is reverse entropy. The heat death of the universe is countered directly by the biological sensors going full-blast. Warm-blooded life reverses cold chemical death.

We the audience have little respite from our daily duties. Often the price of personal escape is too dear: we cannot walk away from our lives to find our own adventures.

What does an audience watch?

Well, what does an audience want?

Why is this story being told?

Better yet, why is this story needed?

We the audience's perceptions were dulled before we came to the movies. The simple art of "visualizing" a story becomes crucial for us. We grab what we think (what we hope) will fill our yearnings.

When we talk "story,” we're talking nutrition.

That artists and the audience are in symbiotic cahoots is nothing new, not even in musical drama, as in opera or a Broadway musical. In a study of the composer Frank Loesser's skills in the musical Guys and Dolls, Lehman Engel notes that the music "gives the lyrics a framework which especially in a comedy song, makes the place of the joke predictable . . . The audience will wait for (the joke) expectantly, hopefully, and then will respond to it in the spot where the music allows 'space' for such a reaction."

We the audience wants to follow the hero. Thus the story itself is the hero. The story is how all of us are saved. The story is our own salvation.

Redemption is important. Those who have lost their souls, those who have fallen prey to evil, must be redeemed. We are all fallen angels. How do we get back to heaven?

We want to learn the secrets of the hero's soul. We want to know what's under his tough guy exterior. Many stories that reveal a disagreeable character under a disagreeable exterior invariably fail at the box office.

We the audience want to bring the lost soul to salvation. (One of the basic elements in the "story" of the character we call Satan is that the story's not over yet; there's always hope he'll be saved. That's what helps make Satan so appealing. The ending's not written in granite. He could still be saved.)

We want to follow the story; we hate getting to the ending before the story itself does. We want to suspend our disbelief and we resent any story element that either diminishes or denies our rights.

We the audience know (perhaps not always consciously, but certainly always unconsciously) when the truth is not being delivered. Listen to any audience leaving any movie theater: "It had a dumb ending."

The audience is hungry . . . starved! . . . for stories. The audience needs the Big Relax that stories can give us.

When we come out of a powerful book, or a movie, or stage play, we feel like we've had an emotional orgasm. Aristotle called it a "catharsis,” "a purging of emotions,” but the experience makes more contemporary sense if we considered it an emotional orgasm.

We the audience want a rush. We want to be consumed by the momentum of the story. The story's impact can even be destructive . . . without the reality of destruction, and the audience finds satisfaction.

We seek these escapes, these fantasies, these sweet dreams, these nightmares, these role-playings. We want . . . seek . . . need this satisfaction.

Each member of the audience subconsciously asks: How does this story "hit" me? How does this story "impact" on me? Each reader of a book or viewer of a movie or play wants to be satisfied.

Was the story satisfying?

The Big Relax gives a cleansing feeling.

Publishing industry figures say that during the 1980s one out of every four books sold was written by . . . Stephen King.

In our society, reading Stephen King is therapy.

The conclusion of this fictitious roller coaster ride gives up the Big Relax. The only one we can get in this never-ending roller coaster Life.

We talk about being in a rut. Yet life is a full-throttle pedal-to-the-metal roller coaster of a rut.

We get no surcease until death. Except in stories.

Stories offer us a conspiracy of functions, or maybe a confederation. All of which are meant to trap us and carry us with them down their predicable paths -- hoping that we'll buy into them, that we will be the willing voyeur -- that they will entertain us.

Entertain us! Yes, that is Job One. To keep us interested. To keep us turning the pages. Everything else is secondary.

The narrative apparatus is a trap. It functions as a trap. To work, it needs the audience's tacit consent. It needs to convince the audience to suspend our disbelief.

A story has ten minutes to hook us. Ten Minutes! Either we willingly agree to suspend our disbelief, or we become bored or distracted and we quit the story. We walk.

We all need our stories. In a sense, in our stories we are demanding our own destinies.

Successful stories are contests. Watch a down-to-the-wire three-seconds-of-overtime-remaining college basketball game when one team is ahead by a single point.

In ancient Greece, H. D. F. Kitto says in his book The Greeks:

At every hand we meet the idea of 'contest', agon. Those things that we weakly translate 'Games' were, in Greek, agones: the dramatic festivals were agones -- contests in which the poet was pitted against poet, actor against actor, choregus against choregus. Our word 'agony' is a direct development from agon; it is the anguish of the struggle that reveals the man.

Stories are contests.

Most storytellers want to tell an "honest" story. Usually that seems to be defined by what's left out of the story, rather than what is put into the story. For the most part, the audience wants honest sentiment, rather than sentimentality. It "wants" sex and violence, because sex and violence are part of life, but it does not want gratuitous sex and violence. (At least, not a steady diet of gratuitous sex and violence. Small and intense dosages now and again are okay, like adrenaline jolts to the central nervous system. Adrenaline is okay. You can get it at a hospital.)

"Honest" does not mean "true.”

These days, for instance, Movies of the Week (also known as MOVs in the television trade) advertise themselves as "a true story" or "based on a true story" (which still leaves enough artistic leg room for a shyster centipede).

When a story is advertised as "the true story,” we accept it unconditionally. But who has decided the story is a true story? Who actually judges it? What's to prevent some unscrupulous independent production company from dusting off a script from a pallet of other scripts in a West Hollywood warehouse, filming it, and then calling it "a true story"?

Yes, you're right. Why is this so ridiculous, so ludicrous, to talk about? And what are we all taking for granted?

Remember Oedipus? The "story" was not original to Sophocles. He rewrote an old myth to make it modern for his audience. His audience knew the story already. They came to hear a better version of it, a newer version, that is, a more contemporary version.

We are all mongrels. We could not have survived all that Life has thrown at the human race unless we were mongrels tough enough to survive all that Life has thrown at us. Especially our bluebloods. Our bluebloods are mongrels in denial. (They should remember what James Joyce said in Ulysses: "Time scatters all wealth.” They should also remember everybody needs a pie in the face sometime.)

Narratives are subversive. They work through the subconscious, the unconscious. Master narratives, dominant narratives, subvert whatever ambivalent feelings you may have. We become swept along in the floodtide, and an individual's imagination can be diverted and/or curtailed.

We can be seduced by absolutes. The familiar and the traditional is valorized, receives privileged status. We stay conventional. We stay within the boundaries created by others, boundaries created by the system itself.

Master narratives entrap us. We see with tunnel vision. Rainbows are cast as black and white; the rest of the spectrum is hidden to us. We become rats in a maze of our own limitations. We walk down corridors, while life itself is an endless geography. We run the risk of becoming too soon prisoners in a cold, chemical universe of brittle feelings, prisoners of a culture's misconceptions and faulty prejudices.

Dominant narratives tell us what socially-acceptable behavior is. It sanctions what promotes it and denies freedom and voice to any new alternatives.

The power of the master narrative is so strong that other narratives we encounter make us uneasy. And if our dominant narrative feels threatened enough, it may persecute us unto our deaths. Yes, Master Narratives kill. Our tacit consent may not guarantee our survival. Our tacit consent may not be enough to save us.

All narratives are biased. They have to be for survival. They "select" patterns and designs and frameworks in order to protect themselves from extinction. Being biased is not wrong. Not knowing how biased you are could be.

Tacit consent on the whole is a consensus of opinion. Consensus hides the enemy, disguises him, and suggests compromises that were always and actually precluded from the start.

The reason we do terrible things to one another because that's the way we see things. That's the way things have always been done around here. Hey, the rebel brought it down upon himself. He tried doing things differently around here. His fault, not ours, that we had to crush him to the ground.

The dominant narrative sees things as black and white and denies the gray. "Canada: Love it or Leave it." Another bumper sticker slogan that embodies an entire philosophy. While a third choice -- neither loving all of it nor leaving it -- includes the rest of the immense universe. "Better Red Than Dead" also denies everything that is neither red nor dead.

Life is infinite in its possibilities.

Deny that and you deny freedom for all of us.

Humans have always had little difficulty accepting the differences between fiction and reality. Not just for adults, but for children, too, after a certain age. For instance, my wife read Charlotte's Web to my five year old and my eight year old, and both shed tears at Charlotte's end. Yet within days my family found a huge spider's web between a bush and an old redwood fence. The web was almost three feet across, very visible and glistening in the morning dew. "Look, mommy, a spider! Kill 'em!" the children shouted.

We the audience has invested ourselves in the story. We want to take up the quest and reach the other end. We want to grow with the hero because we too are as interested in the truth revealed. We the audience wants the psychological truths because we want to be revived.

We deliberately involve ourselves in the characters' lives. We want intimate personal affairs brought to the surface and exposed for all to see because we want to express our fears, our anxieties.

We tell stories to revive ourselves. We want the unconscious truths to emerge -- and not to be submerged. (That the truths emerge and that the truths not be submerged are actually two different states of being, and both states are necessary.) We want to know we are not different than people were generations – millennia!--ago. We want to know we are not different than people were a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

Tell us a story.

                                                                 © FILM JOURNAL 2002