Charles Foster Kane was a man of the people. He might have inherited a fortune, but he’d decided to reject the life of the mercenary rich. Instead, he chose to be an ally of the downtrodden, even as it went against his own financial interests. As editor of The New York Daily Inquirer, he fought for their rights relentlessly. In a bid to serve them even better, he ran for Governor of New York. Who could criticise such a selfless and noble man?
As it turns out, his oldest friend could. In the immediate aftermath of Kane’s political campaign we find him alone and sorrowful, pacing his campaign office which is still hectic with streamers and posters and emptiness. He has lost. And then in staggers his best pal Jedediah Leland who, it soon becomes apparent, has been out with his sorrows for a few too many drinks. When Kane ruefully acknowledges ‘the people have made their choice’, Leland cuts him off. ‘You talk about the people as if you owned them, as though they belonged to you,’ he says, slurring slightly. ‘Goodness. As long as I can remember you’ve talked about giving the people their rights, as if you could make them a present of liberty. As a reward for services rendered. Remember the working man? You used to write an awful lot about the working man. But he’s turning to something called organised labour. You’re not going to like that one little bit when you find out it means that your working man expects something as his right, not as your gift. When your precious underprivileged really get together … I don’t know what you’ll do. Sail away to a desert island, probably, and lord it over the monkeys.’ Kane tells him he’s drunk. ‘Drunk?’ Leland replies. ‘What do you care? You don’t care about anything except you. You just want to persuade people that you love them so much that they ought to love you back.’
Who was Charles Foster Kane really? That was the challenge that editor Rawlston made to his staff of storytellers at the beginning of Citizen Kane. Was he the man his old friend perceived: self-interested, delusional, desperate for approval and attention? Or was he the person his own hero-making brain told him he was: brave, generous and selfless?
Who is this person? This is the question all stories ask. It emerges first at the ignition point. When the initial change strikes, the protagonist overreacts or behaves in an otherwise unexpected way. We sit up, suddenly attentive. Who is this person who behaves like this? The question then re-emerges every time the protagonist is challenged by the plot and compelled to make a choice.
Everywhere in the narrative that the question is present, the reader or viewer will likely be engaged. Where the question is absent, and the events of drama move out of its narrative beam, they risk becoming detached – perhaps even bored. If there’s a single secret to storytelling then I believe it’s this. Who is this person? Or, from the perspective of the character, Who am I? It’s the definition of drama. It is its electricity, its heartbeat, its fire.
Harnessing the energy of the dramatic question means understanding that the answer is not easily found. This is because, even at the best of times, most of us don’t actually know who we are. If you were to ask Kane who he was, he’d surely say he was noble and selfless, the opposite of his old friend’s drunken accusations. He’d mean it too. But, as the plot carefully shows, he’d be wrong.
If Kane was to argue he was noble and selfless, it would be because he’d been listening to a voice in his head – one that was telling him all the ways he was morally right. It’s not only psychotics like Mr B who hear such voices. We all do. You can hear yours now. It’s reading this book to you, commenting here and there as it goes. Flawed characters, in life and story, are often badly led astray by this inner voice, which is generated by word and speech-making circuitry that is mostly located in the brain’s left hemisphere. This voice is not to be trusted.
This isn’t simply because it’s relaying all those flattering hero-making half-truths to us. The narrator can’t be trusted because it has no direct access to the truth of who we really are. It feels as if that voice is the thing that’s in control of us. It feels as if that voice is us. But it’s not. ‘We’ are our neural models. Our narrator is just observing what’s happening in the controlled hallucination in our skulls – including our own behaviour – and explaining it. It’s tying all the events together into a coherent tale that tells us who we are, why we’re doing what we’re doing and feeling what we’re feeling. It’s helping us feel in control of our thrilling neural show. And it’s not lying, exactly. It’s confabulating. As the philosopher of psychology Professor Lisa Bortolotti explains, when we confabulate ‘we tell a story that is fictional, while believing that it is a true story.’ And we’re confabulating all the time.
This disturbing fact was exposed in a series of famous experiments by neuroscientists Professors Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga. Their studies answered a strange question – what would happen if you planted an instruction into a brain and somehow hid it from the narrator? Say, for example, you managed to insert the instruction WALK into a person’s mind. And that person started walking. Without the narrator telling the brain’s owner why they were walking, how would they explain what they were doing? Would they be like a zombie? Would they just shrug? Or what?
Because most of the circuitry that the narrator relies upon is in the brain’s left hemisphere, they’d need to find a way of getting information into the right side and keeping it there, hidden away from it. This would mean recruiting so called ‘split-brain’ patients – epileptics who, as part of their treatment, had had the wiring that connected their hemispheres cut, but who lived otherwise normal lives.
So that’s what they did. They showed a card saying WALK to a split-brain patient such that only their left eye saw it. Because of the way the brain’s wired up, this information was sent into the right hemisphere. And, because the wiring between their hemispheres had been cut, that’s where it stayed, hidden away from the narrator.
So what happened? The patient stood up and walked. When the experimenters asked him why, he said, ‘I’m going to get a Coke.’ His brain observed what was happening, in his neural realm, and made up a cause-and-effect story to explain it. It confabulated. It had no idea why he’d really stood up. But it instantly invented a perfectly credible tale to account for the behaviour – a tale that its owner unquestioningly believed.
This happened again and again. When a woman’s silent hemisphere was shown a picture of a pin-up girl she giggled. She blamed it on their ‘funny machine’. When another woman’s silent hemisphere was shown a video of a man being pushed into a fire, she said, ‘I don’t really know why, but I’m kind of scared. I feel jumpy. I think maybe I don’t like this room. Or maybe it’s you. You’re making me nervous. I know I like Dr Gazzaniga, but, right now, I’m scared of him.’
The job of the narrator, writes Gazzaniga, is to ‘seek explanations or causes for events’. It is, in other words, a storyteller. And facts, while nice, don’t really matter to it: ‘The first makes-sense explanation will do.’ Our narrator has no wired-in access to the neural structures that that are largely (or wholly, depending on who you ask) controlling how we feel and what we do. Because the narrator exists separately from the circuits that are the true causes of our emotions and behaviour, it’s forced to rapidly hash together any makes-sense (and usually heroic) story it can about what we’re up to and why.
It’s because of such findings, writes Professor Nicholas Epley, that ‘no psychologist asks people to explain the causes of their own thoughts and behaviour anymore unless they’re interested in storytelling’. It’s why a neuroscientist colleague of Professor Leonard Mlodinow said that years of psychotherapy had allowed him to construct a helpful story about his feelings, motivations and behaviour, ‘but is it true? Probably not. The real truth lies in structures like my thalamus and hypothalamus, and my amygdala, and I have no conscious access to those no matter how much I introspect.’
The terrible and fascinating truth about the human condition is that none of us really know the answer to the dramatic question as it pertains to ourselves. We don’t know why we do what we do, or feel what we feel. We confabulate when theorising as to why we’re depressed, we confabulate when justifying our moral convictions and we confabulate when explaining why a piece of music moves us. Our sense of self is organised by an unreliable narrator. We’re led to believe we’re in complete control of ourselves, but we’re not. We’re led to believe we really know who we are, but we don’t.
This is why life can be such a vexing struggle. It’s why we disappoint ourselves with behaviour that’s mysterious and self-destructive. It’s why we shock ourselves by saying the unexpected. It’s why we find ourselves telling ourselves off, giving ourselves pep talks or asking, ‘What the hell was I thinking?’ It’s why we despair of ourselves, wondering if we’ll ever learn.
In stories, the dramatic question has the power to unfold so unexpectedly and endlessly because the protagonists themselves don’t know the answer. They’re discovering who they are, moment by moment, as the pressure of the drama is applied. And, as the plot turns, they’re often surprised by who they turn out to be. Every time you read something like ‘she heard herself say’ or ‘he found himself doing’, these forces are likely at play. Characters – and readers and viewers – are being shown fascinating new answers to the dramatic question.
Often, characters are such a mystery to themselves that they seem in complete ignorance of the truth of their own feelings and motives. In The Idea of Perfection, Kate Grenville brilliantly exposes the gap between a character’s confabulation and the reality of who they are in an encounter between married Felicity Porcelline and her local butcher, Alfred Chang. Felicity is convinced that Alfred’s in love with her. She feels so awkward about the situation that she’s taken to dawdling outside his shop until another customer arrives that she can enter with. One evening, when Felicity turns up after hours to ask a favour, she finds herself alone with him. The scene that unfolds causes us to doubt Felicity’s confabulation of who, exactly, desires who.
When Felicity first spots Alfred she feels a ‘a little pulse of something … like apprehension, or stage-fright, but it was not those’. Her narrator provides an immediate confabulation to explain this acute sensation: ‘It was knowing he was in love with her.’ Felicity’s eyes prowl Chang’s face and body, noticing an opening in his shirt. ‘She could actually see a crease of honey-coloured stomach and his neat little navel.’ As they talk, she finds herself calling him by his first name. ‘She had never done it before and she did not know why she had done so now. It would only encourage him.’ When he hoists his trousers up, she sees ‘a bulge just there. They were frayed just there, too, around the zip. She looked away, naturally, but could not help noticing. It was really very badly frayed. She heard herself giggle.’ She makes herself ‘smile slightly, the way she knew smoothed out the skin of her face in a nice way’. Commenting on his family photos, she surprises herself. ‘They’re lovely photos, she heard herself gushing. So … intimate. That was not really the word she had meant. Intimate. It did not sound quite right. She hurried on, before the word could become large in the silence.’
At this stage, it would be an unbelievable shock to Felicity to learn that she ends up in bed with Alfred. But it wouldn’t surprise you or me. That ‘little pulse of something’ she felt on spotting him was her own lust. Like Jedediah Leland in his coruscating view of his old friend Kane, we can clearly see answers to the dramatic question to which Felicity herself is blind. The scene works so brilliantly because the answer keeps changing, paragraph by paragraph, line by gripping line.
For years I’ve struggled with cravings and addictions. In middle age, I battle with food. Because the culture I’m immersed in is obsessed with bodily perfection and youth, and because that culture is in me, I find myself engaged in a hopeless quest to make my stomach appear as it did when I was eighteen. What I’ve discovered, as I’ve waged these tedious wars against myself, is that who I am seems to be in constant flux.
On the Monday morning following a large roast dinner, I am Captain Abstemious himself, determined, rigid, positively Victorian in my values. I will clean out my cupboards and sort out my life. But by 17:00 Wednesday evening, Captain Abstemious has vanished. In his place stands Billy Pillock Jnr who believes it’s pathetic for a man in his forties to worry about a bit of belly flub. He’s earned a bit of a treat, with the week he’s been having. And what sort of person are you anyway, beating yourself up over a mouthful of Roquefort? How joyless, how vain, how positively Victorian! The problem of self-control, I’ve come to think, isn’t really one of willpower. It’s about being inhabited by many different people who have different goals and values, including one who’s determined to be healthy, and one who’s determined to be happy.
As well as having models of everything in the world, inside our heads, we have different models of self that are constantly fighting for control over who we are. At different times, under different circumstances, a different version of us becomes dominant. When it does, it takes over the role of neural narrator, arguing its case passionately and convincingly and usually winning. Beneath the level of consciousness we’re a riotous democracy of mini-selves which, writes the neuroscientist Professor David Eagleman, are ‘locked in chronic battle’ for dominion. Our behaviour is ‘simply the end result of the battles’. All the while our confabulating narrator ‘works around the clock to stitch together a pattern of logic to our daily lives: what just happened and what was my role in it?’ Fabrication of stories, he adds, ‘is one of the key businesses in which our brain engages. Brains do this with the single minded goal of getting the multifaceted actions of the democracy to make sense.’
The truth of our multiplicity is revealed in a condition known as Alien Hand Syndrome. In these patients a behaviour that would usually have been suppressed takes independent control of a limb. The German neurologist Dr Kurt Goldstein recalled a woman whose left hand ‘grabbed her own neck and tried to throttle her, and could only be pulled off by force’. The American neurologist Dr Todd Feinberg saw a patient whose hand ‘answers the phone and refuses to surrender the receiver to the other hand’. The BBC told of a patient whose doctor asked why she was undressing. ‘Until he said that, I had no idea that my left hand was opening up the buttons of my shirt,’ she said. ‘So I start rebuttoning with the right hand and, as soon as I stopped, the left hand started unbuttoning them.’ Her alien hand would remove items from her handbag without her knowing. ‘I lost a lot of things before I realised what was going on.’ Professor Michael Gazzaniga describes a patient who ‘grabbed his wife with his left hand and shook her violently, while with the right hand trying to come to his wife’s aid.’ One day Gazzaniga saw that patient’s left hand pick up an axe. ‘I discreetly left the scene.’
Our multiplicity is revealed whenever we become emotional. When we’re angry, we’re like a different person with different values and goals in a different reality than when we feel nostalgic, depressed or excited. As adults, we’re used to such weird shifts in selfhood and learn to experience them as natural and fluid and organised. But for children, the experience of transforming from one person to another, without any sense of personal volition, can be deeply disturbing. It’s as if a wicked witch has cast an evil spell, magicking us from princess to witch.
In his pioneering classic The Uses of Enchantment the psychoanalyst Professor Bruno Bettelheim argues that making sense of such terrifying transformations is a core function of fairytales. A child can’t consciously accept that an overwhelming mood of anger may make him ‘wish to destroy those on whom he depends for his existence. To understand this would mean he must accept the fact that his own emotions may so overpower him that he does not have control over them – a very scary thought.’
Fairytales take those scary inner selves and turn them into fictional characters. Once they’ve been defined and externalised, like this, they become manageable. The story these characters appear in teaches the child that, if they fight with sufficient courage, they can control the evil selves within them and help the good to become dominant. ‘When all the child’s wishful thinking gets embodied in a good fairy; all his destructive wishes in an evil witch; all his fears in a voracious wolf; all the demands of his conscience in a wise man encountered on an adventure; all his jealous anger in some animal that pecks out the eyes of arch-rivals – then the child can finally begin to sort out his contradictory tendencies,’ writes Bettelheim. ‘Once this starts, the child will be less and less engulfed by unmanageable chaos.’
Of course, the idea of multiplicity has limits. We don’t transform completely, like Jekyll and Hyde. We have a core personality, mediated by culture and early life experience, which is relatively stable. But that core is a pole around which we’re constantly, elastically moving. How we behave, in any given moment, is a combination of personality and situation.
In well-told stories, characters reflect this. They’re ‘three-dimensional’ or more. They’re both recognisably who they are and yet constantly shifting as their circumstances change. A scene in John Fante’s Ask the Dust captures this well. The novel tells of young Arturo Bandini’s unrequited love for waitress Camilla Lopez. In one dark and dynamic sequence, the character of Bandini comes alive in all his convincing multiplicity when he visits Camilla at the Columbia Buffet, where she works.
Watching her laughing with some male customers Bandini bristles with jealousy. He politely beckons her over, telling himself, ‘Be nice to her, Arturo. Fake it.’ He asks to see her later. She tells him she’s busy. He ‘gently’ requests she postpone her engagement. ‘It’s very important that I see you.’ When she declines again, his angry self rears up. He pushes his chair back and shouts, ‘You’ll see me! You little insolent beerhall twirp! You’ll see me!’ He stalks out and waits by her car, telling himself ‘she wasn’t so good that she could excuse herself from a date with Arturo Bandini. Because, by God, I hated her guts.’
When she finally emerges, Bandini tries to force her to leave with him. After a tussle she escapes with a barman. Bandini is left in a stew of self-hatred.
Bandini, the idiot, the dog, the skunk, the fool. But I couldn’t help it. I looked at the car certificate and found her address. It was a place near 24th and Alameda. I couldn’t help it. I walked to Hill Street and got aboard an Alameda trolley. This interested me. A new side to my character, the bestial, the darkness, the unplumbed depth of a new Bandini. But after a few blocks the mood evaporated. I got off the car near the freight yards. Bunker Hill was two miles away, but I walked back. When I got home I said I was through with Camilla Lopez forever.
In this passage, Fante shows Bandini in all his contradiction and multiplicity. One moment he loves her, the next he hates her. One moment he’s swollen with arrogance, the next he’s a skunk and a fool. His decision to stalk her is an urge that plumes out of his subconscious. When it suddenly dissipates, he doesn’t question the madness of his own sudden reversal.
This is a man riding the tumultuous forces of his own hidden brain. He’s barely managing to keep his illusion of self-control intact. It’s hard to read this scene without recalling those alien hands discharging unrepressed wills, unbuttoning, throttling and grabbing for the axe. It’s structurally effective because of its adherence to cause and effect, with one event leading to another unexpected event which leads to another, and so on. It’s meaningfully effective because it keeps asking and answering that essential dramatic question: who is Bandini?
Nobody can agree which tree is the most photographed in the world. Some say it’s a Cypress in Monterey, California, others a Jeffry Pine in nearby Yosemite and others still a Willow in Lake Wanaka, New Zealand. Even if you’ve never seen them, you can probably guess what these trees look like. They stand alone in endless vistas of water, sky or rock.
Millions of brains have been attracted to the hidden and half-hidden truths that emit from these solitary trees. They triggered something in the photographers’ subconscious which responded by giving their owners a pleasurable hit of feeling. Lonely, brave, relentless and beautiful, those who stop and snap are not taking pictures of trees, but of themselves.
What these photographs reveal is that human consciousness works on two levels. There’s the top level on which occurs the drama of our day-to-day lives – that meeting of sight, sound, touch, taste and smell which is narrated by the hero-making inner voice. And then, beneath that, there’s the subconscious level of the neural models, a stewing night ocean of feelings, urges and broken memories in which competing urges engage in a constant struggle for control.
The stories we tell also work on these levels. They operate ‘in two realms’, writes the psychologist Professor Jerome Bruner, ‘one a landscape of action in the world’, the other a landscape of the mind in which the ‘protagonists’ thoughts and feelings and secrets play themselves out’. On the plot’s conscious top layer we experience the visible causes and effects of the drama. Then there’s the story’s subconscious that heaves beneath the visible. It’s a place of symbolism and division, in which characters are multiple and contradictory and surprising, even to themselves.
Some of the most moving moments in story come when the second subconscious layer erupts into the first. Jill Soloway’s TV drama Transparent brought me to tears when the character Josh Pfefferman suddenly revealed himself in a way that surprised even him. The series tracks the ramifications of a family patriarch’s decision to transition to a woman, from Mort to Maura. Josh, Maura’s son, is jovial, wry and essentially decent. He’s a record company executive and thoroughly modern, always wanting to be supportive of Maura’s journey.
But things start slipping for Josh. Towards the end of the second series, he’s driving with some band members and starts uncharacteristically ranting: ‘Look at this traffic! They time it out so you can’t get anywhere. It’s a fucking conspiracy.’ He honks his horn at other drivers. ‘Fucking go, you piece of shit! They’re fucking boxing me in!’ He’s losing control. The woman beside him insists he pulls over. Josh is hyperventilating.
Sometime afterwards, he calls to see his mother Shelley only to discover she’s out. Her new boyfriend Buzz lets him in. ‘Nothing’s adding up,’ Josh confides to Buzz. ‘I thought stuff would add up by now, but everything’s slipping through.’ Buzz, with his grey ponytail and hippy shirt, is of a different generation to Josh. His model of the world comes from an earlier time. He suggests Josh is in ‘shock’ about the ‘loss’ of his father. Josh pushes back. Buzz doesn’t get it, nobody has died. ‘You think I miss Mort?’ he asks, irritated.
‘What do you think?’ says Buzz.
‘Well, it’s like politically incorrect to say that you miss someone who has transitioned, so …’
‘This isn’t about correct, Joshua, this is … This is about grieving. Mourning. Have you grieved and mourned the loss of your father?’
‘Him? Like losing him? No, I’m … I don’t know how to do that.’
There’s a moment of silence. Josh crumbles into the arms of the older man and sobs.
In well-told stories, there’s a constant interplay between the surface world of the drama and the subconscious world of the characters. The bedlam that takes place on the top often has seismic subconscious ramifications for who the character is beneath. As the psychologist Professor Brian Little writes, ‘All individuals are essentially scientists erecting and testing their hypotheses about the world and revising them in the light of their experience.’ As these subtle revisions in who they are take place on the subconscious second level, the answer to the dramatic question changes. And as their character changes this, in turn, alters their behaviour on the surface level of the drama. And so on and so on.
This is how plots develop as they should – from character. At the ignition point, when the drama starts flying at them, their subconscious model of the world receives its first crack. They’ll try to reimpose control. These attempts will fail. They might even make the situation worse. With their neural model of the world increasingly foundering, they enter a subconscious state of panic and disorder.
As their models fracture and break down, previously repressed wills, thoughts and versions of self rise up and become dominant. This can be seen as the brain’s experiments in novel ways of controlling its environment. They might find themselves behaving in ways they weren’t expecting, as Arturo Bandini did when he unexpectedly turned stalker. These unexpected behaviours might cause them to learn something about themselves, as Josh Pfefferman did when he collapsed sobbing.
Some of the most memorable scenes in drama allow us to watch the dramatic question battle itself in the mind of the character. In such scenes, the character appears divided and in a state of internal conflict. What they’re saying, for example, might contradict how they’re behaving in ways that show they’re manifesting as two different versions of self at once. We can’t quite tell what they’re going to do next. Who they are is changing before our eyes.
And so the plot moves on, in all its depth, truth and unpredictability, each new development coming from character. Inch by inch, scene by scene, characters and plot interact, each altering the other. Throughout the plot, as the character confronts the fact that they’re failing to control the world, they’re gradually forced to readdress their deepest beliefs about how it works. Their precious theory of control comes under question. Beneath the level of consciousness, they’re compelled to repeatedly ask themselves that fundamental dramatic question: who am I? Who do I need to be in order to make this right?
This is the process that drives Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson’s cinematic masterpiece Lawrence of Arabia. An approximate definition of Lawrence’s flaw would be something like vanity that manifests as rebellion. He’s rather insolent and self-important. This is how he controls the world of people around him. It’s how he makes himself feel superior – in one early scene, he showily extinguishes a lit match with his bare fingers. When we meet him he’s a lieutenant in the British Army during the First World War. He fails to salute his superior, General Murray, who complains, ‘I can’t make out if you’re bloody bad-mannered or just half-witted.’
‘I have the same problem, sir,’ replies Lawrence with a supercilious lilt.
‘Shut up.’
‘Yes sir.’
Lawrence is sent to the Middle East on an intelligence mission. The ignition point comes when he’s journeying through the desert to begin his work and his local guide is shot dead by an Arab leader, Sherif Ali, because he drank from his well. This unexpected change connects specifically with Lawrence’s flawed theory of control, which is based around rebelliousness and vanity. He reacts in an unexpected way. His flaw causes him not to flee or grovel for his life but to grandiosely berate the killer: ‘Sherif Ali! So long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people, a silly people, greedy, barbarous and cruel – as you are.’ Gone is the insolent wally of the previous scenes. The dramatic question has been posed.
After Lawrence experiences a brutal attack on the Arabs by their enemies, the Turks, his rebellious vanity rises again. He becomes engaged in the Arabs’ fight and suggests they all trek through the hellish Nefud desert and launch a surprise attack on a Turkish stronghold. On the journey, Lawrence’s rebellious vanity kicks up when, against everyone’s advice, he insists on making an insanely dangerous journey back into the desert to rescue a lost Arab. When he returns with the man, the Arabs ecstatically cheer him. Once again, the first layer of drama affects the second layer of subconscious. His theory of control – that you got what you wanted with vain rebelliousness – has been proven right. And so he becomes yet more vain and rebellious. He’s accepted into the tribe. In a deeply symbolic moment, Sherif Ali, the man who shot his guide, burns his western clothes and dresses him in ‘the robes of a Sherif’. When Lawrence leads the Arabs on a successful assault on the Turkish stronghold, his vanity soars even more.
And yet, beneath the level of the surface drama, things have started cracking. Just before the successful assault, Lawrence had been compelled to execute a man in order to prevent factions of his Arab force attacking one another. After the assault, he accidentally leads his men into quicksand. One of them dies. These experiences disturb him. When he finally makes it out of the desert, to the shores of the Suez Canal, a motorcyclist on the opposite bank spots him. Curious about this strange white man in Arab robes emerging from the desert, the motorcyclist shouts across the water: ‘Who are you? Who are you?’ As the dramatic question fills the baking air, the camera freezes on Lawrence’s troubled face.
Who is he? Is he the man his flaw of rebellious vanity tells him he is? Is he extraordinary? Or is he just ordinary? This simple question underpins every gripping scene of the film. So far, he’s proved to be mostly extraordinary. His theory of control has worked. His vain rebelliousness has led him to success after success. We cheer when he berates the killer Sherif Ali! We applaud when he rescues the fallen soldier! We roar when he wins his battle! But if this was all there was to the story, it wouldn’t have won seven Academy Awards.
The pressure of the drama is beginning to crack Lawrence’s model of the world. Adherence to his theory of control might be leading him to great victories but it’s also causing him deep subconscious distress. Our first real clue about these dark changes that are happening to him arrives when he comes in from the desert and General Murray promotes him and asks him to go back. Lawrence refuses. ‘I killed two people,’ he explains. ‘I mean, two Arabs. One was a boy. That was yesterday. I led him into quicksand. The other was a man … I had to execute him with my pistol. There was something about it I didn’t like.’
‘Well, naturally,’ says Murray.
‘No, something else,’ he says. ‘I enjoyed it.’
In this highly dramatic scene, we see Lawrence divided. He’s learned to control the world by adherence to a vanity that manifests as rebellion. This theory of control has driven him to huge success. It’s enabled him to become an extraordinary man. But it’s also led to unexpected effects. He has glimpsed what he’s turning into, and what ‘success’ actually means, and it’s terrified him.
But the military chiefs ignore Lawrence’s pleas. And they know just how to convince a vain man like him – by shoring up his leaking theory of control. They tell him his feats in the desert were superhuman and recommend him for a medal. He’s a brilliant soldier, they say. He’s extraordinary. Precisely because of the nature of Lawrence’s flaw, their manipulations work. He returns to the desert more vain and rebellious than ever. He leads an attack on a Turkish train. The Arabs loot it and hail him almost as a living god: ‘Lawrence! Lawrence! Lawrence!’
His flaw deepens. He begins demanding the impossible of his men – ‘My friends, who will walk on water with me?’ When Sherif Ali protests that he’s asking too much of them, Lawrence pushes back: ‘Whatever I ask them to do can be done … Do you think I’m just anybody, Ali? Do you?’
By now Lawrence has become so vain and rebellious he behaves as if he has magical powers. With a nervous Sherif Ali at his side, he swans into a Turkish garrison, splashing through puddles, utterly convinced he won’t be seen despite his glaring whiteness. ‘Do you not see how they look at you?’ Ali hisses.
‘Peace, Ali,’ he replies. ‘I am invisible.’
But he’s not invisible. Lawrence is caught and brutally tortured. His beating is such that he’s forced to realise his theory of control was wrong. His most fundamental beliefs about who he was were mistaken, and catastrophically so. Back at base, still bleeding from his wounds, he hands General Murray a written request to leave Arabia.
‘For what reason?’ demands Murray.
‘The truth is,’ he says, ‘I’m an ordinary man.’ But Murray knows how to get around him. ‘You’re the most extraordinary man I’ve ever met.’
‘Leave me alone,’ begs Lawrence. ‘Leave me alone.’
‘Well that’s a feeble thing to say.’
‘I know I’m not ordinary.’
‘That’s not what I’m saying.’
‘Alright!’ says Lawrence. ‘I’m extraordinary. What of it?’
Soon afterwards, in the film’s most iconic sequence, Lawrence leads his Arab army in a gruesome attack on fleeing Turks. ‘No prisoners!’ he yells. ‘No prisoners!’ When his handgun runs out of bullets, he starts madly slashing at people with his dagger. Sherif Ali, the man he berated at as ‘barbarous’ and a ‘murderer’ at the film’s start, begs him to stop. Soaked in blood, surrounded by fresh corpses, Lawrence lifts the gory blade of his knife and gazes in horror at his reflection.
Stories such as this are like life itself, a constant conversation between conscious and subconscious, text and subtext, with causes and effects ricocheting between both levels. As incredible and heightened as they often are, they also tell us a truth about the human condition. We believe we’re in control of ourselves but we’re continually being altered by the world and people around us. The difference is that in life, unlike in story, the dramatic question of who we are never has a final and truly satisfying answer.
Tragedies such as Lawrence of Arabia can be especially useful, for the purposes of analysis, because the causes and effects of character change tend to have greater emphasis in the narrative and are therefore clearer to see. But all archetypal stories are like this, even if the process is less overt in some. They’re about flawed selves being offered the opportunity to heal. Whether their endings are happy or otherwise depends on whether or not they take it. If they choose to heal, like Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol or, say, Charlie Simms and Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade, the twin protagonists of Bo Goldman’s Academy Award-winning Scent of a Woman, the audience will be profoundly cheered. But whatever happens, we’re usually left in little doubt as to what conclusion the writer wanted us to come to. In the closing scenes, the dramatic question will have been answered. We’ll leave the story with that lovely emotional sense that something, perhaps just beyond the level of conscious comprehension, has been completed.
Modernist stories are different. Whilst they’re built from the same dance between surface drama and subconscious change, their causes and effects are often left ambiguous. Character change occurs, but it’s less clear how these changes are being triggered by the drama and what message we’re supposed to glean from them. More space is left for the reader to insert their own interpretations into the text.
Franz Kafka’s short story ‘The Passenger’ shows an enigmatic movement of cause and effect between consciousness and subconscious. It tells of a man on a tram feeling uncertain about himself and his place in the world. He becomes lost, for a moment, in the abstract physical details of a woman waiting to disembark – the position of her hands, the shape of her nose, the shadow her ear makes against her skull. These conscious observations trigger something deep in his subconscious. He asks, ‘How is it that she is not astonished at herself, that she keeps her mouth closed, and expresses nothing of any wonderment?’ In a way that recalls eastern story forms such as Kisho-tenketsu, the reader is invited to ponder how one level connects to the other and thereby bring them into harmony.
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway tracks such movements between consciousness and subconscious in longer form, as it follows a day in the life of eponymous Clarissa, and various characters orbiting her, as she prepares for and hosts a party. The story is told not as if the protagonist is talking out loud to the reader, as is common in first-person narratives. Rather, it’s as if we’re privy to her inner narrator as it bounces between the external and internal – from event in the world to thought, memory, to sudden revealing insight – bringing it all together into a compelling and believable composite of self.
In a similar style, Knut Hamsun’s Hunger tracks its unnamed protagonist’s struggle to survive mentally and physically while trying to earn money as a writer. Published in 1890, it’s a stunningly prescient exploration of human cognition. The central character, who ruefully describes himself as ‘nothing but a battleground for invisible forces’ is thrown relentlessly between the two levels of cause and effect. On seeing an attractive woman he becomes ‘possessed by a strange desire’ to frighten her and makes ‘stupid faces’ behind her back: ‘No matter how much I told myself I was acting idiotically, it did not help.’
One morning, for some unknowable reason, the noises of the street send his mood soaring. ‘I was powerful as a giant and could stop a wagon with my shoulders … I started to hum for pure joy and for no particular reason.’ In desperation, he tries to pawn a tattered blanket and is humiliated when the pawnbroker sends him away. After taking it back home: ‘I acted as though nothing had happened, spread the blanket out again on the bed, smoothed out the wrinkles as I always did, and tried to erase every trace of my last action. I couldn’t possibly have been in my right mind when I decided to try this filthy trick. The more I thought of it, the more irrational it seemed. It must have been some failure of energy far inside that had caught me off guard.’
Generations before science caught up, Hamsun showed how we are multiple and confabulatory, skating on the thin ice of sanity, all of us a battleground for the invisible forces of our own subconscious minds.
It’s not uncommon for a character to want something on the conscious level and yet subconsciously need something entirely different. As the story theorist Robert McKee writes, ‘the most memorable, fascinating characters tend to have not only a conscious but an unconscious desire. Although these complex protagonists are unaware of their subconscious need, the audience senses it, perceiving in them an inner contradiction. The conscious and unconscious desires of a multidimensional protagonist contradict each other. What he believes he wants is the antithesis of what he actually but unwittingly needs.’
Alan Ball’s Academy Award-winning screenplay American Beauty focuses on just such a character. When we meet 42-year-old Lester Burnham, he’s bullied by his boss, his daughter and especially his disdainful and unfaithful wife. Miserable and trapped, Lester suffers a midlife crisis, deciding that happiness lies in his becoming young and carefree again. He buys a fast car, starts working out in his garage, finds a job at a drive-through burger restaurant and smokes marijuana. He stands up to his boss and wife. Much of the surface-level plot is taken up with Lester’s blackly comic attempts at sleeping with his daughter’s best friend, the apparently streetwise and experienced Angela.
When he finally gets the opportunity to do so we’re shown the contradiction between his shallow, short-term conscious desires and his deep subconscious needs. Lying half-naked beneath him, Angela confesses she’s not as experienced as she’d appeared: ‘This is my first time.’
‘You’re kidding,’ says Lester. He crumbles, refusing to carry on. Angela becomes upset. Lester wraps her in a blanket and holds her as she sobs – a responsible adult, finally.
While Lester wanted to be young again, what he’d needed was to mature and become truly powerful. In this touching and revelatory moment, as a better version of his self bubbles up from his subconscious, we realise that the answer to the dramatic question has suddenly flipped to its opposite.
The scene has additional power because it doesn’t only show a transformation in who we understand Lester to be. We see Angela in a new way too. In all great stories, each major character is altered somehow by their interpersonal encounters. As they clash, they send each other spinning outwards, only to clash again in new and altered ways, and then spin out again, and meet again and so on and so on, out across the plot, in an elegant and gripping dance of change.
Story time is compressed time. An entire life can be told in the space of just ninety minutes and still somehow feel complete. It’s this compression that’s the secret of arresting dialogue. The words characters speak should both sound true and writhe with meaning, making for a rich source of data for the model-making brain. Speech should be crammed with deep facts that can be greedily absorbed by readers and viewers, whose hyper-social brains rapidly construct models of the fictional characters’ minds.
Some of the most famous lines of dialogue in film history derive their power from the fact that they’re so dense with narrative information it’s as if the entire story is packed into just a few words:
I love the smell of napalm in the morning.
Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola, John Milius, Michael Herr
I wish I knew how to quit you.
Brokeback Mountain, Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana via Annie Proulx
I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.
Network, Paddy Chayefsky
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.
The Usual Suspects, Christopher McQuarrie
I’m just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her.
Notting Hill, Richard Curtis
These go to eleven.
This is Spinal Tap, Rob Reiner, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer
I am big! It’s the pictures that got small.
Sunset Boulevard, Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett, D. M. Marshman Jr
You’re gonna need a bigger boat.
Jaws, Peter Benchley
All the principles of storytelling combine into the art of dialogue. Dialogue should be changeful, it should want something, it should drip with personality and point of view, and it should operate on the two story levels – both conscious and subconscious. It can give us clues about everything we need to know about the character: who they are, what they want, where they’re going, where they’ve been, their social background, their personality, their values, their sense of status, the tension between their true self and the false front they’re presenting, their relationships to other characters, the secret torments that will drive the narrative forwards.
Take this opening monologue from the TV series Marion and Geoff by Rob Brydon and Hugo Blick. How much do we learn in just eighty-three seconds of screen time about the taxi driver Keith Barrett?
KEITH: [sliding into his car seat]: Good morning, good morning! Another day, another dollar. [speaks into handheld radio] My first pick up please? [white noise – he shrugs.] I’ll just drive around. It’s like that some days. You just ease your way into the day.
[Cut to Keith driving] KEITH: These sleeping policemen are a wonderful idea, but they’re a pain in the bloomin’ neck, I’ll tell you that. I mean, I’m not against them. I would never say that. If they only save one life … then probably not very cost-effective.
[Cut] KEITH: It’s not that the kids think of Geoff as their father, because they don’t. They think of him as an uncle. A special uncle. A new uncle. I like him. If you like someone you like someone, you can’t help it. I mean, I actually said to him, ‘I don’t feel like I’ve lost a wife, I feel like I’ve gained a friend.’ I would never have met Geoff if Marion hadn’t left me. Not a chance of it. We’re in different worlds. He’s in pharmaceuticals, I’m in cars. Literally – I’m in the car. I bear you no ill, sir. I bear you no ill.
Similarly, how much do we learn in this brief exchange between the ageing salesman Willy Loman and his wife Linda, from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman?
WILLY: If old man Wagner was alive I’d a been in charge of New York now! That man was a prince, he was a masterful man. But that boy of his, that Howard, he don’t appreciate. When I went up north the first time, the Wagner company didn’t know where New England was!
LINDA: Why don’t you tell those things to Howard, dear?
WILLY (encouraged): I will, I definitely will. Is there any cheese?
As we move through the plots of our lives, we’re not only struggling against unruly, unpredictable and unhelpful versions of self. We’re also fighting to manage powerful drives that are wired deeply into us. These are the products of human evolution. Exposing these drives means travelling back tens of thousands of years, to the era in which we became a storytelling animal. The journey’s reward is the unburying of ancient yet critical lessons about story, not least the origin and purpose of the dramatic question.
Films and novels are pleasurable – tense, shocking, gut-wrenching, thrilling, suspenseful, satisfying – in large part because of their ancient roots. The emotions we experience, when under the power of story, don’t happen by accident. Humans have evolved to respond in certain ways to tales of heroism and villainy because doing so has been critical for our survival. This was especially true back when we were living in hunter-gatherer tribes.
We’ve spent more than ninety-five per cent of our time on earth existing in such tribes and much of the neural architecture we still carry around today evolved when we were doing so. In this twenty-first century of speed, information and high technology, we still have Stone Age brains. As powerful as culture is, it cannot cancel out or transform these deeply embedded primal forces, but only modulate it. No matter where we come from, East, West, North or South, Pleistocene winds blow in our subconscious minds, touching almost every part of our modern lives, from our codes of morality to the ways we arrange our furniture. One study found people prefer to sleep as far from their bedroom door as possible and with a clear view of it, as if still in a cave and wary of night-time predators. The body’s reflexes remain primed for the savannah we once roamed: when someone creeps up and shocks us, the body automatically responds as if being attacked by a prey animal. All over the world, people enjoy open spaces and lawns and prefer trees of a shape, height and canopy similar to that which we evolved amongst. Our Stone Age values also remain strongly evident in stories.
It’s testament to the powers of the storytelling brain that many psychologists argue that human language evolved in the first place in order to tell tales about each other. As unlikely as this sounds, it makes sense. Human tribes were big, topping out at around 150 members who’d occupy a large physical territory and live, day-to-day, in clusters of perhaps five to ten families. In order to be functional, it was essential that members of a tribe cooperated – that they shared and helped and worked together, putting the needs of others before their own. But this presented a problem. Humans are people. And yet, despite this apparently catastrophic design flaw, ancient tribes excelled at cooperating. Not only did they manage to do so such that they survived for tens of thousands of years, with some still existing today, they’re thought to have been far more egalitarian than modern humans. How did they do this? How did they control each other’s self-interested behaviour so fantastically, without the help a police force, a judiciary or even any written law?
They’d do it with the earliest and most incendiary form of storytelling. Gossip. People would keep track of everyone else, closely tallying their behaviour. When these gossipy stories concerned a person following the rules of the group, and putting its interests first, listeners would experience a wash of positive emotions and an urge to celebrate them. But when they told of someone selfishly breaking these rules, listeners would experience the emotion of moral outrage. They’d be motivated to act – to punish them, whether by being shamed and mocked, violently attacked or ostracised from the group, which would’ve been a sentence of death.
This is how stories kept the tribe together as a functional, cooperating unit. They were essential for our survival. Our brains still operate in this way today. Gossip is a universal human behaviour, with around two-thirds of our conversation being devoted to social topics. The psychologist Professor Susan Engel has extraordinary childhood memories of the novelist Truman Capote visiting her mother for lunches of tasty Beluga caviar and even tastier gossip (‘from the time I was four until I was a teenager, I’d linger on a couch nearby, not hungry for food, but ravenous for every morsel of information and story Truman and my mother were sharing over lunch about neighbours and friends’). Engel has studied the natural emergence of gossip in youngsters and found children as young as four routinely learn information about their family history by listening to their parents talk. At the same age, ‘they also begin, in fledgling form, to gossip themselves’.
Childhood gossip is just like that of our ancient tribal ancestors’ in its preoccupation with ‘other people’s behaviour’. One ten-year-old told researchers of a classmate who ‘would sharpen his pencil when [the teacher’s] speaking so he’s not supposed to and he sharpens it on his desk. And sometimes when he’s not supposed to read, he just keeps it on his lap and looks down every time.’ Such rebellious behaviour earned this poor boy the mocking nickname ‘Bookworm’.
Gossip exists to teach us about other people, to tell us who they really are. Most concerns moral infractions: people breaking the rules of the group. Such stories maintain pro-group behaviour by triggering moral outrage, which pushes us to act, either against the ‘characters’ in gossip or in their defence. We enjoy great books or immersive films because they’re activating and exploiting these ancient social emotions. ‘Stories arose out of our intense interest in social monitoring,’ writes the psychologist Professor Brian Boyd. They work by ‘riveting our attention to social information’, whether in the form of gossip or screenplay or books, which typically tell of ‘heightened versions of the behaviours we naturally monitor’. When a character behaves selflessly, and puts the needs of the group before their own, we experience a deep primal craving to see them recognised by the group as a hero and hailed. When a character behaves selfishly, putting their own needs before that of the group, we feel a monstrous urge to see their punishment. Because we can’t jump into a cinema screen and throttle the villain ourselves, our primal urge to act compels us to keep turning the page or watching the screen until our tribal appetites have been satisfied.
We’re wired to find selfless behaviour heroic and selfish deeds evil. Selflessness is thought to be the universal basis of all human morality. An analysis of ethnographic accounts of ethics in sixty worldwide groups found they shared these rules: return favours, be courageous, help your group, respect authority, love your family, never steal and be fair, all a variation on ‘don’t put your own selfish interests before that of the tribe’.
Even pre-verbal babies show approval of selfless behaviour. Researchers showed six-to ten-month-old infants a simple puppet show in which a goodie square selflessly helps a ball up the hill while a baddie triangle tries to force it down. When offered the puppets to play with almost all these children chose the selfless square. Psychologist Professor Paul Bloom writes that ‘these were bona fide social judgements on the part of the babies’.
Further evidence of the universality of the selfless–selfish moral axis comes from story. Theorists have also detected these patterns in myth and fiction. The mythologist Joseph Campbell describes the hero’s ultimate test as selflessly ‘giving yourself to some higher end … When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.’ Meanwhile, the story theorist Christopher Booker writes that ‘the “dark power” in stories represents the power of the ego … [and] is immensely powerful and concerned solely with pursuing its own interests at the expense of everyone else in the world.’
These emotional responses exist as neural networks that can be activated whenever they detect anything, in the environment, that has the rough shape of tribal unfairness. This leaves storytellers free to trigger them in any number of ways. It doesn’t have to be a strictly archetypal pattern of selfless hero versus selfish villain. In the opening sequences of The Grapes of Wrath we feel outraged not about a human, but a terrible drought that drives the noble, hardworking Joad family out on the perilous road. It’s not fair that this is happening to them. We root for them as they battle on towards California. We crave the natural justice of their safety.
In Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf plays with these instincts delicately. When Clarissa ponders the ‘question of love’ she has a memory of an old friend, Sally Seton, ‘sitting on the floor with her arms around her knees smoking a cigarette’ and asks herself ‘had not that, after all, been love?’ At this point we feel our social emotions jolting. It has the inescapable quality of gossip – this is a very interesting new development about Clarissa Dalloway. When we hear their long-ago kiss was ‘the most exquisite moment of her whole life … The whole world might have turned upside down!’ we feel gently outraged that this love was unable to find true expression – it’s not fair! We sit up in the narrative. We care.
Less subtle is Dancer in the Dark, a screenplay by Lars von Trier that pounds relentlessly on these same tribal instincts. It tells of a poor Czech immigrant, Selma Ježková, who lives with her son in a caravan at the bottom of a policeman’s garden. Selma has a degenerative eye condition. She’s going blind. She knows that her son, Gene, has the same hereditary condition and if he’s not operated on before he turns thirteen, he’ll also lose his sight. In order to pay for his operation, Selma saves all the money she can from her dangerous job at a metalworking factory. At great risk to herself, she keeps her failing eyesight a secret. When her disability becomes obvious, and she breaks a machine, she’s fired. Luckily, she has almost enough to pay for Gene’s operation. But then her policeman landlord, in whom she’s confided, steals her money.
Watching Dancer in the Dark, I became so engorged with caveman emotion at this raw and inordinate expression of selfish versus selfless, I’d have gladly stepped into the screen and clubbed him to death. That I was desperate to enact his punishment is, once again, no accident. Just as our storytelling brains are wired to valorise pro-social behaviour, we’re designed to love watching the anti-social suffer the pain of tribal comeuppance. These darker instincts are also evident in children. Another psychologist’s puppet show starred an evil, thieving puppet who was struggling to open a box. A second puppet tried to help the villain whilst a third puppet – the punisher – jumped on the lid, slamming it shut. Even eight-month-olds preferred to play with the punisher. Brain scans reveal that the mere anticipation of a selfish person being punished is experienced as pleasurable.
This ‘altruistic punishment’ of tribal villains is a form of what’s known as ‘costly signalling’. It’s ‘costly’ because it’s difficult to achieve and hard to fake and a ‘signal’ because its purpose is to influence what other members of the tribe think of them. ‘The heroes and heroines of narrative are those who pay the costs of defending the innocent and who punish defectors,’ writes Professor of English Literature William Flesch. ‘Because it is costly, and because bearing those costs is heroic, altruistic punishment is a common characteristic of heroes.’ Heroes in archetypal stories are selfless costly signallers. In the face of great personal peril, they kill dragons, blow up Death Stars and rescue Jews from Nazis. They satisfy our moral outrage, and moral outrage is the ancient lifeblood of human storytelling.
In many of our most successful stories, moral outrage is triggered in the early scenes. Watching a selfless character being treated selfishly is a drug of enchantment for the tribal brain. We almost can’t help but care.
All this reveals why the fundamental drive of our films, novels, journalism and plays is the dramatic question. Whether the protagonist we’re gripped by is Lawrence of Arabia or a rude dad in some school-gate tittle-tattle, what we ultimately want to know is its answer – who is he really? The surprising discovery that’s been waiting for us, at the destination of our long journey into our evolutionary past, is that all story is gossip.
Moral outrage isn’t the only primal social emotion that’s responsible for the pleasure of storytelling. Evolutionary psychologists argue we have two wired-in ambitions: to get along with people, so they like us and consider us non-selfish members of the tribe, and also get ahead of them, so we’re on top. Humans are driven to connect and dominate. These drives, of course, are frequently incompatible. Wanting to get along and get ahead of them sounds like a recipe for dishonesty, hypocrisy, betrayal and Machiavellian manoeuvring. It’s the conflict at the heart of the human condition and the stories we tell about it.
Getting ahead means gaining status, the craving for which is a human universal. The psychologist Professor Brian Boyd writes, ‘Humans naturally pursue status with ferocity: we all relentlessly, if unconsciously, try to raise our own standing by impressing peers, and naturally if unconsciously, evaluate others in terms of their standing.’ And we need it. Researchers have found that people’s ‘subjective well-being, self-esteem, and mental and physical health appear to depend on the level of status they are accorded by others.’ In order to manage their status, people ‘engage in a wide range of goal-directed activities’. Underneath the noblest plots and pursuits of our lives, in other words, lies our unquenchable thirst for status.
Humans are interested in the status of themselves, and others, to an almost obsessional degree. Studies of gossip in contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes find that, just like the stories that fill the newspapers of great cities and nations, it’s dominated by tales of moral infractions by high-status people. Indeed, our preoccupation with the subject stretches back deep into our animal pasts. Even crickets keep a tally of their victories and failures against cricket rivals. Researchers into bird communication have revealed the astonishing fact that not only do ravens listen to the gossip of neighbouring flocks, but they pay especially close attention when it tells of a reversal in another bird’s status.
If many animals are similarly status-obsessed, our special interest in it comes partly because human hierarchies are not static but fluid. We have this in common with chimpanzees who, along with bonobos, are our closest cousins. We can infer from this closeness that any habits we share with them probably stretch back to the ancestor we have in common and with whom we split between five and seven million years ago. Chimpanzee alphas have a lifespan at the top of about four to five years. Because status is of existential importance (benefits for chimps and humans include better food, better mating opportunities and safer sleeping sites) and because everyone’s status is always in flux, it’s a near-constant obsession. This status flux is the very flesh of human drama: it creates running narratives of loyalty and betrayal; ambition and despair; loves won and lost; schemes and intrigues; intimidation, assassination and war.
Chimpanzee politics, like human politics, runs on plots and alliances. Unlike so many other animals, chimpanzees don’t only fight and bite their way to the top, they also have to be coalitional. When they reach the heights, they need to adopt a policy of sensitive politicking. Lashing out at those beneath them risks triggering revolt and revolution. ‘The tendency of chimps to rally for the underdog creates an inherently unstable hierarchy in which the power at the top is shakier than in any monkey group,’ writes the primatologist Professor Frans de Waal. When troop leaders are toppled from their throne, it’s usually because a gang of low-status males has conspired against them.
Precisely these patterns of status play haunt human lives and stories. The story theorist Christopher Booker writes of an archetypal narrative form in which low-ranking characters ‘below the line’ conspire to topple the corrupt and dominating powers above it. ‘The point is that the disorder in the upper world cannot be amended without some crucial activity taking place at a lower level,’ he writes. ‘It is from the lower level that life is regenerated and brought back to the upper world again.’ The necessary characteristics to become a human hero mirror those necessary for a chimpanzee to rise to a position of dominance. At the happy ending of an archetypal story, Booker writes, a ‘hero and heroine must represent the perfect coming together of four values: strength, order, feeling and understanding.’ This same combination of characteristics is required in chimp alphas, whose place on top depends on their balancing straightforward dominance with a will (or at least its appearance) to protect those lower on the ladder.
But if a protagonist learns these four values of heroism at the end of the story, and is therefore rewarded with the ultimate prize of tribal status, that’s not how they begin. When we meet them, they’re frequently low in the hierarchy – vulnerable, reluctant, trembling in the shadow of Goliath. Just as for our cousins the chimpanzees, our empathy with these underdogs comes naturally. A common feature of our hero-making cognition seems to be that we all tend to feel like this – relatively low in status and yet actually, perhaps secretly, possessing the skills and character of someone deserving of a great deal more. I suspect this is why we so easily identify with underdog heroes at the start of the story – and then cheer when they finally seize their just reward. Because they’re us.
If this is true, it would also explain the odd fact that, no matter what our level of actual privilege, everyone seems to feel unfairly lacking in status. Biographer Tom Bower writes that Prince Charles is among the chronically dissatisfied, a condition that perhaps isn’t helped by his association with billionaires. ‘During a recent after-dinner speech at Waddesdon Manor, Lord Rothschild’s Buckinghamshire home, Charles complained that his host employed more gardeners than himself; fifteen against his nine.’ No matter who we really are, to the hero-making brain we’re always poor Oliver Twist: virtuous and hungry, unfairly deprived of status, our bowls bravely offered out: ‘Please, sir, I want some more.’
As much as we might feel like the beloved Oliver Twist, we’re also wired to despise the cruel higher-status Mr Bumbles that surround us. Even when they’re not actually deserving of our wrath, as Dickens’s pompous workhouse boss surely is, we naturally dislike them. When people in brain scanners read of another’s wealth, popularity, good looks and qualifications, regions involved in the perception of pain became activated. When they read about them suffering a misfortune, they enjoyed a pleasurable spike in their brain’s reward systems.
Similar findings have been revealed by researchers at Shenzhen University. Twenty-two participants were asked to play a simple computer game, then told (falsely) they were a ‘two-star player’. Next, in a brain scanner, they were shown pictures of various ‘one-star’ and ‘three-star’ players receiving what looked to be painful facial injections. Afterwards, they claimed to have felt empathy for all the injectees. But their scans betrayed the lie: they only tended to experience empathy for the lower status ‘one-star’ players.
This was a small study, but consistent with other findings. Besides, I’m not sure we really need neuroscientists to tell us that we struggle to empathise with higher-status people. We often feel all too comfortable mocking and bullying politicians, celebrities, CEOs and Prince Charles when, as hard as it can be to fathom, they’re actually no less human than us.
Status play, like moral outrage, permeates human storytelling. It’s hard to conceive of an effective story that doesn’t rely on some form of status movement to squeeze our primal emotions, seize our attention, drive our hatred or earn our empathy. A study of over 200 popular nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels found the antagonists’ most common flaw was an ineffably chimpish ‘quest for social dominance at the expense of others or an abuse of their existing power’.
Jane Austen was a master of such tales. When we meet ‘handsome, clever and rich’ Emma Woodhouse, we’re motivated to keep reading by a desire to see her yanked down. Meanwhile, Mansfield Park tells of low-status Fanny Price whose struggling mother sends her to live with her wealthy uncle and aunt, Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram. Shortly before her arrival, as Lady Bertram is fretting that poor Fanny will ‘tease’ her ‘poor pug’, Sir Thomas girds himself to expect ‘gross ignorance, some meanness of opinions and a very distressing vulgarity of manner’.
He’s also concerned that she’ll start thinking of herself as at one with her high-status cousins. Sir Thomas wishes for ‘a distinction proper to be made between the girls as they grow up: how to preserve in the minds of my daughters the consciousness of what they are, without making them think too lowly of their cousin; and how, without depressing her spirits too far, to make her remember that she is not a Miss Bertram.’ While he hopes his daughters will refrain from treating Fanny with arrogance, ‘they cannot be equals. Their rank, fortune, rights and expectations will always be different.’ If we weren’t on Fanny’s side before Sir Thomas’s pronouncements, we are when we hear them. He’s talking about us. We’re Fanny Price. And we’re fucking outraged.
William Shakespeare’s King Lear shows what happens when humans undergo a nightmare even more dreadful than ostracisation. Shakespeare understood that there’s nothing more likely to make a person mad, desperate and dangerous than the removal of their status. The play is a tragedy, a form that frequently shows how hubris – which can be viewed as the making of an unsound claim to status – can bring personal destruction. Such tales were told repeatedly by the Ancient Greeks and, of course, form real-life narratives that play out continually in chimp troops and human tribes. These dramatic status reversals have probably been part of our existence for millions of years.
King Lear is a canonical example of a story in which the right external change strikes the right character at the right moment and thereby ignites a drama that feels as if it has its own explosive momentum. Its plot serves specifically to shatter its protagonist’s deepest, most fiercely defended identity-forming beliefs. Just like the story of Charles Foster Kane, its ignition point and subsequent causes and effects are the seemingly inevitable consequences of its protagonist’s flawed model of the world.
It all begins as an ageing Lear, heralded by trumpets, announces he’ll divide his kingdom between his three daughters, its spoils being distributed in accordance to how well they perform in a love test. The more they adore him, the better the reward. In the defective reality that Lear’s brain creates for him, he’s the unrivalled, beloved and never-to-be-disputed king of everything around him. Lear naturally accepts the reality of the world with which he’s presented. His neural models predict he’ll consistently be treated with reverence and deference. This flawed model, which of course feels absolutely real and true, causes him to make mistakes that critically damage his ability to control the external world. When his manipulative daughters Regan and Goneril respond to his love test with extravagantly sycophantic oaths of boundless love, he doesn’t question them. Why would he? They’re simply reflecting the reality his brain’s models are predicting. It would be like questioning the shining of the sun or the singing of the birds.
But Lear’s third daughter, his favourite Cordelia, refuses to play. When she says she loves him no more or less than any daughter loves her father, she puts herself in conflict with his precious models. He responds as we all do, when our most sacred identity-forming beliefs are challenged. He pushes back. First, he threatens her: ‘Mend your speech a little, lest it may mar your fortunes.’ When she refuses, he disowns her: ‘I disclaim all my paternal care.’ Cordelia will now forever be ‘a stranger to my heart and me’.
Lear’s commitment to his flawed models is such that when the newly powerful Regan and Goneril begin conspiring to take everything from him, he struggles to perceive what’s happening. As the predictions his models are making about the world increasingly fail, he reacts with denial, either in the form of ape-like rage or simple disbelief. When he discovers Goneril and her husband have put his messenger in the stocks, the insult is literally unbelievable to him. He’s left sputtering and aghast. ‘No, no, they would not … By Jupiter, I swear, no … They could not, would not do ’t. ’Tis worse than murder to do upon respect such violent outrage.’ When Goneril’s assistant refers to him not as his ‘King’ but ‘my Lady’s father’ he’s overcome with fury – ‘You whoreson dog! You slave! You cur!’ – and physically attacks him.
When the reality of the external world finally becomes undeniable, Lear’s internal model of it cracks apart. His entire self collapses. His theory of control had it that, to successfully manipulate his environment, all he had to do was issue orders. And this wasn’t just a silly idea he could cast off when he realised it was false. It formed the very structure of his perception. It was the world he experienced as real. He saw evidence for its truth everywhere, and rubbished and denied any counter-knowledge, because that’s exactly what brains do. It’s from this sophisticated psychological understanding that the play gets its truth and drama. We can’t simply toss aside our flawed ideas as if they’re a pair of badly fitting trousers. It takes overwhelming evidence to convince us that ‘reality’ is wrong. When we finally realise something’s up, breaking these beliefs apart means breaking ourselves apart. And that’s precisely what happens in many of our most successful stories.
When Lear does break down, halfway through the play, it feels as if the entire planet’s imploding. In an apocalyptic storm, he rages at skies, like a bleeding chimp brutally deposed by a conspiracy of younger animals. ‘Here I stand, your slave, a poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man … I’ll not weep. I have full cause of weeping, but this heart shall break into a hundred thousand flaws.’ He’s reduced to the position of beggar, this embodiment of the corrupt leader whose mistake was to forget that status, in human groups, should be earned.
Shakespeare knew well the psychological torments that can be unleashed by such a loss of status. In its most dangerous form, this is experienced as humiliation. In Julius Caesar, Cassius is at the heart of a conspiracy to kill the Roman leader who was once a friend. His hatred stems from an incident in childhood during which, on a dare, Cassius and Caesar tried to swim across the Tiber. But on this ‘raw and gusty’ day, Caesar failed. He was reduced to begging Cassius to save his life. His heroic act of costly signalling made, for Cassius, a model of the world in which he was forever superior in status to Caesar. But now they’re grown up and that desperate, soggy boy has ‘become a God, and Cassius is a wretched creature, and must bend his body if Caesar carelessly but nod on him’. The rage that this unfair de-grading causes in Cassius is murderous.
Psychologists define humiliation as the removal of any ability to claim status. Severe humiliation has been described as ‘an annihilation of the self’. It’s thought to be a uniquely toxic state and is implicated in some of worst behaviours the human animal engages in, from serial murder to honour killings to genocide. In story, an experience of humiliation is often the origin of the antagonist’s dark behaviour, whether it be murderous Cassius or Gone Girl’s scheming Amy Elliot Dunne, who could ‘hear the tale, how everyone would love telling it’ about how ‘Amazing Amy’ had been reduced to the level of those ‘women whose entire personas are woven from a benign mediocrity’ and about whom people think ‘poor dumb bitch’.
Because humiliation is such an apocalyptic punishment, watching villains being punished this way can feel rapturous. As we’re a tribal people with tribal brains, it doesn’t count as humiliation unless other members of the tribe are aware of it. As Professor William Flesch writes, ‘We may hate the villain, but our hatred is meaningless. We want him unmasked to people in his world.’
Babylon, 587 BC. A group of 4,000 high-status men and women were forced out of Jerusalem by King Nebuchadnezzar II. These Judeans journeyed long, and suffered, before finally finding a place to rest in the ancient city of Nippur. But they never forgot their beloved home. In exile, the Judeans determined to keep alive the customs of their people: their moral laws, their rituals, their language, their ways of living, eating and being. In order to do this it was essential that they preserved their stories.
Because most of these stories only existed orally, Judean scribes began writing them down on a series of scrolls. As they did, something remarkable happened. The ragbag of ancient myths and fables became connected. The scribes turned them into one complete cause-and-effect-laden tale. It began with the creation of the world and the first humans, Adam and Eve, and continued to include their occupation of Jerusalem.
The story had an astonishingly galvanising effect on this tribe of exiles. It acted as all tribal stories do, helping them function as a cooperative unit. As a list of prescribed behaviours, it enabled members to differentiate themselves from members of outside groups which created a psychological boundary between them and the ‘other’. This same list of behaviours acted as a regulatory check-list against which they could police each other and therefore keep the tribe functional. But it also did much more. The story provided them with a heroic narrative of the world in which they were god’s chosen people whose rightful homeland was Jerusalem. It filled the exiles with a sense of meaning, righteousness and destiny.
Seventy-one years after their banishment, the Judeans finally had the opportunity to return to their ancestral homelands. Led by a scribe named Ezra, they began their epic journey back to the glorious city they’d heard about only in stories. But when they finally arrived, they were horrified. The descendants of their low-status ancestors, who’d escaped the deportations, were rude, slovenly and interbreeding with other tribes. They weren’t adhering to tribal laws about purity, food, worship or the Sabbath. Jerusalem itself was a crumbling mess.
For Ezra, such tribal decay was a catastrophe. He went to the temple, where it was believed their group’s god Yahweh resided, and collapsed on the ground, wailing his despair and rage and betrayal. A crowd gathered. Ezra turned on them. They’d gravely offended Yahweh. They didn’t deny it. But what could be done? He knew he had to somehow draw his people back together; to run into them the same tribal electricity that had held the exiles shoulder to shoulder, back in Babylon. There was only one way to do it: by unleashing the incredible power of their origin story.
Ezra had a wooden stage erected in a public place and sent out word something important was going to happen. A crowd formed. Ezra, flanked by twelve assistants, theatrically presented the scrolls on which their grand tribal narrative had been written. ‘They immediately bowed their heads to the ground, as they would bow in the presence of their god, or their god’s representative, in the temple,’ writes Professor of English Martin Puchner. Something new was happening; something that would change the world forever. These scrolls, and the stories they contained, were being treated as if they themselves were sacred. And so a religion was born. ‘Ezra’s reading created Judaism as we know it.’
This might have been the first time a written story was treated as sacred, but human tribes have been bound together by such stories for tens of thousands of years. In our hunter-gatherer pasts much of our storytelling would’ve taken place around the campfire under the stars. Outrage and status-drenched tales of hunts and tribal exploits would’ve been told and retold, becoming ever-more magical and strange, eventually taking the form of sacred myth. Such stories would describe the nature of heroic behaviour. Certain characters would be celebrated, and gain status, for acting in ways the tribe approved of. Villainous or cowardly behaviour would trigger moral outrage – an urgent desire to see transgressors punished that would be satisfied in uproariously happy endings. In this way, stories transmitted the values of the tribe. They told listeners exactly how they ought to behave if they wanted to get along and get ahead in that particular group. There’s a sense in which these stories would become the tribe. They’d represent what it stood for in ways purer and clearer than could any flawed human.
Stories are tribal propaganda. They control their group, manipulating its members into behaving in ways that benefit it. And it works. A recent study of eighteen hunter-gatherer tribes found almost eighty per cent of their stories contained lessons in how they should behave in their dealings with other people. The groups with the greater proportion of storytellers showed the most pro-social behaviour.
Because one of our deepest and most powerful urges is the gaining of ever more status, our tribal stories tell us how to earn it. A human tribe can be viewed as a status game that all its members are playing, its rules being recorded in its stories. Every human group that has a shared purpose is held together by such stories. A nation has a story it tells about itself, in which its values are encoded, as does a corporation and a religion and a mafia organisation and a political ideology and a cult. The Bible, The Qur’an and the Torah that Ezra presented to his people in Jerusalem are ready-made theories of control that are internalised by their followers, instructing them how to behave in order to achieve connection and status.
Some of our oldest recorded stories transmit such rules. The Epic of Gilgamesh, which pre-dates Ezra’s story by more than a thousand years and even lends it its episode about a worldwide flood, tells of a King who, like Shakespeare’s Lear, has forgotten that status should be earned. In its first section, the gods send down a challenger, Enkidu, to humble him. King Gilgamesh and Enkidu become friends. Together they bravely take on the monster of the forest, Humbaba, using superhuman effort to slay him before triumphantly returning with valuable wood to continue building Gilgamesh’s great city. By the end of the saga, Enkidu has died, but King Gilgamesh is fully humbled, accepting his lot as just another mortal human. We think more of him and thereby reward him with a bump in status.
That 4,000-year-old epic provides the same tribal function as Mr Nosey. In Roger Hargeaves’s children’s book, the protagonist’s flawed model of the world tells him he’ll only be safe if he sticks his long nose into other people’s business. But the villagers plot against him, first daubing paint on his prying nose, then banging it with a hammer. Finally humbled, Nosey mends his ways, ‘and soon became friends with everybody in Tiddletown’. For shedding his anti-social habits, Nosey is rewarded with connection and status.
All of us are being silently controlled by any number of instructional stories at once. A unique quality of humans is that we’ve evolved the ability to think our way into many tribes simultaneously. ‘We all belong to multiple in-groups,’ writes Professor Leonard Mlodinow. ‘As a result our self-identification shifts from situation to situation. At different times the same person might think of herself as a woman, an executive, a Disney employee, a Brazilian or a mother, depending on which is relevant – or which makes her feel good at the time.’
These groups, and their stories of how to behave and gain connection and status, form part of our identity. It’s mostly during adolescence, that period in which we’re composing our ‘grand narrative of self’, that we decide which ‘peer groups’ to join. We seek out people who have similar mental models to us – who have comparable personalities and interests and perceive the world in ways we recognise. Late adolescence sees many choosing a political ideology, left or right – a tribal master-story that fits over our unconscious landscape of feelings and instincts and half-formed suspicions and makes sense of it, suddenly infusing us with a sense of clarity, mission, righteousness and relief. When this happens it can feel as if we’ve encountered revealed truth and our eyes have suddenly been opened. In fact, the opposite has happened. Tribal stories blind us. They allow us to see only half the truth, at best.
The psychologist Professor Jonathan Haidt has explored the stories that competing ideological tribes tell about the world. Take capitalism. For the left, it’s exploitative. The Industrial Revolution gave evil capitalists the technology to use and abuse workers as dumb machine-parts in their factories and mines and reap all the profits. The workers fought back, unionising and electing more enlightened politicians and then, in the 1980s, the capitalists became resurgent, heralding an era of ever-increasing inequality and eco-disaster. For the right, capitalism is liberation. It freed the used and abused workers from exploitation by kings and tyrants and gave them property rights, the rule of law and free markets, motivating them to work and create. And yet this great freedom is under constant attack from leftists who resent the idea that the most productive individuals are properly rewarded for their hard work. They want everyone to be ‘equal and equally poor’.
What’s insidious about these stories is that they each tell only a partial truth. Capitalism is liberating and it’s also exploitative. Like any complex system it has a trade-off of effects, some good, others bad. But thinking with tribal stories means shutting out such morally unsatisfying complexity. Our storytelling brains transform reality’s chaos into a simple narrative of cause and effect that reassures us that our biased models, and the instincts and emotions they generate, are virtuous and right. And this means casting the opposing tribe into the role of villain.
The evil truth about humans is that we don’t just compete for status with other people inside our tribes. The tribes we belong to also compete with rival tribes. We’re not harmlessly groupish like starlings or sheep or shoals of mackerel, but violently so. In the twentieth century alone, tribal conflict killed 160 million, whether by genocide, political oppression or war.
We have this in common with the chimpanzee whose males, sometimes accompanied by females, patrol the boundaries of their territory, halting in silence for as long as an hour to listen for enemy movements. When caught, a ‘foreign’ chimp is savagely beaten to death: arms twisted off, throat torn out and fingernails plucked, genitals ripped off, the warriors gulping down the gushing blood. When all the males of a neighbouring troop are killed or chased out, the victorious chimps take over their territory and the females still in it. The primatologist Professor Frans de Waal writes that ‘it cannot be coincidental that the only animals in which gangs of males expand their territory by deliberately exterminating neighbouring males happen to be humans and chimpanzees. What is the chance of such tendencies evolving independently in two closely related mammals?’
We still have this primitive cognition. We think in tribal stories. It’s our original sin. Whenever we sense the status of our tribe is threatened by another, these foul networks fire up. In that moment, to the subconscious brain, we’re back in the prehistoric forest or savannah. The storytelling brain enters a state of war. It assigns the opposing group purely selfish motives. It hears their most powerful arguments in a particular mode of spiteful lawyerliness, seeking to misrepresent or discard what they have to say. It uses the most appalling transgressions of their very worst members as a brush to smear them all. It takes its individuals and erases their depth and diversity. It turns them into outlines; morphs their tribe into a herd of silhouettes. It denies those silhouettes the empathy, humanity and patient understanding that it lavishes on its own. And, when it does all this, it makes us feel great, as if we’re the moral hero of an exhilarating story.
The brain enters this war state because a psychological tribal threat is a threat to its theory of control – its intricate network of millions of beliefs about how one thing causes another. Its theory of control tells it, among many other things, how to get what it most desires, namely connection and status. It forms the scaffolding of the model of the world and self it has been building since birth.
Of course this model, and its theory of control, is indivisible from who we are. It’s what we’re experiencing, in the black vault of our skulls, as reality itself. It’s hardly surprising we’ll fight to defend it. Because different tribes live by different models of control – communists and capitalists, to take a broad example, award their prizes of status and connection for very different behaviours – a tribal challenge is existentially disturbing. It’s not merely a threat to our surface beliefs about this and that, but to the very subconscious structures by which we experience reality.
It’s also a threat to the status game to which we’ve invested the efforts of our lives. To our subconscious, if another tribe is allowed to win, their victory won’t merely pull us down the hierarchy but will destroy the hierarchy completely. Our loss in status will be complete and irreversible. This removal of the ability to claim status meets the psychologist’s definition of humiliation, that ‘annihilation of the self’ which underlies a saturnine suite of murderous behaviours, from spree shootings to honour killings. When a group’s collective status feels threatened and they fear even the possibility of humiliation by another group, the result can be massacre, crusade and genocide. Such dynamics have played out relatively recently in places such as Rwanda, the Soviet Union, China, Germany, Myanmar, the southern states of America and, of course, Ezra’s precious Jerusalem.
In such times, tribes deploy the explosive power of story, with all its moral outrage and status play, in order to galvanise and motivate their members against the enemy. In 1915, the film The Birth of a Nation presented African Americans as unintelligent brutes who sexually bullied white women. The three-hour-long story played to sold-out crowds and recruited thousands to the Ku Klux Klan. In 1940, one year before the release of Citizen Kane, the film Jew Süss portrayed Ezra’s descendants as corrupt and showed a high-status Jewish banker, Süss Oppenheimer, raping a blonde German woman, before being hanged in front of grateful crowds in an iron cage. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where it won plaudits, was seen by twenty million and caused viewers to pour en masse into the streets of Berlin chanting, ‘Throw the last of the Jews out of Germany.’ That sexual violence against females appeared in both films and is a territorial dominance behaviour of chimpanzees is surely no coincidence.
But such stories don’t only exploit outrage and tribal humiliation for their power. Many deploy a third incendiary group emotion: disgust. In our evolutionary pasts, the threat from competing groups wouldn’t come only from their potential for violence. They could also be carrying dangerous pathogens that our immune systems hadn’t previously encountered and so couldn’t defend us against. Exposure to carriers of pathogens – in faeces, say, or rotten food – naturally activates feelings of disgust and revulsion. Our tribal brains seem to have developed the cultural tic of thinking of foreign tribes in such a way. This, perhaps, is why children still commonly hold their noses as a way of derogating members of out-groups.
Tribal propaganda exploits these processes by representing enemies as disease-carrying pests such as cockroaches, rats or lice. In Jew Süss, the Jewish people are portrayed as filthy and unhygienic and are shown teeming into a city as a plague. Even popular conventional stories exploit the power of disgust. Villains from Harry Potter’s Lord Voldemort to Beowulf’s Grendel to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Leatherface have disfigurements that fire these neural networks. In The Twits, Roald Dahl created a typically marvellous confabulation of the disgust principle: ‘If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until it gets so ugly you can hardly bear to look at it.’
It’s in these ways that story both exposes and enables the worst traits of our species. We willingly allow highly simplistic narratives to deceive us, gleefully accepting as truth any tale that casts us as the moral hero and the other as the two-dimensional villain. We can tell when we’re under its power. When all the good is on our side and all the bad on theirs, our storytelling brain is working its grim magic in full. We’re being sold a story. Reality is rarely so simple. Such stories are seductive because our hero-making cognition is determined to convince us of our moral worth. They justify our primitive tribal impulses and seduce us into believing that, even in our hatred, we are holy.
It’s sometimes assumed that we root for characters who are simply kind. This is a nice idea, but it’s not true. As literary critic Adam Kirsch has observed, goodness is ‘infertile terrain for a writer’. If a hero starts out in perfect selfless shape there’s going to be no tale to tell. For the story theorist Professor Bruno Bettelheim, the storyteller’s challenge isn’t so much one of arousing the reader’s moral respect for the protagonist, but their sympathy. In his inquiry into the psychology of fairy tales, he writes that ‘the child identifies with the good hero not because of his goodness, but because the hero’s condition makes a deep positive appeal to him. The question for the child is not, “Do I want to be good?” but “Who do I want to be like?”’
But if Bettelheim is correct, how do we explain antiheroes? Millions have been entranced by the adventures of Humbert Humbert, the protagonist of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, who embarks on a sexual relationship with a twelve-year-old girl. Surely we don’t want to be ‘like’ him?
In order to achieve his trick of not having us throw his novel into a cleansing fire after the first seven pages, Nabokov has to go to sometimes extreme lengths to subconsciously manipulate our tribal social emotions. In a scholarly introduction written by an academic we immediately learn that Humbert is dead. Next we discover that, prior to his passing, he was in ‘legal captivity’ awaiting trial. This immediately deflates much of our moral outrage before we even get the chance to feel it: the poor bastard’s caught and dead. Whatever he’s done, he’s had his tribal comeuppance. We can relax. The craving subsides. Before the first sentence is even finished, Nabokov has begun slyly freeing us to enjoy what’s to come.
When we meet the man himself our outrage is further punctured by his immediate acknowledgements of wrongdoing, calling Lolita ‘my sin’ and himself a ‘murderer’. It helps, too, that Humbert’s the opposite of disgusting, being handsome, well-tailored and charming. He’s darkly funny, dealing with the death of his mother in perhaps the most famous in-parenthesis aside in literature – ‘(picnic, lightning)’ – and describing Lolita’s mother as looking like ‘a weak solution of Marlene Dietrich’. We learn his hebephiliac tendencies were triggered by tragedy: when he himself was twelve, his first love Annabelle died, ‘that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since – until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another.’
When Humbert’s adult interest in girls of Annabelle’s age becomes apparent, he tries to cure himself with therapy and marriage. It doesn’t work. The story’s ignition point (just as it is for Charles Foster Kane and King Lear) is an inevitable consequence of his flawed model of the world: Humbert meets and falls in love with Lolita. We soon realise the girl’s mother despises her: not only has she given her daughter ‘the meanest and coldest’ room in the house, Humbert finds a personality questionnaire she’s filled in on her behalf. It indicates she believes Lolita to be, ‘aggressive, boisterous, critical, distrustful, impatient, irritable, negativistic (underlined twice) and obstinate. She had ignored the thirty remaining adjectives, among which were cheerful, cooperative, energetic, and so forth. It was really maddening.’ She then packs her off, against her will, to a boarding school with ‘strict discipline’. By a variety of powerful and crafty means, Nabokov is manipulating our emotions such that we find ourselves somewhat rooting for Humbert.
If Humbert is to have Lolita, her mother has to go. Will Humbert kill her? Nabokov knows he’s already asking a great deal from the reader. Our social emotions are only on Humbert’s ‘side’ in the most fragile way and certainly won’t stand watching him kill. So when her death takes place, it’s not directly Humbert’s doing. In perhaps his most audacious piece of manipulation, Nabokov has his protagonist unable to bring himself to commit the awful deed. Instead he relies on what he cheekily has Humbert describe as ‘the long hairy arm of coincidence’ to do it for him. She’s run over by a car.
When Humbert finally gets his hands on Lolita, he’s randy but also conflicted, hesitant and guilty. We crucially discover she’s no longer a virgin, having already slept with a boy at summer camp. She’s presented, at least by our unreliable narrator, as unsympathetic – pushy, confident, manipulative and precocious – and because this is the behaviour we’re shown, it’s what we’ll subconsciously and emotionally respond to. Lolita comes to dominate Humbert before deciding to run off with a far more despicable man, Clare Quilty. Where Nabokov sympathetically manipulates our response to Humbert, he fully unleashes the disgust principle against this ‘subhuman’ predatory hebephiliac pornographer: we see the ‘black hairs on the back of his piggy hands’ and watch him ‘scratching loudly his fleshy and gritty grey cheek and showing his small pearly teeth in a crooked grin’. Then, in a thrilling act of altruistic punishment and costly signalling that we’re by now deeply craving, Humbert kills him.
Our antihero finally departs the story having submitted voluntarily to his arrest. The very last thing he shares with us is a confessional memory from the period following his abandonment by Lolita. He’d pulled up in his car at the side of a high valley, at the bottom of which lay a small mining town. In its streets, he heard the voices of playing children: ‘I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.’ Humbert Humbert might have done a terrible thing, but Nabokov’s ability to manipulate our deepest tribal feelings about his sin, his soul, are tremendous.
Similar manipulations take place on behalf of other antiheroes, not least the protagonist of the television series The Sopranos. Our first meeting with the Mafioso Tony Soprano occurs in a psychotherapist’s waiting room. We learn he developed a bond with some ducks and ducklings that regularly landed in his pool, and suffered a panic attack when they finally left. He weeps when he speaks of them. Not only is Soprano sensitive and in pain, he’s relatively low in status. Far from being some all-powerful John Gotti, he’s the capo of a marginal New Jersey gang and, anyway, as he says to his new therapist: ‘I came in at the end, the best is over.’
When we see Soprano beating a man, the victim is just a ‘degenerate fucking gambler’ who owes him money and insulted him: ‘you’ve been telling people I’m nothing compared to the people who used to run things.’ As the episode unfolds, Soprano secretly tries to help a non-mob friend in whose restaurant his much more horrible uncle has planned a hit. Soprano cares for his mother. When he takes her to a prospective nursing home and she becomes distressed, he suffers another anxiety attack. We then discover she’s plotting with his uncle to have him killed.
The author Patricia Highsmith indulges in similar manipulations. In Ripley’s Game, the sociopathic con artist Tom Ripley is handsome, eloquent and cultured, just like Humbert. And, like Humbert and Soprano, he’s in conflict with a much more evil villain, Reeves Minot. Like Soprano, darker, more powerful forces are ranged against him in the form of the Italian mafia. And so on. If we have the alarming realisation that we’re actually rooting for these characters, it’s because we’re being cleverly manipulated into doing so by everything that’s happening around them. They might be sex criminals, con artists and gangsters, but the world that’s created for them to battle against is such that we overlook their deviancies in spite of ourselves.
There’s a sense in which all protagonists are antiheroes. Most, when we meet them, are flawed and partial and only become truly heroic if and when they manage to change. Any attempt to find a single reason why we find characters root-worthy is probably destined to fail. There isn’t one secret to creating empathy but many. The key lies in the neural networks. Stories work on multiple evolved systems in the brain and a skilled storyteller activates these networks like the conductor of an orchestra, a little trill of moral outrage here, a fanfare of status play over there, a tintinnabulation of tribal identification, a rumble of threatening antagonism, a tantara of wit, a parp of sexual allure, a crescendo of unfair trouble, a warping and wefting hum as the dramatic question is posed and reposed in new and interesting ways – all instruments by which masses of brains can be captivated and manipulated.
But I suspect there’s also something else going on. Story is a form of play that we domesticated animals use to learn how to control the social world. Archetypal stories about anti-heroes often end in their being killed or otherwise humiliated, thus serving their purpose as tribal propaganda. We’re taught the appropriate lesson and left in no doubt about the costs of such selfish behaviour. But the awkward fact remains that, as we experience the story unfolding in our minds, we seem to enjoy ‘playing’ the antihero. I wonder if this is because, somewhere in the sewers far beneath our hero-making narrators, we know we’re not so lovely. Keeping the secret of ourselves from ourselves can be exhausting. This, perhaps, is the subversive truth of stories about antiheroes. Being freed to be evil, if only in our minds, can be such a joyful relief.
Sometime around the year 1600, the art of storytelling changed forever. Nobody knows how he came upon the idea, but William Shakespeare began experimenting with breaking the rules of how the dramatic question had previously been handled. The Professor of humanities Stephen Greenblatt writes that his true leap into genius took place when he made the ‘crucial breakthrough’ of removing one particular class of character information.
In most instances, the source material on which playwrights such as Shakespeare based their work clearly explained the causes of their character’s behaviour. But when he was working on Hamlet, Shakespeare decided to try artfully excising such neat and reassuring explanations. In previous versions of the play, Hamlet’s ‘madness’ had been tactical and fake, a ruse to buy time and foster the appearance of harmlessness. But in Shakespeare’s version, his suicidal madness is actually real and, writes Greenblatt, ‘nothing to do with the ghost’ that informed him of his father’s murder.
Shakespeare continued his experiment with ‘radical excision’ of such character information in the thrilling sequence of plays written between 1603 and 1606, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. Why did Othello’s Iago so desperately want to kill his general? Shakespeare obscured and hinted at Iago’s motivations, which were clearly spelled out in his source, a short story by Giambattista Giraldi. Why did King Lear decide to perform his ridiculous love test? The source play, The True Chronicle History of King Leir, provided an explanation: Cordelia wanted to marry for love while her father, the King, wanted her marriage to further his dynasty. The love test was a trick. Cordelia was expected to claim she loved her father more than her sisters, to which the King would respond, ‘So prove it. Marry who I tell you.’ In Shakespeare’s version, the cause of Lear’s dysfunctional decision is removed. This experimentation in denying neat explanations, writes Greenblatt, resulted in plays that were ‘immeasurably deeper’ than what had gone before.
It’s often said the genius of Shakespeare lies in his psychological truth. Recent advances in the sciences of the mind show the extraordinary degree to which this is correct. Shakespeare had always been sceptical of ‘accounts, whether psychological or theological, of why people behave the way they do’. In his scepticism he’s been proven entirely correct. As we’ve learned, none of us know why we do what we do – not King Lear, not Iago, not me and not you. Leaving his audiences to guess at the precise causes of a character’s actions enabled the playwright to toy wonderfully with their domesticated brains. There’s little more interesting to most of us than the causes and effects of human behaviour. In making the answer to the dramatic question more mysterious, Shakespeare accessed our infinite wells of curiosity about other people and their oddness, generating a wonderful and enduring obsession with his characters and plays. He also gave us space to insert ourselves into his stories: we wonder, would I ever do such a thing? What could make me?
Great storytelling, like great psychology and great neuroscience, is a deep investigation into human behaviour. Literary storytelling is often dominated not by surface action as much as by the laying out of extensive clues as to why the characters behave as they do. Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach tells of a young couple’s catastrophic honeymoon. In the summer of 1962, we meet freshly-married Florence and Edward in a modest Dorset hotel. That evening, when they attempt to consummate their marriage – they’ve yet to have any significant sexual contact at all – an over-excited Edward suffers premature ejaculation. Florence, who’s been viscerally dreading the entire event, reacts with horror and revulsion at the gushing arrival of his sperm, ‘slime from another body … the feel of it crawling across her skin in thick rivulets, its alien milkiness, its intimate starchy odour …’. She frantically wipes at it with a pillow and storms out. When Edward finds her, he furiously accuses her of being a ‘fraud’ and ‘completely frigid’, telling her she doesn’t ‘have the faintest idea how to be with a man … you don’t even know how to kiss’.
‘I know a failure when I see it,’ Florence cruelly replies. She then suggests that, in future, Edward could satisfy his sexual needs with other women: ‘I’d never be jealous, as long as I knew that you loved me.’ Appalled, Edward rejects her offer. Their marriage is annulled due to non-consummation.
How did this happen? What was it, in the pasts of Florence and Edward, that led to this terrible breakdown in their hitherto wonderful love? What made them the people they became? Much of the rest of McEwan’s book comprises a collection of hints and clues as to the origin of their damage. Did Edward react with such insensitivity and temper because he felt inferior to Florence? She was a talented violinist who we’re shown, in flashback scenes, is clearly the greater intellect. Her upper-middle-class family lived in relative splendour in a ‘big Victorian villa’ in Oxford, while Edward’s clan ate meals at a ‘folding pine table’ in a ‘crammed and squalid’ cottage in the Chilterns that stank of drains. Could it also be something to do with Edward’s ‘very early childhood’ that had been ‘marked by spectacular tantrums’?
And what of Florence? Why did she dread so utterly the act of consummation with the man she loved? Could her reaction of fear and repugnance be rooted in an episode of childhood abuse? McEwan hints at this – but only hints. ‘In the final draft it’s there as a shadowy fact for readers to make of it what they will,’ he has said. ‘I didn’t want to be too deterministic about this. Many readers may miss it altogether, which is fine.’
Much of the joy of literary works such as On Chesil Beach is in being raised into a state of tantalised curiosity about the causes and effects of who people are. They’re detective stories, with the reader as sleuth. If their authors explained their characters’ behaviour precisely, the fire of curiosity would risk being extinguished. Moreover, the reader would be left without an active role in the story, and with no place in which to insert their own interpretations.
While this isn’t always true – in Lolita, of course, Nabokov tells of Humbert’s childhood trauma specifically to help build empathy – many great stories do obscure the root causes of their characters’ damage. Lawrence of Arabia hints at the origin of its protagonist’s flaw in a fireside scene in which he quietly confesses his illegitimacy to Sherif Ali, a fact that would presumably have been a source of much shame to a man of his era. In The Remains of the Day we learn of the gossip a young and awestruck Stevens heard about his father fulfilling his duties with heroic levels of emotional restraint. These tales metastasised, in Stevens’ mind, into an idealised model of self. They were incorporated into his emerging theory of control. They taught him who he had to be in order to be welcomed into the status game of butlers and climb to its pinnacle.
The story of Citizen Kane shows an unusual use of origin damage in that its plot tells of an overt hunt for it. Rawlston’s newsmen are charged to discover who this man was, who’d inherited a spectacular fortune and yet chosen to run a newspaper, attempted to go into politics and then died alone and unhappy in ‘the world’s largest pleasure ground’ surrounded by a ‘collection of everything so big it can never be catalogued’. Most specifically, they’re sent to uncover the mystery of the last word he ever spoke: rosebud.
During the search, one of Rawlston’s men reads the memoir of the guardian who’d raised Kane from boyhood. Its pages reveal that his mother gave Kane up to a wealthy guardian, Thatcher, against his father’s will. She believed she was doing the right thing because his father beat him. But Charles’s father also believed he was doing the right thing, his hero-making narrator insisting the beatings were for the boy’s own good. Despite the corporal punishment, young Charles was essentially happy. We’re shown him full of life, joyfully playing soldiers in the snow. When Thatcher takes him away, he attacks him with a sledge.
In the film’s final frames, the information gaps that opened-up at the story’s start are finally closed. We discover that, written on that sledge was the word ‘rosebud’. The glass snow globe Kane dropped and smashed when he died contained a house resembling that of his parents. In being wrenched away from that home, a void was created that he spent his life trying to fill with the love of the masses and all the material possessions he could buy. But the hole was too big. It was during that moment with the sledge that the damage took place to his models that, in turn, created the ignition point and plot of his story. This revelation answers the fundamental dramatic question of who is he? and thereby leaves the viewer moved and satisfied, their curiosity slaked.
Such examples show the freedom writers have in playing with origin damage. They can hint at it and tease it, use it to build empathy, even orient plots around a hunt for it. It’s my experience teaching these principles, though, that it’s valuable for the storyteller to know specifically when and how such damage happened to their principal cast before they start writing. It doesn’t do to be general and say, for example, ‘It’s because their parents didn’t love them enough,’ because such vague thinking can only lead to vague characters.
In reality, of course, origin damage is often a matter of grim erosion, commonly taking place over months, years and repeated bloody incidents. Much of it’s genetic. As Shakespeare well knew, we don’t usually become who we are in one defining moment. But if a writer is to conjure great characters on the page, they first have to model them vividly in their minds, and that means defining them precisely. They should be able to ‘see’ how they’ll behave in any dramatic situation and try to control the drama that flies at them. To do this, it helps to pin a character’s origin damage down to an actual event, as the writers of Citizen Kane did, even if it’s only hinted at in, or excised completely from, the final draft.
This means imagining that event thoroughly, then deciding what flawed belief about the world or themselves it generated. Once the writer knows when it happened, how it happened and what flawed concept the incident created, their character can more easily come alive in their imagination. The mistake about reality they’ve made, in that instant, helps define not only who that character is, but the life they’ve built for themselves. Ishiguro’s butler’s mistake was specifically emotional restraint. That was the grain around which his entire life, and the novel that tells of it, comes alive.
If origin damage in story most often occurs in youth, it’s because it’s in the first two decades of life that we’re busy forming ourselves out of our experiences. It’s when our models of reality are being built. (If you want to imagine how bizarre and berserk a person with unbuilt neural models of reality would be like, just imagine a four-year-old.) (Or a fourteen-year-old.) As adults, the hallucination we experience as truth is built out of our pasts. We see and feel and explain the world partly with our damage.
This damage can take place before we’re even able to speak. Because humans crave control, infants whose caregivers behave unpredictably can grow up in a constant state of anxious high alert. Their distress gets built into their core concepts about people which can lead to significant social problems when they’re grown. Even a lack of affectionate touch, in our earliest years, has the potential to hurt us forever. The body has a dedicated network of touch receptors optimised specifically to respond to being stroked. For the neuroscientist Professor Francis McGlone, gentle stroking is critical for healthy psychological development. ‘My hunch is that the natural interaction between parents and the infant – that continuous desire to touch, cuddle and handle – is providing the essential inputs that lay the foundations for a well-adjusted social brain,’ he has said. ‘It’s more than just nice, it’s absolutely critical.’
The brain’s models continue to form during adolescence. Our popularity or otherwise at school also warps our neural models, and therefore our experience of reality, forever. Our position on the social hierarchy during adolescence doesn’t merely alter who we are as adults superficially, writes the psychologist Professor Mitch Prinstein, it changes ‘our brain wiring and, consequently, it has changed what we see, what we think and how we act’.
Researchers asked people to watch videos of scenes that were busy with social interactions, such as film of a school corridor. They then tracked their saccades so they could see which elements the participants’ brains were attending to. Those with ‘past histories of social success’ spent most of their time on people being friendly – smiling, chatting, nodding. But those who’d had high-school experiences of loneliness and social isolation ‘scarcely looked at the positive scenes at all’, writes Prinstein. Instead they spent around eighty per cent of their time looking at people being unfriendly and bullying. ‘It was as if they had watched a completely different movie.’
Similar tests had people viewing simple animations of shapes interacting in ambiguous ways. Participants who’d been unpopular at school tended to tell a spontaneous cause-and-effect story about what was happening in which the shapes were behaving violently towards each other. Those who’d been popular were much more likely to experience them as joyfully playing.
This is how we go through our day-to-day lives. What we see in our human environments is a product of our pasts – and, all too often, a product of our own particular damage. We’re literally blind to that which the brain ignores. If it sends the eye to only the distressing elements around us, that’s all we’ll see. If it spins cause-and-effect tales of violence and threat and prejudice about actually harmless events, that’s what we’ll experience. This is how the hallucinated reality in which we live at the centre can be dramatically different to that of the person we’re standing right next to. We all exist in different worlds. And whether that world feels friendly or hostile depends, in significant part, on what happened to us as children. ‘At some level, without our being aware of it, our brains spend all day, every day, drawing upon initial, formative high school memories.’
Harmful childhood experiences damage our ability to control the environment of other people. And for us domesticated creatures the environment of other people is everything. All principal characters in story will engage in such struggles. It might seem as if certain kinds of fictional stories don’t concern such characters – Indiana Jones or heroes of boys-own war adventures, such as Andy McNab’s Bravo Two Zero, for example, focus on a protagonist’s attempts at controlling the physical world rather than the social. But even they will ultimately have to grapple with antagonistic minds, whether in the form of a villain or their own tumultuous, rebelling subconscious.
Because origin damage happens when our models are still being built, the flaws it creates become incorporated into who we are. They’re internalised. The self-justifying hero-maker narrative then gets to work telling us we’re not partial or mistaken at all – we’re right. We see evidence to support this false belief everywhere, and we deny, forget or dismiss any counter-evidence. Experience after experience seems to confirm our rightness. We grow up looking out of this broken model of the world that feels absolutely clear and real, despite its warps and fissures.
Every now and then, actual reality will push back at us. Something in our environment will change in such a way that our flawed models aren’t predicting and are, therefore, specifically unable to cope with. We try to contain the chaos but because this change strikes directly against our model’s particular flaws, we fail. Then we can become conflicted. Are we right? Or is there actually a chance we’re wrong? If this deep, identity-forming belief turns out to be wrong, then who the hell are we? The dramatic question has been triggered. The story has begun.
Finding out who we are, and who we need to become, means accepting the challenge that story offers us. Are we brave enough to change?
This is the question a plot, and a life, asks of each us.