This diary was originally a comment in tote's excellent insider diary about ACORN. I've decided to repost it as a separate diary, because it's really not about tote's topic (ACORN) but about another topic that came up in the discussion: the "hegemonic media."
Is there a "hegemonic media?" Yes, but I suggest it's not for the reason most commonly (if unknowingly) cited: Antonio Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony. I think it goes to something more basic:
Mythmaking.
Join me over the fold.
As a novelist, and certainly back when I was a journalist, I'm part of the "hegemonic media." And I agree that it exists. There are novels I can't write, not because I don't want to but because no editor would buy them. They would posit an alternative society(*) too different from the one commonly perceived to exist, and thus would be immediately shot down as 'unrealistic.'
* A note on aesthetics: My novels are entirely fictional, even when they incorporate real places, institutions, persons, and events. The places, institutions, persons, and events must seem 'realistic' - they must evoke "the willing suspension of disbelief" so the reader can step into the aesthetic experience - but they are not real. I mimic a few factual details and invent the rest to fit the needs of the story. As art is "alternative life experience" - we experience it phenomenologically - its settings are also "alternative."
The irony is that the alternative societies I can't portray in a novel seem more 'realistic' to me than the ones I can. But the reason I can't use them is not censorship, no corporate attempt to coerce a hegemonic worldview. Editors will buy and publish whatever they think will sell; that's how they gain advancement in the publishing world. They rightly estimate that the alternative settings I might use - even ones they may believe are realistic - will not sell.
Why?
Because novelists are mythmakers and readers want myths of hope and empowerment. Readers want myths that make them believe they could defeat the evil in their own lives, rather than myths that cast them as pawns in some grand, shadowy, complex, morally ambiguous game.
My agent, who also represents screenwriters, says the same is true in the film industry, but more so. Readers are somewhat more willing to stray from the beaten path than are moviegoers, by the nature of the two media. Because movies are so visual, rather than relying on a reader's imagination, we want movies to be 'realistic.' But we still demand myths of hope and empowerment. Peter Jackson faced these problems in bringing J.R.R. Tolkein's enduringly popular Lord of the Rings to the screen. It was an exceptionally risky project, despite the popularity of the story itself, because the mythic constraints on the movie industry are even tighter than for novels, and Tolkein's myth does not completely fit those constraints.
What are those constraints? What do we demand from our myths?
We want myths where a single, brave, resourceful hero battles evil and wins an unambiguous, decisive victory. If the hero has help, that help must be minimal. The hero's own choices and actions must ultimately decide the issue, and he must win. And we want the myth to be 'realistic,' even though the real world is rarely like that.
In the real world, the 'forces of evil' are rarely motivated by evil. Most of the time, they are simply people or organizations whose interests are divergent or incompatible with our own. The Politburo were not trying to do 'evil,' regardless of Reagan's "Evil Empire" rhetoric. They were pursuing the interests of the Soviet Union, which in many cases were divergent from or incompatible with U.S. interests. Similarly, the rich aren't trying to be 'evil;' they're pursuing their own economic interests. As they see it, workers and competitors are playing the same complex, morally ambiguous game. As they see it, if they get richer and the rest lose, that simply means they're playing the game better.
More's the point, in the real world a single hero, however brave and resourceful, usually can't tackle those forces and win. A true crime story usually has no primary 'hero.' Anything more serious than a petty crime will likely be investigated by a team of detectives, uniformed officers, and forensics technicians, and later (or even at the time) a team of prosecutors. And when it comes to a truly big crime - Watergate, Enron, Abu Ghraib - the cast swells to hundreds if not thousands.
But teams make poor mythic heroes. We usually imagine ourselves facing the world alone, and we want myths where single hero can overcome. We want a lone hero like John McClane or Jack Ryan, or at most two buddies or a romantic pair. This was a major risk Jackson faced with Lord of the Rings. Tolkein's myth featured several heroes acting together. Jackson intentionally made the first film "Frodo-centric," in his own words - dropping entire passages from the book where Frodo was not the lead - so the audience could identify with a single hero. Only in the second and third films did Jackson allow Tolkein's other characters to perform truly heroic actions independent of Frodo.
I vainly attempted to buck these mythic constraints in a series of international conspiracy thrillers. That alternative world featured a network of behind-the-scenes organizations, none entirely good or evil, with both common and divergent interests, yielding a web of shifting alliances as they worked with or against each other in each story. And among those was a shadowy organization for which my heroes worked, an organization with considerable personnel and resources of its own, and which also formed ad-hoc alliances with other organizations as needed. While each story resolved a specific plot, the resolution was never an unambiguous victory. An organization might be temporarily defanged, but they were too large to crush completely. And even in foiling one threat, the seeds had already been laid for the next.
It was, despite necessary exaggerations, a reasonable view of the modern world as I see it. The series did very well in Europe, but not so well in the U.S. My agent, my editor, and I finally agreed to end the series and focus on more marketable ideas. It was a painful choice, for all of us, as we all had believed that series could become a "franchise." But we make our living by selling books, not by believing in them. And the U.S. sales - our primary market - simply weren't strong enough.
I share that because the narrative arts - mythmaking - have come to shape our politics and our journalism.
Like novelists, political candidates and journalists must tell stories that will sell. The former is the nature of democracy; the latter is the nature of professional journalism.
And increasingly, the American people seem to want political narratives that mirror our myths. Organizations challenging other organizations with divergent interests, ending not in 'victory' but some compromise of interests - rather than single heroes crushing evil in an unambiguous victory - is as unpopular politically as it is in fiction.
Our news media function not much different from a publisher or movie studio. They float out story ideas until one catches on, then repackage and repeat it until the public tires of it. The gross narrative seems hegemonic - and effectively it is - but I think that's a hegemony born of popular mythological demands rather than an attempt to coerce a specific worldview.
Quite simply, we don't much like the world as it is, and we want our politicians and journalists to sell us a world we wish we had, a myth of hope and empowerment, a world where a single, brave, resourceful hero can take on evil and crush it. That's why John McCain's 'hero' narrative has remained effective. That's why the entire domestic policy debate reduced to Joe the Plumber. And, lest we think it solely a GOP mythology, that's why Barack Obama had to stop talking about what "we can" do, and shift to what "I will" do.
We are constrained by our myths of rugged individualism and personal heroism ... in a world demanding cooperative heroism.
We want to battle an evil we can crush without sullying ourselves in the crushing ... in a world comprised of legitimate but divergent interests in need of negotiation.
We want Peter Jackson's morally clarified adaptation of Lord of the Rings ... without J.R.R. Tolkein's morally ambiguous 'Cleansing of the Shire.'
We want to live in a mythical world. Our politicians and media accomodate us.
And we blame them for it.