The Story So Far

As you would expect from a Briton, Simpson concludes that the only repository of serious cultural analysis is on British television which as we have seen, is being re-structured according to American imperatives. The circle in short, is closed.

The sound of an Englishman being superior about America is rarely uplifting; but in this case the complaints come most fiercely from the people who work for American television themselves. They know how steep the decline has been, and why it has happened. All three networks have been brought up by giant corporations which appear to regard news and current affairs as branches of the entertainment industry, and insist they have to pay their way with advertisers just as chat-shows and sit coms do. Advertisers are not good people for a news organization to rely on: during the Gulf war NBC lost $25 million in revenue because companies which had bought space in the news bulletins cancelled their advertisements — they were afraid their products would appear alongside reports of American casualties.

The decline of the networks is depressing. CBS is one of the grandest names in journalism, the high-minded organisation which broadcast Ed Murrow's wartime despatches from London and Walter Cronkite's influential verdicts on the Vietnam war and Watergate. NBC's record is a proud one too. Recently it announced it was back in the news business and would stop broadcasting stories that were simply features. But NBC News seems very close to the rocks nowadays, and it does not have the money to send its teams abroad in the way it did until a couple of years ago. The foreign coverage will mostly be based on pictures from the British television news agency Visnews, and from the BBC. (p. 9)

We have entered the period of "authoritarian capital", and Simpson argues that the "story" is the indicator of this denouement. If this is so, the promoters of storying have strange bed fellows.
Earl and Irma, meanwhile, are still there in front of their television sets, serenely unaware of what is happening around them. Decisions which affect their lives are being taken every day in Frankfurt, Tokyo and London, but no one tells them about it. Most of the companies which advertise on television just want them to feel good so, therefore, do the people in charge of providing them with news. The freest society in the world has achieved the kind of news blackout which totalitarian régimes can only dream about.(p. 9)

In one sense the enshrinement of the personal story as a central motif for knowledge transmission links up with another theme in current restructuring. Namely: the reconstruction of the middle ground in the social and economic system. By sponsoring voices at the periphery, the centre may well be strengthening its hand. Hence, empowerment of personal and peripheral voices can go hand in hand with aggrandizement and a further concentration of power at the centre. As Alan Wolfe has pointed out in his new book Whose Keeper?: "...a debate that casts government and the marketplace as the main mechanisms of social organization leaves out all those intermediate institutions that are, in fact, the most important in people's lives: family, church, neighbourhood associations, workplace ties, unions and a variety of informal organizations (quoted in Dionne, 1992, p. 18)."

The current appeal to personal and "family values" in the U.S. election undoubtedly is driven by a realisation of this kind of dissolution of mediating social structures. "The appeal of this vague phrase is that fundamentally it reminds people that good society depends not only, or even primarily, on their economic well-being, but also on this web of personal-social relationships that transcend the marketplace and transcend government (Rosenthal, 1992, section 4, p. 1)."

This focus on storytelling emerged early in the movies. By 1914, William and Cecil DeMille had developed a technique of storytelling that would "follow the old dramatic principles, but adapt itself to a new medium", "find its own compensations for its lack of words...to make a train of thought visible enough to be photographed (Berg, 1989, p. 48)". By 1916, this had evolved to the point where a ghostwriter for Samuel Goldwyn could write, "by the time I started the Goldwyn Company it was the player, not the play which was the thing (p. 68)."

Likewise in the world of fantasy, promoted by the movies, stories are the central motif for colonising and re-directing lived experience. This has been so since very early on as the Goldwyn quotes indicate.

A painless way to make sense of this new world was suggested by one of the modernizing forces itself: the movies. The movies offered many forms of guidance to confused Americans, particularly to immigrant urban dwellers; they became a virtual manual for acculturation. But one of the most important and most subtle services the movies offered was to serve as a popular model of narrative coherence. If reality was overwhelming, one could always carve it into a story, as the movies did. One could bend life to the familiar and comforting formulas one saw in the theatre (The New York Times, 1991, p. 32).

From the beginning, then, movies began to explore new terrains for formularizing and domesticating reality.