The Dangers of Story Overload

Let me start by saying that I believe in the power of a good story...to transcend culture, to spark imagination, to create connections, to engage strangers, to empower the voiceless, to provoke change, to inspire ideas, to nurture understanding, and on and on. But as I witness the proliferation and dominance of story - corporations, politicians, activists, evangelists all out there busking - I'm becoming concerned about the impact on our real lives.

Stories are simple. Stories are constructs that take complex and often messy realities and craft them into a narrative with a beginning middle and end. Just the act of choosing a beginning is artificial. Our daily lives are not linear, orderly progressions. An encounter that holds the promise of future romance or a business partnership can fizzle into nothing at all. Unless you create a life together or launch a product or make a film or a baby or whatever - that storyline just ends. We all have countless dead-ends in our lives. The same is true for history and biology. My concern is that if we constantly see everything in the form of a story, we may lose our capacity to confront - and even embrace - the very real complexities of life, love, politics, business, and nature.

But it's not only the simplification, it's also heightened drama that is a concern. In a recent Wall Street Journal Article about the "stars" of the award-winning documentary STARTUP.COM, both entrepreneurs talk about the difference between their actual experience and the dramatized version that was depicted on screen. One of them eloquently explains:

"They had to sell the story, and they had to pick the pieces that made everything larger than life. And that's part of the brilliance in the work that they did. It's not part of the reflection of reality - it's the reflection of the artistic license to tell a story - an exciting story." - Tom Herman

I'm starting to better understand why innovator and entrepreneur Iqbal Quadir resisted becoming a "character" in the documentary film I wanted to make about him...we were calling it 'Startup.com with a global twist.'

I can give another example. My documentary CATCHING OUT features several contemporary hobos who dissent against mainstream American consumer culture by traveling for free on freight trains. The film has received criticism for not being more dramatic - no encounters with railroad police, not enough actual trainhopping footage. Sure, it's far from a perfect film, but even with hindsight I would not amp up the action. True, you can get a big adrenaline kick when you are scrambling around a train yard, but more often riding the rails is about endlessly waiting and watching. You go nowhere fast. It's boring stuff that involves a lot of napping, reading books, and philosophizing with fellow travelers. The exhilarating part of hopping a train is the existential journey of abandoning social convention and cultural expectation - a more complex and nuanced experience than encountering a bull or a catching a train on the fly.

Or consider my more recent filmmaking adventure: when I went to Kenya to document the making of the feature film TOGETHERNESS SUPREME, I thought I would capture a straightforward story about the trials and tribulations of producing a film in a slum on the outskirts of Nairobi with a local cast and a crew of local youth trainees. But as I started shooting, that story felt shallow, contrived. A more complex and more compelling story presented itself about the interplay between the fictional narrative of the film and the real lives of the cast and crew. There's no question that the more complex story would have been harder to tell and part of the reason that I recently pronounced the project a "Fail" is because I couldn't figure out how to bring it to fruition. But I'd rather not make a film at all then craft a contrived story.

Of course, I want passionate and talented storytellers to continue to create stories that offer us the chance to dream and imagine and visit worlds we would otherwise never know. I particularly want storytellers from distant and diverse places to challenge our standard western narratives. But I also want to encourage the storytellers of our time to experiment with deconstructing stories, breaking them down, pulling them apart, and exposing their simplicity and artifice.