Popular Fiction and
the
Quest for Freedom
by Ken Sanes
Movies and TV programs begin (more or less) when people use their thoughts and
fantasies to craft stories that are intended to bring a fictional world to life. But many
of those thoughts and fantasies appear in these stories only in disguised form, since the
creators are not themselves conscious of what they are expressing. Then, as audiences, we
perceive what they put into the work, also mostly outside of awareness. Finally, through
criticism -- discussion, writing, etc. -- we become aware of what we were responding to in
the work and how it fits in with our own personalities and minds.
The meanings that the creators put into these stories include
representations of any or all of the following: mind, family, birth, society
and culture, politics, myth and religion, and they also contain ideas on the
course and purpose of life. But all of these domains of meaning are usually
used to tell the same kind of story in which characters are depicted as
growing into something or as breaking free from some kind of bondage. What
the characters achieve through these experiences is maturity, authenticity,
the ability to experience the richness and importance of life, fairness, or
some other desired goal.
An example is the movie Logan’s Run, which is about a future humanity trapped
by a computer in an enclosed city. Inside, the inhabitants experience a life of endless
sensual delights. They believe they are in a paradise, but they are really a prison in
which they are infantilized and their lives are controlled. In the end, humanity escapes
and creates a new civilization based on work and responsibility. As I discuss in a long
essay on Logan’s Run, the movie simultaneously offers disguised depictions of a mind
being freed from neurosis; of a baby being born; of children growing to adulthood and
leaving home; of rebels overthrowing a dictatorship; of humanity escaping from an
underworld back to the surface of the earth; of Pagan Rome becoming Christian; of Adam and
Eve leaving the garden; and of contemporary society going through a transformation toward
a more authentic culture. The movie tells many different stories at the same time, but all
of them are about the growth of the individual and society to a new level of existence.
Eventually, after we've analyzed a great many stories like this, we can create a
map of the domains of meaning that are part of popular culture. We will discover that all
the stories of popular culture -- in movies, TV, news, political speeches, advertisements,
and so on -- are based on the same set of ideas. All include the same themes that center
around our desire to evolve into whole selves and good societies, in the face of fears and
desires, and obstacles that block our path. At that point, we will have achieved a kind of
psychoanalysis of culture, as a disguised and undisguised expression of what is on our
minds. Culture and our selves will then become more transparent.
What we discover after we have done this kind of analysis is that works of popular
fiction and nonfiction allow us to vicariously experience the kind of selves and societies
we know should exist. Most notably, they offer us happy endings that are the sigh of the
oppressed creature, giving us a moment -- but only a moment -- to experience the life and
society we desire. But the experience is only temporary and only via the invented world of
the story.
Nevertheless, through the magic of empathy and identification, these same stories
do at least temporarily transform us, giving us a vision of other ways of being and making
us more open and receptive to their ideas. As we begin to recognize that this is what they
are doing, we begin to face a task. If what is on our minds is a desire to lead a fuller
and more authentic life and to do so in a good society, than clearly this is an essential
element of what our lives are about. Works of fiction aren't only efforts to experience
this vicariously; they are also "symbolic" models and guides for how we might
approach our own lives. They are a "game plan" for life and social action, which
we create in disguised form, and perceive largely outside of awareness.
Our task then is to take what we experience vicariously and in fantasy, through
fiction, and find ways to make it actual. We then go from being audiences who experience
the story, to being critics who understand the story, to being people who act on what we
know. The stories of fiction and nonfiction thus contain within them the potential to be
catalysts for human freedom. In the end, they tell us that we face a choice: we can
endlessly pretend to change the world and ourselves in our stories, or we can genuinely
change the world and ourselves. If we choose the latter path, we will then have new
stories to tell and to learn from, and, although it may sound a little maudlin, our lives
will then become more like the happy endings of popular culture.
