* Idiots who think movies are real exist, and they are everywhere.
I think neither you nor OP give enough credit to the sway stories actually have over our lives, wherever they happen to originate. There’s this idea in social psychology of scripting (or schema) which is one’s working knowledge about the sequence of events in a specific situation. Namely, it recognizes that in order to save brain power, a vast number of social interactions are actually just playing out of some type of mutually understood scripted interaction, very much like a movie.
This can be small and external, like walking into a restaurant and waiting at the little booth to be noticed before answering the expected question of group size, upon which you’re led to a table. This is how every restaurant works in most if not all countries around the world every time you go. You can preempt it. The only way to impede it is to say or do something nonsensical that doesn’t follow what all actors are supposed to be doing, whereupon the waiter is going to flounder and call their manager for help.
Those with shit parents will ask strangers, “How do I buy a car? What do I do in an interview? How do I ask someone out or make a phone call?” Those are all socially imposed acting roles that they were never taught. Everyone expects a marriage proposal to be on one knee, but not a lot of them were around to see their parents do it. They only expect or engage in it because they saw it repeatedly in the media.
Importantly here, it can be huge and internalized: Life scripts are the idea that consciously or no, people through observation and enforcement generally have some sort of ingrained idea about how their life is supposed to go even before they’ve lived it, even if no one else is outwardly expecting that from them. It can be a good path (encouraging a smart, helpful kid and feeding them idealistic works of empathy and sacrifice has steered them into medicine), but it doesn’t have to be. It just has to exist as a narrative framework for someone in need of a framework.
• e.g., My go-to story as a kid was The Little Matchgirl, the tale of a miserable, unloved street urchin who freezes to death in the snow but it’s actually ok because she goes to Heaven. Tuck Everlasting and Interview with the Vampire (I watched this ad nauseam) both stressed how tidy and fulfilling a normal life was and framed immortality as an inescapable whining misery.
Guess how well I’m doing and what my stance is on MAID. People latch onto things. Louis was my favorite because he just seemed so sweet and teary-eyed and melodramatic, but now I’m an adult overanalyzing it and oh god, Louis was my favorite!?? No fucking wonder all I do is sit in my wretched corner and complain, that’s all that asshole ever did either! We’re fucking both insufferable!
• A shining example from Terry Pratchett’s Reaper Man: a character recounts the loss of her husband hours before they were to be wed, stating that before grief kicked in, her first reaction was that his death was just so stupid. That it felt to her that what the universe wanted – expected – her to do was to moon around all alone in her wedding dress for the rest of her life like a loon, grieving her lost love. And so she’d decided she wasn’t going to do that.
I suspect this was a jab at Ms. Havisham of Great Expectations, who wasted her life doing exactly that. I don’t think Pratchett would know that’s what he was talking about, but what his character is describing is exactly this type of script. An understanding of the narrative and The Way Things Are Supposed To Go that runs so deep you’ll pursue any action if it seems in service to the “correct” ending that your situation would have had in a novel.
• For a funnier last example, see this greentext, wherein anon gains a steady relationship by imitating Ryan Gosling for 4 years
TL;DR, stories are a basic function of the brain trying to understand and streamline reality and they are deathly important because they tell us how to act and who to be. It doesn’t matter where those stories come from. Behavior and morality will be stolen from them anyway by whoever needs those because that is the function of a story.
Folk tales always have some sort of moral or warning at the end. Someone who wants to be Cool and Manly and In Control will probably like Clint Eastwood enough to start emulating him. Me, I latched onto the barely-functional moral idealism of The Sneetches as a kid and later to Speaker for the Dead as a teen/adult. All of those are exactly as real as each other, but only one is being labeled in this thread as laughable. If you have a problem with Clint Eastwood, you also have beef with Doctor Seuss.
If we really expected the stories we tell not to influence reality, we wouldn’t be fighting so hard for inclusion in media. And that one Steven Universe artist who drew a character skinny wouldn’t have gotten death threats
* Idiots who think movies are real exist, and they are everywhere.
I think neither you nor OP give enough credit to the sway stories actually have over our lives, wherever they happen to originate. There’s this idea in social psychology of scripting (or schema) which is one’s working knowledge about the sequence of events in a specific situation. Namely, it recognizes that in order to save brain power, a vast number of social interactions are actually just playing out of some type of mutually understood scripted interaction, very much like a movie.
This can be small and external, like walking into a restaurant and waiting at the little booth to be noticed before answering the expected question of group size, upon which you’re led to a table. This is how every restaurant works in most if not all countries around the world every time you go. You can preempt it. The only way to impede it is to say or do something nonsensical that doesn’t follow what all actors are supposed to be doing, whereupon the waiter is going to flounder and call their manager for help.
Those with shit parents will ask strangers, “How do I buy a car? What do I do in an interview? How do I ask someone out or make a phone call?” Those are all socially imposed acting roles that they were never taught. Everyone expects a marriage proposal to be on one knee, but not a lot of them were around to see their parents do it. They only expect or engage in it because they saw it repeatedly in the media.
Importantly here, it can be huge and internalized: Life scripts are the idea that consciously or no, people through observation and enforcement generally have some sort of ingrained idea about how their life is supposed to go even before they’ve lived it, even if no one else is outwardly expecting that from them. It can be a good path (encouraging a smart, helpful kid and feeding them idealistic works of empathy and sacrifice has steered them into medicine), but it doesn’t have to be. It just has to exist as a narrative framework for someone in need of a framework.
• e.g., My go-to story as a kid was The Little Matchgirl, the tale of a miserable, unloved street urchin who freezes to death in the snow but it’s actually ok because she goes to Heaven. Tuck Everlasting and Interview with the Vampire (I watched this ad nauseam) both stressed how tidy and fulfilling a normal life was and framed immortality as an inescapable whining misery.
Guess how well I’m doing and what my stance is on MAID. People latch onto things. Louis was my favorite because he just seemed so sweet and teary-eyed and melodramatic, but now I’m an adult overanalyzing it and oh god, Louis was my favorite!?? No fucking wonder all I do is sit in my wretched corner and complain, that’s all that asshole ever did either! We’re fucking both insufferable!
• A shining example from Terry Pratchett’s Reaper Man: a character recounts the loss of her husband hours before they were to be wed, stating that before grief kicked in, her first reaction was that his death was just so stupid. That it felt to her that what the universe wanted – expected – her to do was to moon around all alone in her wedding dress for the rest of her life like a loon, grieving her lost love. And so she’d decided she wasn’t going to do that.
I suspect this was a jab at Ms. Havisham of Great Expectations, who wasted her life doing exactly that. I don’t think Pratchett would know that’s what he was talking about, but what his character is describing is exactly this type of script. An understanding of the narrative and The Way Things Are Supposed To Go that runs so deep you’ll pursue any action if it seems in service to the “correct” ending that your situation would have had in a novel.
• For a funnier last example, see this greentext, wherein anon gains a steady relationship by imitating Ryan Gosling for 4 years
TL;DR, stories are a basic function of the brain trying to understand and streamline reality and they are deathly important because they tell us how to act and who to be. It doesn’t matter where those stories come from. Behavior and morality will be stolen from them anyway by whoever needs those because that is the function of a story.
Folk tales always have some sort of moral or warning at the end. Someone who wants to be Cool and Manly and In Control will probably like Clint Eastwood enough to start emulating him. Me, I latched onto the barely-functional moral idealism of The Sneetches as a kid and later to Speaker for the Dead as a teen/adult. All of those are exactly as real as each other, but only one is being labeled in this thread as laughable. If you have a problem with Clint Eastwood, you also have beef with Doctor Seuss.
If we really expected the stories we tell not to influence reality, we wouldn’t be fighting so hard for inclusion in media. And that one Steven Universe artist who drew a character skinny wouldn’t have gotten death threats
that’s the one line i can take away with me. thank you for this write-up, much appreciated 🙂