Fiction as Warfare

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I have been re-reading, as I do almost every year, Grant Morrison's "The Invisibles". And this time around, it has planted the idea of fiction-as-warfare in my head.

“Don't wait for it," I said. "Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. Create. And then the love will come to you, then it comes to you. It was only when I wrote my first book that the world I wanted to live in opened to me.”
Anais Nin

That Anais Nin quote is a good starting point. It speaks of the pleasure of losing yourself in the work, in the world you're building and the characters you're creating. Anyone who writes fiction, for any medium, will be familiar with this feeling. It doesn't always happen, but it happens enough to keep us going back.

And as readers and viewers and listeners, we all know the comfort of escaping into the fictional world someone else has created.

Despite what some of the social media scolds say, there is nothing wrong with escapism. Don't take my word for it; here's Ursula Le Guin quoting Tolkein...

Yes, he said, fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the knownothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.

And Tolkein himself:

Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.

That last point is especially strong; redirecting your thinking away from that which you cannot control is not the same as surrendering.

One of the things I hear more and more in movie and TV meetings at the moment is "Right now, people want escapism." We'll have to ignore the persistent chronological challenge that execs experience when they talk about what people want "right now", without acknowledging that whatever project they are developing is not coming out "right now" but in 2-5 years time. The truth is that people always want escapism, that's what fiction is. What I think they mean is that people want fantastical stories that are upbeat and optimistic. Again, always true to an extent, but not a necessary component of escapism either right now or ever. I can escape into Orwell's 1984 very successfully. The story and characters will draw me in and my own life and problems will melt away for as long as I'm reading and thinking about it. It doesn't need to be warm and fuzzy, it just has to be not-real.

In fact, Orwell's work provides more than an interesting counterpoint to the idea that escapism requires puppies and rainbows. I think we, as creators, can provide more than escape.

In creating our worlds, we provide a blueprint for how the real world can be. When we put a character into our story world and we give them an objective, when we throw some obstacles into their path, we are giving that character the opportunity and the obligation to make moral choices.

Whether the character is seeking love, or money, or justice, or revenge, the decisions they make on their journey are going to be defined by who they are, by the rules of the world, and by the genre of the story they are in. But the sum of those choices, and the exploration of the theme of the story, presents a moral viewpoint.

When the moral choices the character makes align with the cultural mainstream, we have ourselves a hero, however dubious that morality may objectively be. John Wick goes on a killing spree when some Russian mobsters kill his dog. We understand that this is not an acceptable course of action in the real world but, because most of us like a puppy and abhor cruelty, in the world of the story Wick's actions are justified and carry moral weight. And beneath the surface, the movie reaffirms our notion that injustice and cruelty should be punished and bullies must not go unanswered.

John Wick, the movie, correctly takes the temperature of mainstream morality and is tailored to align perfectly with it. It preaches to the choir, which is not a criticism because it is not pretending otherwise. (Plenty of things that are preaching to their own particular choir do pretend otherwise, claiming to be "provocative", when they are, in fact, firing blanks - if your intended audience already thinks what you're encouraging them to think, your story is not as edgy as you might want to believe).

Mainstream cultural thinking is a behemoth that is not easily thrown off track. But there is a chicken/egg aspect to it. Do successful books and movies reflect our thinking back at us, or do we think what we think because of our cultural inputs? Is the notion of what it is to be American purely a product of historical fact and political infrastructure, or were Mark Twain, Dr Seuss and John Wayne not also factors? Would the cultural shift around the HIV epidemic have happened in the same way absent the influence of the movie "Philadelphia"?

Are we even capable of defining a morality without fiction? (Obviously those persuaded that all religious texts are a form of fiction have a much easier time arguing this). I would imagine that, to most Development Hell subscribers, the actions of the Trump Administration; the wanton destruction of the natural environment, the racism, misogyny and transphobia etc (this is me preaching to the choir) are morally repugnant. But if everyone needs a cultural model to define their worldview, where might we find theirs? Well, we can look for starters at Gordon Gecko and the works of Ayn Rand. Even if these people haven't read "The Fountainhead", it's become a landmark in the cultural landscape they inhabit.

Their cultural landscape is not our cultural landscape, and that's OK, because these people are a minority. The problem of America, the problem of any democracy, is not its leaders, it is the electorate who voted them in. The trust that America has lost in the world is not trust in its government, but trust in its people; how can you do business with a country that might run up the curtains and elect an idiot at any moment?

And here, after a brief diversion, we find ourselves back on the path. Because what is traditionally to blame for an electorate getting it wrong (and we'll let America off the hook for now, because every democracy is in some kind of crisis at the moment), is the quality of the information they receive. We blame news media, which is either too biased or insufficiently biased, we blame the rise of poor quality information disseminated via social media. And those things are certainly culpable; the manipulation of information for profit (it is ALWAYS for profit - if there was money in being left-wing, Fox News's logo would be a silhouette of Karl Marx) has created a hellscape. And education, or the lack thereof, is equally to blame.

We, as fiction creators, can't do very much about any of that in the short term. But we are far from helpless. The media's attitude has always been "Where are my people going, that I may lead them?" They aren't changing minds, they are in the business of reinforcing cultural beliefs. And those cultural beliefs are, at least in large part, born of fiction.

As children, we watch shows and are read stories. Then we (hopefully) learn to read and we start absorbing culture of our own choosing. The stuff we read and watch and listen to shapes who we are, both as individuals and within the group. A story is a spell. It wraps up important information and plants it, like a seed, in the brain. Our parents and grand-parents had stories of cowboys and Indians, for example, of segregation; stereotypes reinforced because publishers and movie studios are no more in the business of changing minds than the news media is. But slowly, via film noir challenging the Hayes Code in the 40s and 50s, and then through more mainstream movies in the 60s and 70s, some subtle shifts started to occur, prompted by individual storytellers who were smart enough to smuggle their messages into their work, rather than spotlight them. They weren't preaching to the choir, they were hiding the medicine inside something delicious.

If you make a movie about a trans person, you are making a movie about trans people, and your audience is likely going to be made up of sympathetic people who agree with your viewpoint. Everyone feels good about being right and no minds are changed. If you make a movie about a doctor or a soldier or a secret agent or a detective who just happens to be trans, i.e. if you create a storyworld where being trans is not the defining trait of your hero, you have a chance at broadening your audience and persuading hitherto unsympathetic minds to reconsider their positions.

To this exact point, and recalling the inspiration for this piece, I first read The Invisibles when it was released in the 90s. Having grown up in the heart of Tory-Essex countryside, and coming from a culture where the word "gay" was a grave insult, I was suddenly confronted with a team of heroes battling the establishment, and one of those heroes was a trans woman. I bounced off that whole idea pretty hard, initially. But the story was so good that I couldn't put it down. And the story wasn't ABOUT this character being trans, she just happened to be. And so I kept buying the comic and, within the course of a few issues, my own issues started to evaporate. The comic altered my thinking because it wasn't directly challenging me; the problem I had was my problem and the comic had bigger things on its mind - it had a story to tell and I had better get on board if I wanted to see where it went. I quickly moved beyond just accepting the character into actively liking her, and I maintain that this (lasting) change in perspective came about because it was being subtly manipulated, not battered by brute force.

As Anais Nin seemed to be getting at in the quote at the top, our job is to build the world, not as it is, but as we want it to be. And we must present that world to an audience without saying "See, isn't this better?" but rather just let them absorb it and come to that conclusion for themselves, or at least allow themselves to be changed, incrementally, by the experience.

None of which is a radical argument for a change in the nature of fiction; far from it. But in a world where the notion of diversity is taking a battering, our stories need to present the world in all its diversity. We don't need to overtly celebrate it, we simply need to make it an indelible fact; "This is how it is, move along, find something else to get your knickers in a twist about."

Imagine if, instead of John Wick's puppy being kicked to death by Russian mobsters, it had been murdered by Christian Nationalists... How might that have affected the mainstream acceptance of American fascism? Same movie, same hero, same level of entertainment (and no more an examination of the tenets of white nationalism than the real thing was a documentary on Russian organised crime), but a different villain identity.

And if you don't believe that would have had any effect on the culture, then instead imagine if the bad guys had all been black, or gay - might you have objected then? Might you have argued that this would have a detrimental outcome for those groups?

The media, and the quality of information generally, might be in the spotlight right now, but I argue that fiction is far more powerful and its effects last a lot longer.

I think that's one of the reasons why creators are under attack from those pushing AI. Our power is dangerous, it needs to be seized, or at least neutralised. Fiction makers, like musicians, are witches and shaman. When someone reads our books, or watches or listens to our movies or shows, we put them in a trance. Their lives melt away and they enter the world of our story. The spells we weave within those worlds have direct access to the subconscious; we can change hearts and minds and we operate on a level far deeper than words and slogans - we're working with feelings and instincts. The media, big business, the church achieve nothing compared to what we have been doing ever since the first people sat around a campfire and asked "What happened next?" We are all members of The Invisibles, waging an unseen war against the forces of control.

But this is a slow process. You're putting a little bit of spin on the ball each time. Sometimes, it's really tempting to give the ball a massive whack. But those who do that are only applauded by like-minded people who cheered the swing, but didn't notice that it missed the ball entirely.

Fiction is warfare. But it's a cold war. The battle is for ideas, the goal is to change minds. Enlist now.