Eclectica

Mostly cogent, most of the time.

To Holy Jihad via John McClane and Belle de Jour

This blog rambles a bit, but stick with it, there’s a point, honest :-)

When you construct a story you tend to go for one of two possible approaches – create an extraordinary person and explore their life, or take an ordinary person and relate something extraordinary that happens to them.

These approaches, very broadly speaking, reflect the difference between telly and film.

A film is different from a TV series because every film is the story of the most remarkable thing that ever happened to the central character, whereas a TV series is an ongoing narrative about their lives.

That’s why the heroes of good films tend to be everymen having a bad day – John McClane – whereas the heroes of good telly shows tend to be remarkable people trying to have a normal one – Buffy.

(Aside: John McClane had a really, really bad day at Nakatomi Plaza, but Die Hard was such a good film because the day was so remarkable for a man who was, day in day out, a bog standard New York beat cop. Once that kind of shit started happening to McClane every other week the films, although still good, became inessential somehow, and the character inevitably morphed from an everyman hero to a superhero. And since it was his everyman status that made us root for him so much in the first film, we are less engaged in subsequent installments because we know he can handle this kind of thing. This is why Die Hard 4.0 worked so much better than 2 and 3, because although his comfort zone had changed from street policing to gangs of armed robbers/terrorists it replicated the first film by taking the character out of his comfort zone by presenting him with a new enemy he really didn’t know how to deal with and thus got the audience to invest in him all over again.)

Right. I started this blog intending to talk about the outing of Belle de Jour and have ended up discussing Die Hard. That’s everything you need to know about the inside of my head right there.

What point was I aiming at…? Oh yeah.

That’s what writers do – either try to fit characters into stories or to generate stories from characters. But it’s not just writers – everybody does it. People like to pigeonhole other people, assess them, label them, file them, fit them into some kind of narrative that fits with their world view.

Newspapers and 24 hour rolling news do the same thing writ large – they observe society and try to pick out trends and themes to explain things. But then once they’ve done this it becomes inevitable that they will try to make individual stories fit in with the themes they have identified. It makes them feel secure, to contextualise people according to a percieved societal trend.

So when an individual comes along whose real, genuine, totally valid life experience doesn’t fit the theme or trend that the media is trying to present, they get angry. How dare this person, they opine, dare to be a real individual, to have an experience that challenges our lazy preconceptions; how dare they screw with our carefully constructed narrative and remind the world that everybody’s experience is different and that we are individuals with wildly differing viewpoints?

Which roundabout rambling brings us to Dr Brooke Magnanti.

Belle de Jour has outed herself in order to get the drop on the muckracking bastards at the Daily Mail, and the fact of her existence has put social commentators into a great frothing tizzy, not because of who or what she is, but because of who or what she’s NOT. She’s not:

• guilty or ashamed


• bitter and man-hating


• a victim of child abuse


• mentally ill


• the product of a broken home


• a drug addict


• a fictional literary conceit


• Toby Young

Instead she’s everything anyone reading her books would have expected her to be – intelligent, articulate, funny and seemingly well-balanced, or at least as well balanced as any of us ever are. Plus, bonus, she’s not bad looking.

In fact not only is she all those things, but she’s clearly far more intelligent than many of the commentators who pour such scorn on her – for God’s sake, she’s a research scientist investigating the causes of cancer in children! As far as the Daily Mail is concerned that should make her practically a living saint.

But the cognitive dissonance this has caused in the commentators who construct the social narrative that runs almost entirely on outrage and approbation, is simultaneously hilarious and pathetic. They just can’t make it compute – ex-prostitute = enemy of social cohesion and object of pity; current research scientist helping kids = top of the list for the Daily Mail’s humanitarian of the year award

I can almost see Bell Mooney clutching her head and screaming ‘I can’t stand the confusion in my mind!’

Mooney’s byline today reads ‘How can such a clever woman be so stupidly naive about this sleazy world?’ But Bell, don’t you see that the answer’s in the question? The world isn’t ‘sleazy’, it’s ‘complicated’. If you really think you can sum up the state of the world in one word then you have no insight, wisdom or life experience to bring to the table. I don’t argue with the facts Bell quotes, only with the assertion that they paint the whole picture, encompassing every possible, valid life experience.

(Aside: I try not to deconstruct the thinly veiled idiocy of the Daily Mail on this blog, coz it’d take up all my time, but here’s a quick example of what they do, from today’s coverage:

The Daily Mail: ”[Her father] believes that letting her meet some of the prostitutes when she was in her twenties may have made her think that women who sell sex can have a ‘human face’.”

Translation: “Poor, silly Brooke, thinking that prostitutes have human faces. Deluded girl. They don’t have a human face, they can’t have a human face because they’re not really human, are they?”)

The quote from Dr Magnanti that really jumped out at me from her interview was: “There’s no such thing as being 100% correct, but thinking sceptically and being switched on helps, as does keeping your eyes and ears open.” I know I’m taking that quote out of context, but that’s a manifesto for life I can respect.

“The thing is that people are complex,” she went on. “People lead complicated lives… You can’t say I’m not real, and that my experience isn’t real, because here I am.” She is, she says, “entitled to speak about it, or write about it, as I lived it”.

So what is Belle de Jour – an ordinary person who had an extraordinary experience; or an extraordinary person trying to live a normal life? Your guess is as good as mine – I’ve not met her, and even if I had I would never be so presumptious as to draw that kind of conclusion.

But the narrative she’s constructed out of her life – and make no mistake it is, in smaller or larger part, constructed and, crucially, WELL constructed, with a writer’s eye for detail, a sympathy for human foibles and a lively wit – is still far more valid than the narrative that social commentators seem determined to try and fit her into because it is the story of an individual, not a social trend made flesh. And that will always make some people uncomfortable, because complexity is messy, it requires patience, tolerance, understanding, an open mind, a willingness to listen without judgement or preconception and a fundamental respect for the valid experience of another human being.

And there’s not a single person working for the Daily Mail who evinces a single one of those qualities.

So hurrah for Dr Brooke Magnanti – complex, problematic, hard to pigeponhole and a timely reminder that when you start to see people as merely representative of one or another profession/trend/religion/race/sex/creed/orientation then you are missing the point of… well, of everything, really.

On which note, go read this article by Johann Hari in which he talks to ex-jihadists who’ve turned away from fundamentalism and violence and are reassessing their faith and their role in the world. It’s a long piece but it’s worth the effort.

In fact, I’d say it’s the single best piece of journalism I’ve read all year, and it should be required reading for anyone who wants to be a writer or journalist.

The point that sings through is that each of these men saw the light of liberalism when they finally realised that the people they wished to destroy were not a homogenous mass, but a collection of complicated individuals. A key section, which really got to me:
——-

“Usman… finally stopped wanting to be a suicide bomber because of the kindness of an old white man.

Usman’s mother had moved in next door to an elderly man called Tony, who was known in the neighbourhood as a spiteful, nasty grump. One day, Usman was teaching his little brother to box in the garden when he noticed the old man watching him from across the fence. “I used to box when I was in the Navy,” he said. He started to give them tips and before long, he was building a boxing ring in their shed.

Tony died not long before 9/11, and Usman was sent to help clear out his belongings. In Tony’s closet, he found a present wrapped and ready for his little brother’s birthday: a pair of boxing gloves. “And I thought – that is humanity right there. That’s an aspect of the divine that’s in every human being. How can I want to kill people like him? How can I call him kaffir?”
———-

As unlikely as it may seem, the ex-extremist and the ex-prostitute have far more in common with each other, I would argue, than either of them have with Bell Mooney and her ilk, and I know which I’d rather have round my dinner table.

In that moment Usman understood the central fact of a journalist’s job, the central fact that eludes so many journalists these days: “There’s no such thing as being 100% correct, but thinking sceptically and being switched on helps, as does keeping your eyes and ears open.”

Amen to that.