A few weeks ago I attended a forum on filmmaking where the only speaker worth noting, screenwriter Barbara Nicolosi, expounded on the importance of story. The gist of her excellent talk, as I understood it (and I’m still processing), was that great stories help us make sense of our lives, and on occasion live them better.
One inevitability of our time that I often struggle to make sense of is violence.
Here’s a snapshot of the BBC’s Middle East front page this morning:
Do you see it? “Bomb Attack Near Iraqi Shia Shrine” and to the right of that, “Villagers Hurt in West Bank Clash”. Violence is so much a part of our daily lives, especially for me as a journalist, that I sometimes find myself reading past it in the headlines. These days we can escape its scourge with the click of a mouse, and thankfully there’s plenty of good news just a website away. But the violence doesn’t stop, and I think it stays with us regardless of whether we stop to register it, haunting us because we don’t understand.
Here is an example of where story becomes important. Over the past few months I have been watching excellent TV programs in my ongoing study of the art of storytelling, screenwriting in particular. One of them is Aaron Sorkin’s seminal political drama The West Wing, which ran on NBC from 1999-2006. The show won 2 Golden Globes and 26 Emmy awards, a tie for the most Emmys ever won by a TV series (with the program Hill Street Blues, a show penned by David Milch which is next on my must-see list).
I’m up to season 5, and last night I watched the episode titled “The Dogs of War” which gave me occasion to reexamine the concept of violence as a cyclical exercise.
Pictured: (l-r) John Spencer as Leo McGarry, Martin Sheen as Josiah Bartlet, and John Goodman as Glenallen Walken (NBC, Warner Bros. Photo)
At this moment in the show, President Bartlet has invoked the 25th Amendment to relinquish his presidential powers because his daughter is missing and, in effect, he can’t think straight. She’s feared to have been kidnapped by terrorists from the fictional Middle Eastern country of Qumar in retaliation for the administration’s newly disclosed assassination of suspected terrorist Abdul Shareef, a member of the Qumari royal family. (After 9/11 the show set Qumar at the center of its terrorism subplots.)
The FBI doesn’t know who kidnapped the President’s daughter, but as the hours pass the decisionmakers’ composure weakens, and military options are discussed. Bartlet’s temporary replacement, Congressman Glennallen Walken, orders the bombing of several Qumari terrorist training camps, during which six American soldiers are killed.
I can’t seem to find a clip of the scene I’m looking for on YouTube, so the script will have to suffice:
CUT TO: INT. – RESIDENCE – HALLWAY – DAY
Leo is walking down the hallway toward the residence. He walk through the doors, past Charlie, and into the next room.
BARTLET
We started this, Leo.
LEO
This isn’t about Shareef.
BARTLET
You’re right; it’s not. It’s about our allowing situations in these countries to develop in the first place.
LEO
I’m not gonna let you do this.
BARTLET
We choose the order and certainty of petty despots over the uncertainty and chaos of developing democracies.
LEO
Shareef ordered the assassination of women and children. He wasn’t a nationalist or a fledgling Democrat. He was a cold-blooded murderer.
BARTLET
Six more American boys are dead.
LEO
And that doesn’t make you angry?
BARTLET
[yelling] Of course that makes me angry! [pause] “The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral. Returning violence with violence only multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.”
LEO
Dr. King.
BARTLET
I’m part of that darkness now, Leo. When did that happen?
LEO
Dr. King wasn’t wrong. He just didn’t have your job.
FADE OUT.
END ACT TWO
It’s not that I didn’t know before I saw this scene that violence begets violence; rather, I understood from a new perspective some of the reasons why this spiral starts in the first place. I can think only that this was story doing its thing to help me process something that, thankfully, I have rarely experienced first-hand.
Granted, this is TV drama, but for 7 years it brought us into the White House Situation Room or the Oval Office to witness a portrayal, made realistic at great pains, of our leaders’ decision-making process, which results in the kinds of headlines we see daily. The show hired former high level White House staffers from both parties as consultants, including Marlin Fitzwater (Reagan, Bush) and Dee Dee Myers (Clinton).
In a 2006 news article, Fitzwater said, “It was very realistic, and that’s why people liked it. They wanted to see good government. They appreciated people who were trying to do the right thing for the right reasons. That was common to both parties.”
It’s difficult to articulate what came together for me, watching this episode, but it happens a lot with The West Wing. The show will end and I’ll sit back in awe as I find myself back in my own comparatively boring reality, stirred to thought, and often debate, by what I’ve just seen. Good story adds to our perspective in small, but important ways, giving us something we can use in our own lives later.
Have you had a similar experience after taking in a good story? If so, please leave a comment.
In the meantime, here’s the entirety of the Dr. King passage President Bartlet quotes from:
The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral,
begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy.
Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it.
Through violence you may murder the liar,
but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth.
Through violence you may murder the hater,
but you do not murder hate.
In fact, violence merely increases hate.
So it goes.
Returning violence for violence multiplies violence,
adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness:
only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
