Lightsabers and Light Beer

If you will recall, in the classic faith-based film Return of the Jedi, the Rebel Alliance must destroy a replacement Death Star currently under construction. But before the squadron of X-wing pilots can fly into the heart of the structure to nuke it, the scrappy group of Rebel fighters on Endor must first destroy the force generator currently creating the force field that surrounds and protects the Death Star. Got all that?

When it comes to messages, we have our own force fields. The X-wing fighters of broadcast commercials and online ads come barreling toward us, but we see them coming from a parsec away and – kaBOOM – they collide against our lack of attention and interest. Like a modern hunting instinct, we sense when someone wants to sell us something and the message never gets through the door.

Unless.

Unless that force field has been deactivated. Then and only then can these messages freely fly through the byzantine mazes of our hearts and minds.

But what powerful force can short circuit our powerful and well-developed shields? Yeah, you know the answer: story.

While traditional advertising pushes, story pulls. Advertising shouts and waves; story woos and seduces.

Think about it: You likely have a laundry list of favorite commercials you’ve mentally curated through the years. And I’ll bet you there’s a common thread that connects each of them. They either make you laugh or cry or think. They each somehow surprise and delight. All while making you just slightly more inclined to buy this laundry detergent or that mid-sized sedan or that brand of light beer.

Story – very often using humor – has a way of deactivating our force fields. The Bard knew this.

In Hamlet, the titular Danish prince suspects his uncle Claudius murdered his father. So, to winnow out the truth, Hamlet stages a play with a scene involving a similar regicide. With Claudius in attendance, Hamlet plans to gauge his uncle’s reaction to the scene, using that unguarded emotional moment to determine the truth. “The Play’s the Thing, wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.” A lyrical way of stating that story has the power to disarm.

“But wait,” you say. “Not all books or TV shows or web series or movies or other entertainment have a message.”

It’s true that each story you encounter might not have an agenda-driven point, but they all most certainly have a point of view, an inescapable worldview naturally baked in by the story’s creator. It’s not necessarily a sinister or paranoid notion; it’s simply the nature of storytelling.

I’ve tried to think of a single exception to this, a work that carries zero point of view or message and here’s the best I can come up with…

Consider the Dadaists.

Dadaism was a broad artistic movement born shortly after the start of WWI. The common through-line through all forms was simply ‘meaninglessness’; an upside-down urinal submitted as a sculpture (Fountain, Marcel Duchamp, 1917). A play that deconstructs the concept of ‘play’ as characters named for body parts recite non-sequiturs (The Gas Heart, Tristan Tzara, 1921).

As the trench warfare of WWI shocked the world with new developments like poison gas, mobile tanks, and flamethrowers, Dadaists shocked audiences with pure and unadulterated absurdity. In his “Manifesto of the Dada Movement” (1920), French poet Louis Aragon called for “an end at last to all this stupidity, nothing left, nothing at all, nothing, nothing.” The Dadaist’s didn’t just celebrate nihilism, they fought their own active hot war on art, culture, and meaning itself.

So, circling back, did these works of art – the sculptures or the paintings or the plays – have any meaning, in and of themselves? No.

And yet…

And yet the works of the Dadaists clearly did carry a meaning and purpose. Like a teenager who gets dumped and now can’t stop talking about how they hate their ex (but clearly don’t), these artists once had something beautiful they loved and valued. Yet in the time it took to assassinate an archduke and his wife, it was gone forever. For all the strident posturing, their art was actually born from hurt, not hate.

Stories are unavoidably embedded with a purpose (even the Dadaist ones).

And when they work, stories have the power to disarm us in regard to that purpose.

The play is (still) the thing.