Can we trust stories, can we? The Responsibility of Storytellers
Psychologist Steven Frenda published a disturbing study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2012. Frenda and his team were able to prove in an experiment with more than 5,000 participants that people are much more likely to believe and remember apparently false news if it corresponds to their own ideas and preconceived opinions. Steven showed the participants of his test a series of stories, some true and some that were clearly made up. For example, that Barack Obama shook hands with the Iranian president or that George W. Bush took a leisurely vacation with a prominent baseball professional during Hurricane Katrina. Conservatives were more likely to believe the Obama story, Democrats remembered the Bush story more easily. Participants from both camps even claimed that they had seen the made-up stories on official news. The most effective stories were those that had pictures attached to them.
We are so gullible
With this in mind, a critical look at a film genre that has received a creative boost in recent years — namely semi-documentaries and so-called biopics — is permitted.
Susan Vahabzadeh draws attention to the dangers of this kind of narrative in her film review about “Vice — the Second Man” (2018), a film biography by director and screenwriter Adam McKay about American Vice President Dick Cheney. Her article is aptly titled “Risky trade in perceived truths”, because all too easily we allow this kind of story to influence our opinion of people. Film biographies usually follow the historical course of the story and in parts depict reality. But to make the story conclusive, fictional gaps are closed that are not documented. This is where the problem begins: the audience cannot distinguish where truth ends and fiction begins.
Do we as viewers often judge a character — and real person — on the basis of a mixture of reality and fictionality that cakes up to an inscrutable, felt truth that we can no longer banish from our minds.
What do we know about Mata Hari?
Susan Vahabzadeh is quite gracious of the cinema when it comes to responsibility in this matter: “Whenever the cinema takes reality as its model, and it does indeed often, someone will point out that the depiction is not accurate. (…) To imagine missing parts for a portrait is perfectly normal — every feature film based on true events must do this, because every second of a life can never be clearly proven. (…) Anyone who watches Greta Garbo in “Mata Hari” from 1931 and then thinks that he now knows everything about the spy whose life this story roughly tells is to blame himself. `Vice’ is not a documentary film,” says Vahabzadeh.
But there remains a bland aftertaste. And it has something to do with the times we live in now. Vahabzadeh continues: “And yet cinema lovers no longer feel as comfortable with inaccurate representations as they used to. (…) There used to be other debates about cinema, about the effects of stories on people. They flared up particularly violently around the turn of the millennium, when a series of murders occurred that seemed to be inspired by films, or where the perpetrators cited a film as a model. There was a “Natural Born Killers” couple, a “Scream” imitator, one who stabbed someone and blamed it on “American Psycho” as if art was responsible for his actions. “
Today, however, it is no longer about these great deeds. It is about much smaller inaccuracies that make us nervous.
Many little lies
The debates about fake news and deep fake have not left the cinema and every storyteller — whether in the entertainment sector, journalism, marketing or corporate communications — unaffected. Because Fake News works in a very special way. In a perfidious way.
According to Katarina Bader, Professor of Online Journalism at the Stuttgart Media University, we are paying too much attention to the wrong aspects. The fight against fake news is not about the obvious lies and irrationalities. Fake news does not work on its own, but unfolds its fatal power through many small lies that cement a story.
To understand why blatant false reports can influence public opinion so much, it is not enough to analyse these obvious lies and refute them with fact-checks. The assumption that an unsuspecting citizen sees a fictitious story on Facebook, mistakenly believes it, unsuspectingly shares it, and that this changes public opinion is simply wrong. This scenario misses the point.
The problem is not so much the big lies. It’s the “many little lies that slowly shift the perception of reality. (…) Many small lies establish a narrative that can be activated immediately (…) if something happens that confirms this narrative,” says Bader.
Counter-narrative — urgently sought
Bader sees it as the task of science to classify and better understand these narratives which are believed and shared worldwide. She sees it as a task for all citizens to invalidate these narratives. However, it is not enough to counter this with facts and figures alone. Bauer does not see this as a goal-oriented approach. Instead — according to the media scientist — a credible and effective counter-narrative must be established.
Bernhard Pörksen, Professor of Media Science at the University of Tübingen, cites Ursula von der Leyen as an example and role model of how this can be done. Yes, you heard right. Because #Flinten-Uschi and #Zensursula has managed, with great storytelling, to create a counter-narrative to the sexist minefield from which these hashtags originate and, moreover, to win over the EU Parliament.
In her candidature speech for the EU Commission Presidency, von der Leyen succeeded in telling her own life — in three languages — as a perfectly logical introduction to this very office: Her love of Europe, she said, was inherited from her father, the Prime Minister of Lower Saxony, who throughout his life supported the vision of Europe. As a mother of seven children, the future of Europe is particularly dear to her heart and it is probably foreseeable that Ursula von der Leyen was born in Brussels.
The right story — and the choice of the right narrative makes the difference, because, according to media scientist Bernhard Pörksen, “(stories) are myths of everyday life, medium of our intellectual existence, forms of ordering reality. They create meaning, transforming the fragments of a life into conclusive causally linked sequences of events that are told to each other over and over again and at some point are believed with absolute certainty. Suddenly everything is clear …
Time of the narrators
But according to Pörksen, there is also a danger in the power of the narrative, and here the media scientist and film critic Susanne Vahabzadeh reach out their hands: “In times of general uncertainty and the hectic search for meaning in the information flurry of the present, it is the great hour of the instrumental narrator, to whom the world appears as will and imagination. This world has to submit to the perfect plot, which is established long before one comes into contact with reality.”
So caution is advised.
“Is the solution,” so Pörksen, “to do without stories, as the purists of objectivity demand? Certainly not. Banning the story as a tool for explaining the world is about as realistic as asking people to breathe less to save oxygen. We humans are, in a word from the literary scholar Jonathan Gottschall, the storytelling animal — the living being that tells stories. (…) Stories are of course also authentic documents of lived morality and concrete utopia. Personal new beginnings, happy therapies, transformation in the private sphere and revolutions in society (…).
So Professor Bernhard Pörksen, Susan Vahabzadeh, Katarina Bader and many others — they all demand the almost impossible from us. From us the audience and us the storytellers:
It is “necessary to sensitize for the omnipresent abuse of human fascination. For one thing,” says Pörksen, “is certain: you cannot — by telling a story — not construct it. But when does the unavoidable construction finally become a manipulative staging, the subjectively prepared scene and the atmospheric detail the supposed proof of the prejudice? When does the pull of the story — perhaps unconsciously at first, not even with malicious intent — become a deception, first a self-deception and then an audience deception? This is the key question on the way to new openness and genuine curiosity. “
Be vigilant
Ups, how difficult it is. And yet how important. We must not indulge in uncritical storytelling. Not unconditional immersion and submerge ourselves in immersion and fiction. We must not indulge uncritically in escapism. Rather, we must remain vigilant and deal responsibly with the power of history — at least where storytellingis in any way related to reality. Effortful and infinitely important.
(Read this article in German here — and more about Petra Sammer)
