Stories we love but don’t need
Stories enslave us. From our dreams to Shortland Street, from elections to religion, we are in thrall to stories. In essence they are simple: they have beginnings, middles and ends. And they grip like pythons. Along with perhaps a billion people I watched Croatia beat Russia at the World Cup. I am neither Croatian nor Russian and I played my last game of football 43 years ago and I was never much good anyway, yet I was transfixed. The game took the form of a story and I wanted to know how it ended.
After extra time the score was 2-2. In the old days this would have led to a replay. But a replay was never satisfactory because the crowd had come for a story with an ending and they felt thwarted. Hence the penalty shootout. It isn’t much of a test of football but it does make a fine finale.
Every world cup is the same. The names change but the stories don’t. They are just waiting for fresh flesh to slot into them. Take Mario Fernandes, the improbably named Russian. He scored the equalising goal in extra time and leapt the hoardings in joy uncontainable. Ten minutes later he booted a penalty wide of the goal. ‘‘From hero to zero,’’ said the commentator. It’s a script as old as Sophocles.
As the shootout neared its climax the commentator indulged in some warp-factor hyperbole. ‘‘This could be the penalty that breaks Russian hearts,’’ he declared. And then, ‘‘the whole of Russia dissolves into tears’’.
But no hearts were broken, and any tears were part of the pleasure. People felt the cathartic release of grief, without any actual loss. For sport only simulates real life. There’s no death in a sudden-death playoff. There are no bullets in a shootout. The emotions aroused are pleasantly close to the real thing but they aren’t the real thing.
The real thing is readily available. As I write this, the story of the Thai boys trapped in a cave is approaching climax. And the world is as gripped as it is by the football because the story plugs into such fundamental fears: the vulnerability of children, the ubiquity of danger, the worst nightmare of any parent, the claustrophobic horror of the caves, the threat of drowning, of asphyxiation. The whole incomplete tale is fraught with primal emotion.
So every news network has seized on it. They have sent reporters and truckloads of equipment to the cave entrance. But not to help extract the boys. They are there only to bring the story from there to us, though there is nothing we can do and there is nothing we can learn.
Yes, of course we are on the side of the boys – and by yesterday eight had been successfully brought out. May all the rest follow – but our being on their side serves no purpose other than to indulge our emotions. We are no more nor less than voyeurs, well-meaning ones perhaps, but still voyeurs, getting a vicarious thrill from their story, which we did not need to know.
As I have said before, pretty well all the news you do need to know will come to find you without the help of the media. The rest is titillation.
And when the Thai boys’ story is resolved, the reporters will move on to wherever there is next a story to feed our insatiable addiction. The Japanese floods look promising. And then there’ll be some All Black tests.