There is talk that many Vietnam films are anti-war, that the message is war in inhumane

and look what happens when you train young American men to fight and kill, they turn
their fighting and killing everywhere, they ignore their targets and desecrate the entire
country, shooting fully automatic, forgetting they were trained to aim. But actually,
Vietnam war films are all pro-war, no matter what the supposed message, what Kubrick
or Copolla intended. Mr. and Mrs. Johnson in Omaha or San Francisco or Manhattan
will watch the films and weep and decide once and for all that war is inhumane and
terrible, and they will tell their friends at church and their family this, but Corporal
Johnson at Camp Pendleton and Sergeant Johnson at Travis Air Force Base and Seaman
Johnson at Coronado Naval Station and Spec 4 Johnson at Fort Bragg and Lance
Corporal Swofford at Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Base watch the same films and
are excited by them, because the magic brutality of the films celebrates the terrible and
despicable beauty of their fighting skills. Fight, rape, war, pillage, burn. Filmic images
of death and carnage are pornography for the military man; with film you are stroking
his cock, tickling his balls with the pink feather of history, getting him ready for his real
First Fuck. It doesn’t matter how many Mr. and Mrs. Johnsons are anti-war – the actual
killers who know how to use the weapons are not.
Anthony Swofford, Jarhead

Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different
immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish. And yet it also
pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom to one man seems nonsense
to another.
Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

This is great news for the writer, seeing as how I can rationalize any bad reviews I may
get on the imprecise nature of language. But no, people would still think I’m a dick.

As I was recently reading The Stranger by Albert Camus, these quotes came to mind
(obviously not in their entirety1), as they often do whenever I find myself searching for a
point to whatever chapter I’m reading in a book I’ve yet to get a thematic hold on. The
great thing about The Stranger, though, is that it is a delightfully compact 123 pages,
short enough for me to finish without actually enjoying. The theme comes on the last
page, in one sentence summing up what all the point of all the previous pages had been in
service of.

The main character is about to be executed for a crime he committed for the simple
reason of existential dread. He saw that nothing really mattered, so to him it didn’t
matter whether or not he killed someone. So he did. And right before his execution, he
finally gets his head on straight:

And I felt ready to live it all again too. As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me
of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the
gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself – so like a brother, really
– I felt I had been happy and was happy again.
 Albert Camus, The Stranger

I could say it pissed me off that this character had to be sentenced to death to realize that
life matters because it’s all you have, but I would be lying. It really pissed me off
because this existential French writer that my Philosophy 180 teacher had so revered was
giving a pep talk to 5th grade Atheists. He was teaching me things that had been taught to
me by not only other writers (::cough cough:: Salinger), but also by my own brain when
I was in junior high.

But I thought of those quotes because I was looking for some other hidden meaning
behind the text, because I know that writers often employ what book/film reviewers and
high school English teachers call “subtlety2.” When talking about a work of art with
friends or other people you want to impress, someone often mentions that a certain film
had a higher meaning, as in “Fight Club was really about the man’s need for love.” 3 This
is not to say that you are wrong if you thought that about Fight Club, but someone else
could watch that film and think it was a half-assed demonization of Capitalism, or Fascist
propaganda, or an example of how dangerously powerful propaganda can be, or maybe
someone thought it was about the danger of loving someone too much.

People pick out of art the things that they are comfortable picking out, and this is nothing
new. If this was my only point, this essay would be of no more value than Camus’ The
Stranger4. The point is, writers use subtlety so the audience/reader doesn’t feel like its
being hit over the head with a point, but the danger is that they will just ignore the point
entirely, a point that might’ve been the reason the writer wrote the piece in the first place.
Camus saw that people could get really depressed about the kind of philosophy that he
and his peers advocated, so he wrote a book showing that getting depressed was not the
answer. He got that point across, but only because he wrote a sentence at the end that
summed up the whole book, and provided a solution to the main character’s problem. He
wrote it out, plain as day, obvious and very much unsubtle. Maybe there were other ideas
in the book, but since he didn’t spell those out they will forever remain a mystery to me.
And that’s a problem, because if he was being too subtle for people who agree with his
philosophy (which I do), then how does he expect to reveal truth to anyone who doesn’t
agree with him.

If you are being subtle, you are changing no minds. This is why millions of people can
watch The Simpsons every week and not riot in the streets at the injustices of our current
social and political systems. The Simpsons shows a corrupt mayor, a corrupt police
chief, a church pastor who belittles his most ardent supporter, and many other
unwholesome people. One person could read that as a rebuke and mistrust of authority,
and on the basis of weekly viewing begin to pay more attention to pork belly politics and
the downsides of capitalism. Another person could see the same program and laugh at
how each one of us is flawed and ripe for ridicule, and then thank God that we have Him
to save us from our sins and send us a righteous leader like George W. Bush. The
Simpsons, however liberal-minded, is still a sitcom, and as such is intended for the widest
possible audience. It can only do so much, only say so much without alienating those
who disagree with whatever views they would put forth.
You5 might scoff at the idea that narrative of any kind is responsible for arguing
philosophical ideas of any sort. You (or I, if I’ve got a case of the Mondays) might say
that people want a story told well, and with a vague sense of meaning attached to it so
they can get an endorphin rush at the end. And that’s all they want. You’d say that if
they wanted philosophy, if they wanted to be persuaded to live their lives differently,
they’d read Sartre or Kant or Kierkegaard or Nietzsche. But to that6 I would say this:

When people read philosophy texts, they are just as much reading a narrative as when
they are reading Tom Clancy. Jack Ryan must be moral in all of the ways that Immanuel
Kant7 spends an entire book writing about, but Jack must be moral in action, not in
theory. When we are watching a film, we take the actions of heroes and protagonists as
the window through which we see the world. If they do something, the story must prove
that their action was indeed correct, and therefore moral. When Kant does this, he uses
different words, and less examples, so it’s easy to think the two are diametrically
opposed. But they are not. They are both stories. In Clancy, the story is “how you find
the bomb while doing the right thing” and in Kant the story is “how you do the right
thing.” Obviously, it’s more fun to get the bad guys while you’re moralizing, but don’t be
fooled into thinking that’s just an action movie you’re watching.

In the end, there really is no answer8 to the problem of narrative subtlety turning into
narrative ambiguity. If you want to say something about life, say it, and make a case for
it. Try to win over the other side by being all-inclusive, logical, and thorough9. Can this
be done in a film or book? Has it already been done, and I’m just forgetting? How many
licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll™ center of a Tootsie Pop™? The answer to
these questions, and many more questions better men have posed, is The World May
Never Know®.

And, for a narrative writer, this is a bitch.

“Heraclitus, whose life probably overlapped with that of Confucius, expressed himself
with such gnomic obscurity that on the basis of a few surviving fragments he could be
hailed as a Christian by Justin Martyr, a Marxist by Lenin and a Nietzschean by
Nietzsche.”
Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Truth: A History and a Guide for the Perplexed

1. Although if I had that kind of memory, I would definitely use it to my advantage,

acting out whole episode of The Simpsons’ Season 6 with offensively inadequate
impressions of all the characters. There would, of course, be some code-breaking
for the CIA, as well.
2. Forgive my lack of bias.
3. This is me a few years ago. If I was to deconstruct that quote, I would say it’s
about a man’s need to find higher meaning in a movie that got him amped up
when he was sixteen.
4. If only this could be of as much value as Camus’ The Stranger.
5. I don’t mean to put words in your mouth, but it’s awfully lonely here in the abyss,
so once in a while I make up imaginary people. Like You. I’ve written a whole
personality profile about You.
6. Assuming You had said that, which I’m not.
7. Out of the previous list of philosophers, I use Kant not only because his
worldview most closely mirrors that of Tom Clancy, but also because his last
name is the least annoying to type out.
8. And by that I mean, my small brain couldn’t find one.
9. And don’t use this essay as a good example.