Backstory and Trauma Plotline

 Reading The Past Is Never Dead: On TV’s Backstory Problem by Elizabeth Alsop left me concerned with my novel "Love Stinks." Originally conceived as a screenplay wherein I would dramatize my characters' memories. I was very much taken with a scene with Willem Dafoe in Boondock Saints where he recreated a murder scene. I was told it was too complicated for a movie. When I moved the story over to a novel, I kept the memories as flash cuts for one particular character; the other is more resistant to her memories and I let her control them more.

Ms. Alsop's thesis is, I think, here:

The result is a show that, as Andy Greenwald put it in a recent episode of The Watch, is “too busy loading everyone with past events, past trauma, past things that needed to be healed through the mechanism of these six episodes.” But, he adds, this orientation also makes it “emblematic of where we are with TV.” Not only does the overreliance on flashbacks threaten to create a kind of narrative monoculture, in which many series, regardless of genre, now appear to follow the same sad, inevitable arc; there’s also a knock-on effect for audiences, who are being supplied with ready-made motivations for all character behavior. Increasingly, viewers’ inferences are being preempted by these instructive look-backs, counteracting what is arguably among the chief pleasures of watching serialized narrative. The problem, then, is not just that there are too many flashbacks but that TV seems to have so thoroughly co-opted them for traumatic-explanatory purposes as well.

Yes, there is a trauma that splits the two leads apart; for one, there is also the shock of his father's death; and for the other, there is a history of an abusive father. There are also some far-from traumatic memories. My theme is history - and history has its traumas - and we need to deal with the problems of history, or else we are doomed to die in a stagnant pond of our own making.

She leaves me happy not to own a television:

The trauma-fueled flashback, in short, has come to feel like a mark of bad-faith storytelling: a device used to promote the illusion of narrative complexity where little may actually exist. The impression of style produced by these temporal anachronies—once cutting-edge, now commonplace—appears for now to be persuasive to audiences, trained by a generation of post-network television to associate time-jumping with narrative richness and density. But when it comes to all this backward glancing, more may actually be less.

Stagnation is not the only thing I see, it is a feeling of part circle jerk and part self-flagellation. That does not interest me. How we react - acceptance or rejection of the trauma; the overcoming or repression - interests me far more.

Consider how Trump uses our history - things were better back then for people like us, and they will be again if I get power. He is even more vague than usual about what has changed, how it has changed, or what he can do to bring back the glory days. This I call repression, if he means giving back to the high school graduates of the working class a path to middle-class jobs (let us forget about automation, for example), or that white high school graduates will remain in political power regardless of demographics (which overlooks the disparity of wealth and income and health between whites and blacks; which refuses to acknowledge the violence that prevented the equal rights promised by America, the promise that did make America great.) Maybe Bruce Springsteen's "Glory Days" did capture how some Americans repress their traumas.

On the other hand, I cannot think of any better declaration of resisting the traumas of history than this.

sch 5/5