Analyzing fictional scenarios indicates how you perceive the world
By VIOLET ZANZOT— vmzanzot@ucdavis.edu
My first year at UC Davis coincided with Joey Graziadei’s season on “The Bachelor,” which meant big things for the world of reality TV and potentially bigger things for the foundation of my personal theory on media literacy: You can learn a lot about someone by how they interpret the culture built into a movie, show, book or play.
I wouldn’t say the discovery of my appreciation for reality TV was the most novel transformation of my first year of college, but at the very least, I could connect it to my anthropological studies later on. At the time, I would join my roommate and her friends to watch “The Bachelor;” I remember feeling like I knew right away who was hot, who was not, who was the psychotic instigator and what tropes each girl was destined to fulfill.
You can imagine my surprise when my friends didn’t seem to pick up on the unspoken roles that had seemed so obvious to me. While I was deeply annoyed it had taken them five more episodes than me to realize which contestants were more irrational than others, I was tickled by my new kind of game. It was simple; nothing more than a conversation. Ask people what they thought about the show, see how they analyze it and then dissect.
Over the years, this game has developed. It was born from the realization that fiction provides us a rare chance to pick apart a social situation unbiasedly and without confounding influence. Movies, shows, books and plays offer an opportunity for people to practice being a therapist or anthropologist — like a test drive for real life. They allow the viewer to measure how good they are at understanding social networks and the human experience.
This happens for a myriad of reasons, one of which is framing. Every work of fiction has exactly two components: a narrator and an audience. Can the audience place how the storyteller is able to shape the story itself? If “How I Met Your Mother” were to be “How I Met Your Father,” we would think a lot differently about each component of the story. Even without a narrator explicitly telling us, can we understand what the story is and that the story is shaped by who says it? When developing an idea, decisions are made strategically to tell that story with a certain objective. The ability of the viewer to identify the inherent objective indicates their capacity to perceive the narrative independently of their own implicit biases.
Once we accept what we are told the story is, we can find out how people choose to analyze characters. The first time I heard that “Sex and the City” star Carrie Bradshaw was a “bad” person, I jumped out of my metaphorical Manolo Blahniks (some of Carrie’s favorite heels). Carrie is undoubtedly an imperfect person, but that’s the point — no one is. We judge relationships between characters and individual characters alike, often forgetting they are meant to be human beings — flaws, complexities and all. Michael Scott from “The Office” might annoy me constantly, but I’m not sure I have the authority to decide if he’s a “bad” guy.
This feeds into the idea of context. As viewers, being able to contextualize people, decisions and scenarios says a lot about how we do so in our everyday lives. Understanding nuance is a skill, in both looking down at a screen and up at the world around you. Is a relationship toxic, or are they just two gay hockey players battling internal and external struggles (because obviously we can use “Heated Rivalry” as an ethnographic text about the social fabric surrounding us)?
Whatever the story is, we can use it to learn about how proficient people are at reading the culture and psychology of others. Are we able to empathize and contextualize the storyteller, the story itself and the character dynamics within it? Your Netflix account may say more than you know. It’s not just what you watch, but how you watch it. Appreciation for what you consume will force you to change your intake. If you learn about ingredients, if you know how to taste ingredients, you will change how you eat. You will consume media differently if you can appreciate the sum of its parts.
Written by: Violet Zanzot— vmzanzot@ucdavis.edu
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