The narrator is an important dramatic role. Much like 'everyman' protagonists, the narrator's purpose is to bring the reader or viewer into the story, often through the viewpoint of a compelling character or raconteur. Yet, part of the fun with these characters is that we cannot always trust them - being as they are players in the game themselves - and our own willingness to trust these storytellers leads to great dramatic moments when the deception is unveiled.
Our culture is replete with examples of these unreliable narrators, from the ignorant, like Memento's Leonard Shelby, whose telling of the tale is skewed by his own limited view of events; to the liars, like The Usual Suspects' Verbal Kint, who exploits our limited ability to make sense of our universe by framing the information we receive from him to fit his own purposes.
But these devices are not limited to the land of fiction. In the real world, without the guiding hand of an author to pull away the veil, it can be much more difficult to see the truth and intentions behind the tales you are told. There are, however, ways to combat these impediments. Francis Bacon changed the world and laid the foundations of modern scientific thought when he posited the idea that nothing should get in the way of the gathering and analysis of raw data, even hypotheses, for those who wished to discover the truth of how something worked.
In Memento, the protagonist Leonard Shelby - through whose eyes we see events - is attempting to solve the murder of his wife despite a brain injury that has rendered him incapable of creating new memories. While he pursues answers for himself, he is dependent both on those around him and upon the mechanisms he has created to take the place of his memories - his tattoos and his Polaroids. Those dependences fall foul of Bacon's Idols of the Mind, or False Images of the Mind, part of his method for overcoming the obstruction to rational thought. We construct classifications and orders, and try to force the world fit to in with our systems, as what Jung would have called Archetypes, in an attempt to make sense of the chaos around us. Yet Bacon argued that these systems actually limited our view by placing these human imposed systems in the way of pursuing purely rational truth.
In The Usual Suspects we are introduced to the much more manipulative Verbal Kint, who shows us how these Idols of the Mind not only restrict us, but might even be wielded against us. The interrogating detective, Dave Kujan, entered into the interview preoccupied with discovering certain facts, and both his preoccupation and his presumptions about likely events were used to deceive him. Kint uses Kujan's prejudices, his conceits, his presumptions about how the world is and the relationships between things to successful deceive him into believing the story he crafts - hiding the truth behind what the Detective Kujan expected to find.
Back in the real world, the most poignant area of our lives that this affects is the way in which receive our news. In a talk for TED in 2011, Eli Pariser described how the tools that we rely on to stay informed on the internet have also begun to shape the picture of the world that we see. He called this phenomenon, where 'personalisation' changes tools like search engines to produce results tailored for you, 'filter bubbles'. He expressed his fears that these electronic systems were damaging us by taking away the things that we need to see - like the uncomfortable or the different - that help us to flesh out or contextualise our thinking.
And this effect isn't limited to our internet social media. Anything from the news channel you watch, to the newspaper you read, to the people you surround yourself with, can have a decisive influence upon your ability to see to the heart of a matter. It is because of this, and the fact that those with ulterior motives can use this against us to deceive us, that methods like drawing information from multiple, and diverse, sources is so important. Bacon stressed the importance of gathering data for yourself, without relying on the narratives or hypotheses of others which might sway your judgement away from the story that the data itself tells.
As films like the The Usual Suspects and Memento have taught us to be wary of being overly trusting of sources in dramatic narratives, so too must we take these lessons seriously in our real lives. We must check our facts, check them with multiple sources, and put aside distractions like prior presumptions if we are to find our way to the heart of matters.
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