Performance, Storytelling, and the Problematic Draw of the Slow

Storytelling, as performed, is slow; slower than our focus on nearly anything else. When stories are devised and defined in our heads, or bouncing around with other people, alive and enlivened, they race, at least in comparison to the pace of stories performed. We can race through real-world exposition, setting, character development, plot—we can make up our minds about people in a mere few seconds, even if the conclusions are faulty. We can create narratives about ourselves among others with a few mental quips, sometimes even without any diligent articulation. We know what we know. We can go on feelings and impressions—we don’t have to wait and actually string together a whole series of words to understand. We know in microseconds. Our minds race through the world, drawing on an evolution’s universe of tricks and traits to move quickly, to get into the world without hesitation, to act, make choices, communicate, see—our minds remain faster than most supercomputers. We just don’t understand all the laws in our programming.

Stories, on the other hand, are slow. They have a sluggish pace, compared with how we engage with and think about the rest of the world. Our engagement with stories performed, from TV shows to social media vids, is thus a way to calm things down, to take a break, to zone out. They are mostly pacifiers and thus do very little to inform or develop.

Stories’ slowness is created through structure and performance. Structure is simpler and can be annoying and criticised. For instance, Apple created a show about an aeroplane hijacking—a multi-episode endeavour with a compelling leading man and yet, really, a hijacking over a dozen one-hour-long episodes? It spent 45 minutes in the first episode showing people boarding the plane, using the scene to reveal the character traits and quirks of different passengers and to set up how these characters may drive the plot. But, 45 minutes? The original Airplane! did so in around four minutes. If we board a plane in real life, assessing the people we pass as we get to our seats, the whole thing might take a minute or two. This structural slowness isn’t restricted to such plot development. Even setting, the long panoramic shot of some magnificent vista, slowly panning back and forth, is much, much slower than how the natural eye might take in such a scene. We can go back and forth in a second or two, and then zoom in on different details, flashing from a very specific point to the wider spectrum, considering how unique these images are or how they connect with what else we know, or how we will file these away as important mementos. We can also do this while thinking about how the people around us may be taking in the same scene. We can even do all this while using a camera, taking a few shots of what we admire.  In fact, we can look, take a shot, and comment on the glory of it all to our loved one in, say, 6 - 10 seconds? A movie would make this a whole scene, easily lasting a minute or two. This is inherent to performed stories, a rudimentary and slow form of expression, and yet made even worse by commercial interests that want to fill time, elongating the narrative to fill hours, like the annoying hijack film and it’s annoying 45 minute boarding sequence.

The slowness of performance would be harder to prove and yet it is inherent. This is partly due to the actual pace of spoken words. If you count the number of words that are spoken at a lively dinner party with your friends, at the height of conversation, and compare this with those from a movie or show, there is a stark difference. Part of this is that, in performance, people don’t talk over one another. Everything is articulated and separated to avoid the corruption of the script and because, from the performance’s concept, each word is important. In natural conversation, not every word is important—in fact we are engaging in a much more dynamic dance with people, not simply taking things in but reacting to and advancing personal interests and needs. We are engaging back and forth with people with such a web of known and unknown interests as to sometimes lead to all kinds of confusion and misrepresentation. We are, in real life, much less cohesive and coherent that a performance.  A performance slows down, tries to make every word, every image, resonate.

What does this mean?

It means that we are not actually drawn to performance because of its ability to provide enlightening insights into humanity. Stories, of course, can do this, on occasion.  The reason we are actually drawn to performance is because it is entertaining and it is entertaining because it is slower. Everything makes sense. We like that. We know why the panorama is shown, why a character complements his spouse, why another character scowls or when some words or phrases are setting us up for the next wrinkle, the next twist or turn. We like all this, and stories performance have gotten fairly good at setting us up for entertaining emotion, the gasp, the shock, the joy, the tear. Yet, when we are experiencing this, from our couch or in the theatre, we know we are being manipulated, we don’t confuse fiction and reality. Even if a documentary, we know the scenes have been constructed, set up to tell a story and to not necessarily mimic real life. We are blissfully being entertained. This is not real life.

Real life is so much faster; so much more complicated and complex; so much fuller.

Yet, we still tend to derive our standards for how life should and could be from stories. They are our primary source for lessons, for how people could and should behave, how they could live. This is highly problematic and, in fact, as the real world becomes more complicated, even faster with more and more inputs from all different angles, we are searching out something that has more meaning that a movie. This is the draw of the quick videos in social media. We are drawn to both their seeming authenticity, being created not by master story tellers but by normal blokes and blokettes, setting up scene, punch line, and resolution in a few seconds or, at most a couple of minutes. They are more direct, more visceral, and more reflective of the pace of inputs we get from the rest of our media. Unfortunately, they are also drawing us further away from the fullness of real life. We are getting sucked into a cortex of more compelling entertainment that also pulls us further way from experiencing life as it is meant to be.

This means that we need to better differentiate between the performance and the real, and stop trying to understand life from the performed. It is simply not very illustrative of how we live our lives. It sets up totally unrealistic expectations not simply for the glitz and glamour but for what it means to be human and a part of a family, community, nation and society. This slowing down, this over complication and blunt entertainment aspect of the performed is preventing us from dealing with life on its own terms, on our own terms. This is also why we are flooding therapists’ offices, seeking out gurus and their top ten lists,  better drugs, and other simple tools that have arisen not from our own concerted introspection but from media-crazed performances. These are simply far too simplistic to be of much good. When they are, it is because of what we added to them from our own inner knowledge, from our experience, from our thoughtfulness, from our experienced life, that we can use them as tools to get us somewhere else. They are not doing for us; we are doing for us.