Dangerous Fictions

The quickest way to kill many grown-ups' interest in a work of art is to label it as healthy and useful, to turn it into another productive chore. And the quickest way to kill fiction more generally is to declare that it exists to make you a better person, to train you into shape.

there's a particular fulfillment that we only get from narrativizing reality, from the satisfaction of familiar procedure and familiar if incorrect facts, from reducing public institutions and individuals into something we can easily grasp. This, I think, holds the key to why this kind of story takes up so much space in most of our lives, and why w

what makes fascist art uniquely frightening is that fascism itself can be described as a kind of factionalizing tendency, deliberately co-locating itself inside categories of thinking and feeling more normally reserved for literature and art. Fascism operates at the level of story; it works like a story, with violent heroes and monstrous villains.

Fiction, even of the most "realistic" kind, represents what never happened, what isn't, but what maybe yet could be, in a different world than this. It's always moving in opposition to reality. All art is motion, and in motion. A good story goes in a direction that we were unable, previously, to see.

In terms of their portrayal of actual lived reality, cop shows are really not much different from science fiction: most police procedurals take place in a world where dangerous criminals are everywhere and only a well-armed and respected cadre of officers and prosecutors can stop them. This consistent representation of cops as heroic and successful

If the United States' Cold War propaganda efforts have receded so far into the past as to be meaningless to us today, then it remains remarkable that we still believe basically everything they said.

Fiction may represent and inform a changing reality: it can contribute to the disruption of that feedback loop. But it can't change reality on its own, by itself.

it's dangerous to imagine human beings as less than human, especially when their oppression arises from already being perceived as less than human in the first place. A flat character is more than an aesthetic mistake: it's a political error too, even if placed in the service of good politics.

only in genre fiction could we see anything like a revolution if it hasn't already happened in the historic past. Only outside the "given reality" are characters allowed to alter the fabric of daily life rather than just learn to cope with it. This isn't to say that genre fiction always depicts real change, or does so in interesting ways,