Arrested Development and Philosophy_ They've Made a Huge Mistake - Kristopher G. Phillips [100]
Due to poor acting, the burden of the story was placed on the narrator . . . but this inattention to detail was typical of the laziness the show’s narrator was known for. Real shoddy narrating. Just pure crap.
If we know what bad narration sounds like, what exactly does the show suggest as better narration? Are we to take the show’s narrator as any sort of indication? Perhaps. But the show’s narrator often treads the line between passive observer and active participant.
In a particularly clever moment, the show pokes fun at this very predicament of narrator as participant and observer. During a confrontation between Michael and his just-fired secretary Kitty Sanchez, the local newsman John Beard (a real-life Los Angeles-based news anchor) is seen in the background, and immediately departs the scene:
Kitty: Did you hear that everyone? Michael Bluth is threatening me!
John Beard: I’ve got to get out of here. I’m part of the story. I can’t be a part of the story. I can’t be a part of the story. [“Missing Kitty”]
On the surface, John Beard is surely being a good journalist. On another level, it also works as the subtle posing of a question—can narrators be part of the story, and should they be? Soon after, we then see John Beard on the newscast, under the sly on-screen caption, “I” Witness: “A woman shows all during a fracas at a local restaurant”—adding “sources say” under his breath. If only the real news could be so clever. If we think of ourselves as the narrator of our own stories, this puts us in an awkward position—we’re always part of the story that we tell, and yet must somehow find a way to be removed enough from it in order to tell a good story. At any given time, we find ourselves as the storyteller, the main character, or simply a background character in our or other people’s stories.
The question of how we might be both observers and participants of our self-creating story is something that we may address in turning to another philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). For Nietzsche, the key is that a mindfulness of style is very important to the way in which we fashion our lives:
How can we make things beautiful, attractive, and desirable for us when they are not? And I rather think that in themselves they never are. Here we could learn something from . . . artists who are really continually trying to bring off such inventions and feats. Moving away from things until there is a good deal that one no longer sees and there is much that our eye has to add if we are still to see them at all; or seeing things around a corner and as cut out and framed; or to place them so that they partially conceal each other and grant us only glimpses of architectural perspectives; or looking at them through tinted glasses or in the light of the sunset; or giving them a surface and skin that is not really transparent—all this we should learn from artists.13
As Nietzsche indicates, there is more to narration than a simple recounting; there is an aesthetic principle at work. Nietzsche wants us to be like the artist who can both see the object of his attention in the minutest details and also step back and see the bigger picture: “Where art ends and life begins; we want to be the poets of our life—first of all in the smallest, most everyday matters.”14 Much as in the telling of a story, style can become a defining characteristic of our lives if we want to be mindful of what we might call an aesthetic coherence of the way our self-narratives come together.
We see this awareness of style in the narrative selectivity of the show. In one situation that exemplifies this narrative freedom, the narrator uses an opportunity while Michael