Arrested Development and Philosophy_ They've Made a Huge Mistake - Kristopher G. Phillips [101]
Narrator: Hey, let’s see what some of the other folks are up to.
Crickets chirping.
Narrator: Nothing there.
Quiet clicking.
Narrator: Or there.
(Shows Buster in a hospital bed, pretending to be in a coma, while his nurse climbs in with him).
Narrator: Oh, my. Let’s get back to Michael. [“Family Ties”]
In our own lives, we are accustomed to long periods in which nothing out of the ordinary seems to happen. We wish we could jump around and select only those things that are interesting to us. But, if we are to fully appreciate Nietzsche’s sentiments, we must accept that even the most mundane of moments are in fact very much an essential part of the larger story of our lives.15
The very nature of telling our self-story is nevertheless quite difficult, as Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) helps us see:
It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards. And if one thinks over that proposition, it becomes more and more evident that life can never really be understood in time simply because at no particular moment can I find the necessary resting point from which to understand it—backwards.16
As Kierkegaard points out, telling the story of our lives must of necessity be an incomplete and ever-evolving undertaking. We’re always adding to the material of that story, and we’re confronted with the choice of how we go about telling that story at every moment. If we agree with Kierkegaard’s proposition, then this sort of narrative sense-making is a ceaseless process of backward-moving reinterpretation. We’re always looking backward into our past in telling such a story because life is always moving forward in time. Likewise, that very same backward-looking approach is what rewards rewatching in a show like Arrested Development. It’s only then that we catch some of the show’s very subtlest humor—for instance, when Buster rediscovers his hand-shaped chair, “Well, I never thought I’d miss a hand so much,” several episodes before he finds himself being “all right.”
Lucille: How’s my son?
Literal Doctor: He’s going to be all right.
Lindsay: Finally some good news from this guy.
George Michael: There’s no other way to take that.
Literal Doctor: That’s a great attitude. I got to tell you, if I was getting this news, I don’t know that I’d take it this well.
Lucille: But you said he was all right.
Literal Doctor: Yes, he’s lost his left hand. So he’s going to be “all right.”
Lucille: I hate this doctor!
Lindsay: How do we keep getting this guy?
Michael: Mom, he’s a very literal man. [“Hand to God”]
Perhaps the greater benefit of all of this narrative awareness, both in the show and in our everyday experiences, is that it can help us appreciate the ways in which even the seemingly most insignificant of details and moments play a greater role than we at first suspect: “Over the course of a lifetime stories may change. Characters first dismissed as ‘bit players’ may gain importance. Gestures or words earlier thought unimportant may, in retrospect, take on greater significance.”17 Stories define and guide us; they provide us with a sense of purpose out of which the various narrative fragments that constitute our daily lives cohere into a greater sense of meaning.
Narrative structure can also provide a sense of finality. In the show’s last episode “Development Arrested,” the narrator closes with “It was Arrested Development”—a fitting tying together from the opening credits of every episode (“It’s Arrested Development”). That sense of finality is oftentimes one of the things that makes fiction fictional; only rarely do we have such clear-cut distinctions between the beginnings, middles, and endings of events in our lives. Even when we like to think that we’re starting a “new chapter” of our lives, or that we’re “turning