Arrested Development and Philosophy_ They've Made a Huge Mistake - Kristopher G. Phillips [97]
Looking closely at the stories that make up the developing narrative of Arrested Development gives us a chance to examine our own relation to narrative—how and why we relate to stories the way we do, and how we can find meaning in the world by and through stories. Narrative is a way of organizing and understanding events that makes them meaningful and coherent to us. Much like the narrator of Arrested Development, we impose a narrative structure on the seemingly unconnected events of our daily existence to create a feeling of progression, of something leading somewhere. In his Poetics, Aristotle (384–322 bce) observes that a story cannot be just any sequence of events. Rather, it must have a beginning, middle, and an end that relate to each other. As a result, we create stories that will explain why things are the way they are, how they relate, how they begin, and how they end. In fact, the philosopher and neuroscientist Mark Turner has gone so far as to say that narrative is “basic to human thinking”; we make sense of events in terms of how one thing leads to another, and hence the ability to understand the world in narrative is “the root of human thought.”2
Aristotle also suggests that our stories are an important way of seeking truth because stories do more than entertain us. Our enjoyment of narrative stems from the sense of shared meaning that stories provide. Stories are told and retold because they take on a sense of timelessness and universality. For that reason we learn of our most fundamental values through stories, parables, and fables.3 Precisely what lessons Arrested Development teaches is an open question. But one of the things that makes the show fascinating is its playful use of explanatory narrative. In “Burning Love,” for example, when Michael asks Gob how he hurt his ankle, Gob replies that he must’ve hurt it “shooting hoops, or something.” A cut-scene then immediately shows Gob actually hurting his ankle during his patented chicken dance, ending in a hilarious bit of chaos with both Gob and Buster screaming and wailing. So perhaps stories may give us hope that there is an underlying order to our lives. Real life, of course, is never quite so neat and tidy. Things rarely happen at precisely the right moment, we almost never get the facts in exactly the right order, and we can only ever operate with incomplete knowledge of the world, left to wonder about the stories that remain untold to us.
Since this storytelling aspect (of which the narrator is very proud, exclaiming in the episode “Spring Breakout”, “now that’s how you narrate a story”) of the show is so much a part of its distinctive style, it also serves to remind us of an important point: that this narrative way of understanding is not simply relegated to fiction. We might even imagine that our lives are lived in narrative:
Our knowledge of the world and ourselves is in fact shaped by narrative: We dream in narrative, day-dream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, gossip, learn, hate, and love by narrative.4
Narrative in this way presents us with an analogy for the larger task of philosophy. When we ask questions of why, we are seeking the story of what. To be sure, the process of understanding our relation to stories and how we derive meaning from them is no small task—as Arrested Development narrator Ron Howard so aptly puts it in “S.O.B.s,” “It was a complex situation without an easy solution”—but that doesn’t mean it can’t be a fun process for us along the way.
“And That’s Why You Always Leave a Note”: What Lessons Can We Learn From Our Narratives?
To understand things in terms of narrative also entails an act of interpretation—an act that gives meaning and form to events that we experience. What makes Arrested Development unique is that