The Speech in Praise of the Villain

The Attraction and Repulsion of Control

What's your favorite Story?

It's a difficult question to answer without reflection and contemplation, isn't it?

You've experienced so many stories that boiling them down to just one requires a serious amount of qualification. We all have different favorites depending on our particular moods. So I sort them into four broad concepts to keep track of essential emphasis. 

On the Surface, Green Zone Stories Present the Nowness of Time

Tribulation product-based stories like Run Lola Run and The Martian concern radical changes in enlivening and depleting energy. You bite your nails to the quick, experiencing them moment by moment. Solving a throughline life-and-death problem drives these narratives.

Above the Surface, Red Zone Stories Represent a Duration of Time

Transformational process stories like Whiplash and Brooklyn depict personal development processes, figuring out when and how to stand out or fade into a context. Considering these stories event by event, you can't predict what will happen next. They are so compellingly mysterious, yet somehow you find their endings inevitable. How a being gains or loses skills, perspectives, relationships, and propositions drive these narratives.

Beyond the Surface, Blue Zone Stories Formalize the Eternity of Time

Transcendent purpose stories like Life Is Beautiful and Sophie's Choice are about discovering purpose. They hit you right in the solar plexus. You find yourself misty-eyed and flushed as the moments and events cohere into a cascade of meaningful insight. The story maps onto one of your private past experiences, meaningfully directing how you "ought" (David Hume's Is-Ought problem) to navigate your future. Purposefully communing, coordinating, and conforming to a particular eternal archetype (Carl Jung's complex formal patterns of universal human behavior) drive these narratives.

Complex Broadband Masterwork Stories Transcend Time

Lastly, stories like Pride and Prejudice and The Hobbit are complex, a whole greater than the sum of their parts. While they elicit all three emotional experiences for their audiences: excitement, intrigue, and catharsis, they achieve something seemingly impossible, timelessness. They do so by dynamically integrating a virtual life's productive interaction with tribulation, the processional transformation of that life, and the transcendent purpose of that life into a coherent distillation of simulated reality... "more real than reality itself." The Whole is not just greater than the sum of its parts. It's a thing in itself, a fountain of intelligibility no matter the time it is experienced. Multiple exposures reveal more insights.