Pop culture worldviews

At the bottom of the ocean, two tectonic plates strive against each other, titanic forces equally balanced. Above, the calm sea hides the tensions in the Earth’s heart. A rock fractures, unbalancing the system, and the forces are unleashed. But the sea disguises all for long after, until suddenly, an immense wave wrecks devastation thousands of miles away. The wave merely transports the tectonic forces to the distant shore, the same forces that, just recently, had been the guarantors of calm. 

My wife and I recently remarked on how hopelessly naïve we are after watching the very bleak series Babylon Berlin. Like most interesting series in the last decade or so, Babylon Berlin is a study in moral ambiguity: No protagonist, no matter how sympathetic, without a dark secret; no antagonist, no matter how loathsome, without a redeeming act of kindness.

Much like in real life.  

We feel naïve, though, because we have a hard time fathoming the darker motives that drive some of the characters. They seem like space aliens to us. They thirst for power for its own sake. They savor cruelty. It’s not that we believe these aren’t realistic motives for some people, it’s more that in Babylon Berlin – set in the Weimar Republic as it descends into fascist madness – those darker motives are portrayed as having world-historic import. It’s fiction, of course, but Babylon Berlin touches fact in many ways, and it suggests a worldview: The world is willed into disaster by humanity’s worst impulses.  

The same worldview runs as a common thread through many of popular series of the last decade or so: Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Westworld, House of Cards, Veep to name a few. It’s a worldview in which peace is not guaranteed by people’s desire for it, but by their worst impulses locked in a stalemate, until some inciting event throws things out of balance and unleashes a tsunami of violence.

That’s one way to look at the world and our own hearts. There’s another way, and it, too, is embodied in a popular series. The Wire is another study in ambiguity, and it also portrays a society, a polis (Baltimore) fracturing along a web of interlocking fault lines. But in The Wire – with one exception –the characters don’t seem like space aliens to me. They are driven by motives I can relate to; they want the same things I do, and that does not include power for its own sake and cruelty as enjoyment of that power. In The Wire, characters inhabit different circles of mutual obligation: to self, to family, to neighborhood, to teams, to organizations, to political parties, to the polis itself. Conflict emerges between those circles because not all obligations can be met. And because all characters inhabit multiple circles, the conflict is just as violent within individuals as between them. It’s heartbreaking, because no character’s heart can be in the right place; it has to be in several places at once.

Much like in real life.

There is a character in The Wire whose heart is unfathomable to me, the exception that proves the rule. The emerging drug lord Marlo is nothing but a raw will to power. Having achieved recognition, wealth, security, and even a kind of legitimacy at the end, he cannot help but put it all at risk again and exercise sheer physical cruelty for its own sake, descending literally into the gutter to knife a stranger.

I am not so naïve as to believe that no such characters exist in real life. The difference between the Babylon Berlin and The Wire worldviews is that the former places a bit of Marlo in all our hearts and makes it the motive force of all that happens, whereas the latter sees Marlo and his rise as an outcome of societal conflict, not its cause. Are society’s tectonic forces blind ambition and cruelty pushing up against each other? Or loyalties and loves pulling us apart?

I subscribe to The Wire version of things. We don’t need a heart of darkness in all of us to explain the world’s awfulness. Our obligations – to self, to family, to tribe, to polis, to the nation-state, to the globe – are in enough tension with each other to lead to a cataclysm when balance is lost. Alien hearts like Marlo’s, Hitler’s, Stalin’s exist, and they may be able to ride the shockwave’s crest, crashing destructively on our shores. Our tragedy is that our best motives, fragmented across many loyalties, suffice to unleash the disaster.

Now I’m not sure which worldview is naïve and which is bleak.