Humanist Narratology and the Suburban Ensemble Dramedy

Humanist Narratology and the Suburban Ensemble Dramedy Wyatt Moss-Wellington A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of: Doctor of Philosophy Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences University of Sydney 2017 DECLARATION OF ORIGINALITY This is to certify that to the best of my knowledge, the content of this thesis is my own work. This thesis has not been submitted for any degree or other purposes. I certify that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work and that all the assistance received in preparing this thesis and sources have been acknowledged. Wyatt Moss-Wellington 2 ABSTRACT What is a “humanistic drama”? Although we might describe narrative works as humanist, and references to the humanistic drama abound across a breadth of critical media, including film and literary theory, the parameters of these terms remain elliptical. My work attempts to clarify the narrative conditions of humanism. In particular, humanists ask how we use narrative texts to complicate our understanding of others, and question the ethics and efficacy of attempts to represent human social complexity in fiction. After historicising narrative humanism and situating it among related philosophies, I develop humanist hermeneutics as a method for reading fictive texts, and provide examples of such readings. I integrate literary Darwinism, anthropology, cognitive science and social psychology into a social narratology, which catalogues the social functions of narrative. This expansive study asks how we can unite the descriptive capabilities of social science with the more prescriptive ethical inquiry of traditional humanism, and aims to demonstrate their productive compatibility. From this groundwork, I then look at a cluster of humanistic film texts: the suburban ensemble dramedy, a phenomenon in millennial American cinema politicising the quotidian and the domestic. Popular works include The Kids Are All Right, Little Miss Sunshine, Little Children, Junebug, The Oranges, and what is arguably the inciting feature in a wave of such films entering production, American Beauty. I provide examples of humanist readings of these films at two levels: an overview of genre development as social phenomenon (including histories of suburban depiction onscreen, ensemble cinema and affective experimentation in recent American filmmaking), followed by a close reading of a progenitor text, Ron Howard's 1989 film Parenthood. 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you first and foremost to Dr David Kelly whose supervisory acumen, encouragement and attentiveness have been invaluable – I could not have asked for better guidance throughout this project. Thanks to Sophia Harris for love, support and for keeping me intellectually honest over the past three years. Thank you also to my colleagues at Sydney University, in particular Dr Rebecca Johinke, Dr Kim Wilkins, Professor Peter Marks, Dr Bruce Isaacs and Associate Professor Sarah Gleeson-White, among others, who have all influenced my work in various ways. I also extend my gratitude to the editorial staff of the Projections, Film International and Forum journals, whose close scrutiny and expertise have impacted the following. Finally, thank you to my family and friends for support while I have been engaged with this research, thinking, writing, and deliberating – I owe you all a beverage. 4 CONTENTS Introduction: Humanist Hermeneutics 6 Social Narratology: A Catalogue of Storytelling Social Functions from a Humanist Perspective 47 The Suburban Ensemble Dramedy: History, Taxonomy and Discussions 130 Parenthood: A Humanistic Close Reading 195 Afterword 259 Bibliography 265 5 INTRODUCTION: Humanist Hermeneutics We are all story addicts. We might go to bed with a book or film, or wake up to the news; our immersion in micronarratives on the internet has scarcely made a dent in television use (United States of America Bureau of Labor Statistics np); the expansion of television into epic serialised narratives made for intensive or “binge” consumption tells of an increasing appetite for fictive immersion throughout the day; narratives in songform now follow us relentlessly throughout the urban environment; and we tell of our lives by ordering autobiographical memories into comprehensible narratives. Much of our day is, thus, engaged in storied activities, a phenomenon that some have positioned as a contemporary Western “addiction” or “obsession” with narrative (Landy 497). In fact, for a narrative theorist like Walter Fisher, storytelling is the foundation of all human reason and communication (“Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm”). Although we perform multiple acts of sustained creativity in our lives, which arguably have further reaching impact on participants – childrearing and teaching, for example – we single out the fictive storyteller for special regard and loftier status, in many cases aspiring to similar creativity, while ignoring our own quotidian creative practices. So why should this activity, concocting and disseminating creative fictions, matter to us so much? As Dennis Dutton writes: Human beings across the globe expend staggering amounts of time and resources on creating and experiencing fantasies and fictions. The human fascination with fiction is so intense that it can amount to a virtual addiction. (109) Joseph Carroll has pointed out that many evolutionary interpretations of the genesis of art fail to account for the insatiable need to create and consume narrative, our story “addiction” (Literary Darwinism xxi). Considering the widespread use of narrative arts in the daily life of a majority, it would not be right to characterise this addiction as pathological; instead, it appears to be foundational to human sociobiology, one of those very few qualities that can truly be considered pancultural. Once investigated, we begin to witness the diversity of uses we have found for the storytelling instinct, and they are terrifically manifold. 6 The following thesis largely concerns the utility and the ethics of narrative. Specifically, it looks at our motivations for storytelling, and the way we might extend research in human sociobiology to ask ethical questions: how we ought to live. As such, I begin with an attempt to come to grips with what, precisely, a narrative is, and ground a sense of narrative purpose in human history and development. Following from these foundations, I will introduce my central concerns: what humanistic narrative and humanist hermeneutics might look like. From the start, however, it is necessary to be careful in delineating the confines of sociobiological speculation and literary Darwinism: given that we find new uses for old adaptations (exaptation occurring at a complex cultural level, for instance), we cannot explain all human behaviours via portrayals of their origins (Buller Adapting Minds; Turvey 49), and further, evolutionary theory contains no prescriptive value and cannot tell us how to act. Accounting for these dilemmas will be one substantial component in the project I am calling humanist narratology. I take a broad view of story. Story is a communicative act that specifically implies a chain of causality, and story as we popularly know it is any series of descriptors, transmitted via any sensory means, which can be read as causal, or “a chain of events in cause-effect relationship occurring in time and space” (Bordwell and Thompson 69). In effect, stories mimic how we think: due to our necessary abstraction of the world into causal patterns, if we receive any communication from another, we intuitively attempt to unpack its concept of causality.1 Likewise, when concocting imagery using tools from the written word to a stage prop, the storyteller suggests “a set of perceptual processes that the reader then uses to construct a particular idea or experience” (Mar and Oatley 178). For example, we may neuroaesthetically react to the ornamentality of an abstract painting and thus be drawn to consider it, but once considered we apply meanings based on a pattern of causal understandings, by which we know the world – thus our relationship with the artwork, and how we explain its meaning to ourselves, although abstract, is “storied,” founded on narrative. It is also an implicitly human narrative we are attempting to read, as we discern and empathise with emotional states the artist moved through in their creative process: “the relationship between embodied simulation-driven empathic feelings in the observer and the content of art works, in terms of the actions, intentions, objects, emotions, and sensations 1 Perhaps this is why, in Marie-Laure Ryan’s view, the meaning of “narrative” has been diluted into concepts including “‘belief,’ ‘value,’ ‘experience,’ ‘interpretation,’ or simply ‘content’” (Avatars of Story 6); because all of these things rely on a mental causality that narrative does not quite copy, but simply is. 7 portrayed in a given painting or sculpture” (Gallese “Mirror Neurons and Art” 446). That is, artworks and still images tell all kinds of stories: stories of the emotional and interior process of their creation, stories of the kind of person we are when we react to them, or the culture we mutually exist within, a prompting to conceptual causality that ignites a reasoning that fortifies or puts into question our values. So even if an image does not suggest a narrative in itself, it connects to other narratives, or reductions to pertinent causal details – self- narratives, cultural narratives and so on – to become meaningful.2

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