To Hell with Realism

I've jumping on the bandwagon of a new HBO series, Boardwalk Empire. I've heard it described as a combination of The Sopranos and The Wire. The show is set in 1920 - Atlantic City, USA just after the signing of Prohibition. City treasurer Enoch "Nucky" Thompson is as corrupt as they come, and he plans to make a killing with the banning of alcohol. However, there are other people around who plan to make a killing as well.

We've watched the first two episodes and we like what we've seen. We'll hang in there.

Interestingly enough, I was flipped on to an essay by George Orwell who writes about the difference between two modern crime stories, Raffles and No Orchids for Miss Blandish. The difference is that in the older story, Raffles - ostensibly the bad guy, a gentleman crook - has a sense of morality. He only steals whenever he's been invited to someone's home, and he only steals from the other guests and never the homeowner. He would never think of killing anyone. Whereas, No Orchids for Miss Blandish is what we call a realistic crime novel. Orwell has this to say about realism:

[The author of No Orchids for Miss Blandish] is a popular writer — there are many such in America, but they are still rarities in England — who has caught up with what is now fashionable to call ‘realism’, meaning the doctrine that might is right.

Funny, that seems to be the doctrine of The Sopranos. And The Wire. And Boardwalk Empire, for that matter.

Orwell concludes:

Several people, after reading No Orchids, have remarked to me, ‘It's pure Fascism’. This is a correct description, although the book has not the smallest connexion with politics and very little with social or economic problems. It has merely the same relation to Fascism as, say Trollope's novels have to nineteenth-century capitalism. It is a daydream appropriate to a totalitarian age. In his imagined world of gangsters Chase is presenting, as it were, a distilled version of the modern political scene, in which such things as mass bombing of civilians, the use of hostages, torture to obtain confessions, secret prisons, execution without trial, floggings with rubber truncheons, drownings in cesspools, systematic falsification of records and statistics, treachery, bribery, and quislingism are normal and morally neutral, even admirable when they are done in a large and bold way. The average man is not directly interested in politics, and when he reads, he wants the current struggles of the world to be translated into a simple story about individuals. He can take an interest in Slim and Fenner as he could not in the G.P.U. and the Gestapo. People worship power in the form in which they are able to understand it. A twelve-year-old boy worships Jack Dempsey. An adolescent in a Glasgow slum worships Al Capone. An aspiring pupil at a business college worships Lord Nuffield. A New Statesman reader worships Stalin. There is a difference in intellectual maturity, but none in moral outlook. Thirty years ago the heroes of popular fiction had nothing in common with Mr. Chase's gangsters and detectives, and the idols of the English liberal intelligentsia were also comparatively sympathetic figures. Between Holmes and Fenner on the one hand, and between Abraham Lincoln and Stalin on the other, there is a similar gulf.

Ouch.

Orwell's point - to repeat it - is that No Orchids for Miss Blandish is a Fascist novel, even though the book has absolutely nothing to do with political philosophy. I don't know if Orwell is making the unintentional point that everything is political, down to the shows we watch, the books we read and the clothes we wear. All of these choices are choices grounded in philosophies of one sort or another, and all politics is is philosophy applied to human relations on a large scale.

You know you've read something great when it makes you think about the choices you've made in your own life. And furthermore, it makes you think about the meaning that is taken away from media. A person can watch The Wire because it reflects her own philosophy that an political system, corrupted by modern prohibition (the Drug War), will grind people up. Another person can watch it and say "if I ran a crew, I'd run it like Marlo Stanfield". Same medium, different philosophical interpretation.