narrative junkies

A little while back, NYT film critic Manohla Dargis, writing about her earliest passions, explained (without intending to) why most of us are not addicted to, say, PBS’s NewsHour and NPR but rather to, say, the Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer and Countdown with Keith Olbermann—that is to say: we’re drawn to infotainment rather than “the news.”

It has to do with the human need to let our imaginations roam free with the aid of storytelling:

… Comic-Con [is] where people can give physical form to the passions that the rest of the year remain safely hidden from the cruel world. This is where you let your freak flag fly without getting beaten up by the playground bullies. …

I never became a comic book geek; then, as now, I got my fix from watching movies. [e.a.]

Whatever form of narrative we’re addicted to, we all need our fixes. We are all suckers for a good story. Marketers of all stripes, marketers of everything—from Viagra to the iPhone to the Iraq war to the Bourne Ultimatum to jihad to celebrity gossip—take advantage of our love of spectacle and our desire to suspend disbelief and our need to abandon ourselves to the pleasure and pain of feeling for someone else so that we will be alleviated, if for just a little while, of the burden of being ourselves.

When it comes to TV, the news as a narrative form just doesn’t do it for people; sensational storytelling—infotainment—does.