On Nuance

It’s the primary thing I look for these days, in films, in novels, in life.  Nuance.

It’s easy to find nuance in good storytelling.  In fact, it is the most crucial marker that distinguishes good from bad storytelling.  My own and others.

I began watching a film recently and shut it down within ten minutes.  The story was based on a vital topic, the travails of a Black family in the 1960’s when they left the Jim Crow south to make a home in a white community in California. 

The good life!  At last!

Except it wasn’t.  Of course. 

The neighbors instantly boycotted the new family, the immaculately dressed but mean-looking white women setting up chairs in the street and bellowing music at the house from their transistor radios.  The receptionist at the plant where the man had been hired as an engineer sent him off to the kitchen without waiting to find out who he was or what directions he needed.

And so it went.

Until I turned the whole thing off.

It’s not that I don’t believe such things have happened.  Still happen.  After all, I live in a community with a profoundly racist history that likes to refer to itself as “Minnesota nice.”  Rather, it was that the story itself was drawn from life, but not a single person on the screen replicated a living human being.

The Black family was perfect, their perfection signaled by the family’s being immaculately dressed.  The wife/mother traveled across country in an automobile in a well-ironed dress, hose and heels.  The father and the two daughters were dressed to match. 

Cheerful.  Loving.  Naively hopeful.  No trace of travel fatigue or irritability. 

Every white person in the story looked perfect, too.  Except that they were also, instantly and conspicuously, perfectly mean.

And all I could feel, soon after entering their story, was tired.  Tired of the characters.  Tired of the situation.  Tired of being asked to care.

We human beings—the real creatures, not the ones on screen or page—are composed of nuance, and nuance is made of contradictions.  No created character can duplicate our complexity.  The best a creator can do is to hint at it.  Even one small contradiction peeking through, especially one we understand the meaning of, can give a character the illusion of depth.

And that’s what stories are made of, after all.  Illusion.

These are basic writing rules, ones we all understand.

But what about nuance in life?

We live in a deeply divided world.  And what keeps those divisions so emphatically clear seems to me to be a complete lack of nuance.  We believe we know one another across the gaping divide, but we know little that is meaningful or real.

Whichever side of the divide we stand on, we are right and they are wrong.

Transparently, overwhelmingly, obscenely wrong.

Even when we attempt to empathize with the other side, if we ever attempt that, we empathize from the pedestal of our own moral superiority.  They simply don’t have the right information.  How can they be expected to understand?

Or they are wounded/limited/misguided and can never be part of the elect.

We, on both sides, become the mean women, certain of our right to protect our turf.

We have lost our sense of nuance, our sense of the humanity of those who do not share our beliefs.  (And by we, I mean I, too, of course.)  That the “other side” has lost their sense of humanity, too, is no excuse.

How do we learn how to live without blaring noise at the enemy? 

How do we learn to live without dividing into enemies at all?

I don’t have the answer.  Not even a scrap of one.  But I’m pretty sure recognizing that none of us is simply one thing, good or bad, is the first step.

Photo by Kelly Searle on Unsplash