Jackanory

Lots of stuff in the ether about narrative. Switched on the TV last night and heard the tail end of Channel 4 news about Marion Cotillard's scepticism towards the accepted versions of 9/11 and the moon landings. Her views were apparently recorded before her Oscar for Piaf, but the newsreader punned on whether Marion would 'regrette' what she'd said. There was something chilling in the way this made the news at all. There seemed an aspect of 'thought police' about it - as in 'woe betide those who don't accept the truth as we tell it'. If she'd said 'I'm a Virgo and I believe everyone has a One True Love' I'd imagine this would only have made the celebrity gossip magazines, such beliefs being common currency and heartily encouraged in that domain, despite their tenuous basis. She would not have been presented as either a crank or subversive, which seemed implicit in the brief clip I saw. Of course what Marion was discussing on record concerned two world events, not just personal fancies. Though, as far as I'm aware, she didn't say she didn't believe the truth as told, only that she had doubts.
The two big news stories she had doubts about pertained crucially to America and its identity, one as wronged in this century, the other triumphant in the last.

On BBC 4 later were two great programmes about the stories America wanted to tell itself in the 1960's through advertising - a doc about the industry itself and Mad Men, the new drama series set in the midst of it in New York's Madison Avenue. What was immediately striking about the latter was the ubiquity of smoking. This became both subject and metaphor - the dilemma of how to continue to sell cigarettes despite the growing health warnings and the way in which almost all the characters smoked, clinging to the dream of what they thought this meant (suave sophistication) rather than the reality (they were addicted to something poisonous). The doc spoke of how, in the '60's, despite American affluence, anxiety levels seemed to rise. I remember cigarettes being sold as a way to relax, despite the fact they actually increase our heart rate.

This morning, Nassim Nicholas Taleb was on Start the Week, Radio 4, talking about his Black Swan theory, about how we don't see things coming because we're telling ourselves an out of date, out of touch, story. Why we might want to believe in incomplete stories in the first place begs several questions.