As I type this there is an ongoing search for an 84 year old woman named Nancy Guthrie, who was kidnapped from her home on the morning of February 1st. Today (Feb. 22) marks the beginning of the fourth week that she has been missing. The story has captured a lot of media attention, and millions are praying for her swift discovery. Local law enforcement agencies, and the FBI, have gone to heroic efforts to retrieve her, so far to no success. If you talk to people on the street about this it seems like everyone had a theory. Almost all of them believe that Nancy Guthrie is still alive, and will remain so as long as someone acts swiftly enough, though who that “someone” is might vary from person to person.
Everyone seems to have this aching sense that we just need to find one more thing, one more clue, and Nancy will be home safe. We also understand that there is a ticking clock to this story. She is 84, and was taken without her medication. If she is not found soon there is a good chance she will perish from lack of medical care.
What I don’t understand is why this story is so important? Why do we care? Why does everyone seem to have a theory about where Nancy is? We don’t know her, and almost none of us have any connection to her. Not that I wish ill on Mrs. Guthrie, or her family, but 84 year old women die every day in America, most without comment or concern. Why is this particular old woman important, and the others not?
The answer I keep coming back to is that we have a head full of stories, and feel a strong urge to see them concluded, in the right way.
Good must overcome evil. The innocent must be saved, the guilty must be vanquished. That’s how this works. We all have a sense that this is the proper order of things. We all understand that an old and frail woman deserves to be found and returned safely. We all know that the people who kidnapped her deserve to be caught and punished. That is how all good stories are supposed to end.
When stories do not end properly, like when an old woman is kidnapped and not swiftly returned, it makes us feel uncomfortable. This is not a small thing either. It feels as if something is wrong with our world. Her loss is somehow existential to us. Millions will pray for her recovery, so they can feel better about the world.
And that’s kind of weird to me. Not that I don’t feel these same things (because I do), but that I feel this way about someone I have no connection to. It’s as if the story has co-opted a small part of my brain and won’t let it go.
And I don’t understand why.
***
Stories, it turns out, are deeply important to humans. They exist in every person and in every culture. It doesn’t matter where you are from or what language you speak; the first thing you will learn, and likely the last thing you will speak of, are stories.
Nowhere is the primacy of stories more evident than in our libraries. Libraries in America are divided into two sections: Fiction and Nonfiction. I find it telling that in the English language we don’t have a word for stories that are true. Instead we stuck with this weird compound word that means “things that aren’t stories.” It is as if all of human knowledge can be measured by whether it is a story, or not a story. Truth and fact, play a distant second.
When I was in university in the mid 80s, I took a few Greek classes. There I learned that the Greek word for story is istoria (Ιστορία), pronounced ee-sto-REE-ah. Like a lot of words that start with a vowel, in Greek it is common to speak the word by aspirating before the vowel (adding a soft “h” sound, like the beginning of the word heel). Thus istoria when spoken becomes historia. That word should look really familiar since this is the word we use for history. History is supposed to signify “true events”, but I think it’s important to remember that at its root, history is stories. Nothing more and nothing less.
Not only are stories important to our culture, we use them personally all the time. Ask a friend how their day was, and they will likely tell you a story. Ask a co-worker about their meeting, or their commute, or their lunch, and you will likely get another story.
We don’t just get in a car and drive to work. We face adversity: “A truck pulled out in front of me, and when I honked my horn the driver gave me the finger!”
We don’t just have meetings, we have political battles: “Bill from Marketing grabbed my team’s artwork, and then presented our project as if it was his own!”
We don’t just eat lunch, we have gastronomical adventures: “I was just biting into my sandwich when I noticed it had avocado. And this after I specifically told the guy at the counter that I was allergic to avocado! Can you believe it?”
***
Stories are so ingrained to us as humans that they are the primary way in which we understand the world. Things do not make sense to us if they do not have a built in understanding of protagonism and antagonism; that is, if there are no heroes and villains. The heroes aren’t always swash-bucking handsome men, and the villains do not always wear black and have sweeping plans to take over the universe, but both sides need to exist, even if only as placeholders, for our understanding of the world to make sense.
This is how they work: If a friend tells you that someone in a truck pulled out in front of them, your brain will automatically cast your friend as the hero and the truck driver as the villain. It doesn’t matter what really happened—your friend could have been speeding or run a red light, and the truck driver could have been directed by a cop to pull out—once the facts are laid out, then the roles will be set, and everything will be in order.
These roles don’t even have to make sense. How many times have you cursed at your phone for being stupid, especially when you’re in a hurry? Your phone is neither stupid nor smart, it just is, but as soon as you have an urgent demand, and the phone is not processing something fast enough, then it suddenly has become the villain in your story. If we stub a toe on a box, then we react as if the box had agency and purposely moved to be in front of our foot, rather than admit that we were not paying attention.
In most stories the hero is the one telling the story. In the writing world, we call them the protagonist. We understand that protagonists are important because we get the story from their point of view. They are not just the hero, they are the primary way the reader can access the story. We see it through their eyes. But it should be obvious that protagonists from novels didn’t start this idea. No, the idea that the hero is the one telling the story starts with us. It comes from the everyday stories that we tell each other.
Opposite of the protagonist is the antagonist. The Antagonist is the one who is trying to thwart our hero. Often they are called the villain, though they don’t necessarily have to be evil for the story to make sense. They just need to be in the way. The antagonist doesn’t even need to be a person. Humans are so flexible with our stories that we will happily substitute a box or a smart phone for our villain. I believe it was Robert McKee who came up with the term “forces of antagonism,” meaning anything that is between the protagonist and their goal. We don’t really need a person to act as the villain (though we are happy when someone steps into the role) for the story to be complete. We just need something, literally anything, that is stopping our hero from reaching their goal, and we are happy.
The beauty of such a story telling system is that it is wonderfully flexible. Someone is attempting to do an action, and someone or something is in their way. And just like that, a story is invented. The particulars do not really matter. As we’ve seen you don’t really have to have a villain—a cardboard box will suffice. All you need is someone with a point of view, attempting to do an action, and someone or something stopping them.
***
There are some limitations to this system. For instance, we can use forces of antagonism rather than an actual antagonist for small stories, but the longer the story gets, then the more this starts to sound like an excuse on the part of the teller, rather than an actual difficulty. “I was trying to get to the kitchen and the cat stepped in front of me,” is a perfectly fine story for explaining to my wife why I didn’t turn off the annoying buzzer on the microwave right away, but it wouldn’t make sense if I tried to use it as an excuse for why a client’s artwork wasn’t completed on time. The way I see it, the forces of protagonism and the forces of antagonism need to be in balance for the story to work. If too much strength, ability, or power goes to one side or the other, then suddenly the story falls apart. That is, unless the point of the story was to be funny.
Superman versus Ultraman might make sense to us, but Superman versus a mouse can only be viewed as humor.
But this balance is not just about size, it’s also about attachment. In the case about Nancy Guthrie, we’re all hearing a story of an elderly woman who was violently kidnapped from her home. The more details we get about the victim, the more one-sided it sounds. She was frail and in poor health. She was able to live alone, but just barely. Whereas the antagonist (in this case an actual villain) was strong and capable. That alone is already an unequal matchup, which makes us uncomfortable. The good and the bad sides of the story are not in balance. But I think the far larger problem with the story (and why it has grabbed so much attention) is the connection we have gained to the protagonist. Every day the news is carries stories about Nancy Guthrie. We get to see videos of her with family before she was taken. We get to watch her family make tearful pleas to the kidnappers, we get to see law enforcement leaders holding press conferences about her case, and everywhere we go in public we bump into strangers who are talking about the case. All of these things act as forces of protagonism, supporting Nancy’s story. There is so much protagonism that we have developed an attachment to this woman, even though she is a stranger to us. If not to her, then at least to her story.
Perversely, we know almost nothing about the other side. We don’t know who the antagonist is. We only have a single video of them covering up a ring camera. We have no sense of him (if they are a him) as a person. We don’t know anything. For the story to feel balanced, we need to have an equal amount of information about the villain as we do the hero, but that information is not forthcoming. Obviously this is not a story that can devolve into humor, and yet the lack of information on one side leaves the story so terribly imbalanced that it makes us all uncomfortable.
***
The weird thing is none of this is real. These are stories that for the most part have nothing to do with ourselves, and yet we are captured by their telling, held captive by our collective discomfort.
I’ve always read a lot of fiction, so I am a bit of an outlier, but all of us are familiar with some pretty crazy stories. Children’s stories often feature animals that can talk and have agency, exactly like humans, but no one stands up in a kindergarten class and says, “Cats can’t talk. This story is crazy pants.” As we get older we discover all manner of monsters, from vampires and werewolves, to ghosts and ghouls. There’s even a monster that makes a living person out of the parts of dead bodies, and then abandons them. Now that is a monster.
We each have a sense that none of these monsters are real, but when it gets late at night we still can get scared. We ask each other if we believe in ghosts, or aliens from outer space, but we never ask if we believe in stories. As soon as someone strings a story together then its true, at least to our brains. All you have to do is wait until midnight and that big, bright line between fiction and nonfiction suddenly stretches pretty darn thin.
The weird thing isn’t that we are affected by unbelievable stories, the weird thing is we need to pretend that some of them are real. They are all real, in some way or another. All of them. They may not exist in the flesh and blood, but they are very much alive in our culture, and more importantly, in our heads. And no matter how hard you try, you can’t quite turn this part of your brain completely off. If it’s a story, then it’s real.
***
Since I first heard about it, the Nancy Guthrie story has reminded me of another famous kidnapping, that of Charles Lindbergh, the baby of the famous aviator, who was kidnapped from his home in 1932. That case was huge in the media of the day (it was called the crime of the century), and ended on a very sad note.
I’ve known about the Lindbergh kidnapping from my time studying history at University, but I didn’t understand why my mind kept trying to connect the two until now. Both stories started imbalanced. Charles Lindbergh was a 20 month old child, while Nancy Guthrie is an 84 year old woman. Already we understand that neither is in a fair fight with their kidnappers. In both cases, the ever increasing publicity about the crime lead to more and more information about the victim, while almost nothing was known about the assailant. That is, the public developed strong ties to one side of the story, but not the other, which lead to an ever growing sense of discomfort throughout the nation.
The more the Guthrie story plays on the news, the more that regular people talk about it, the greater our discomfort will grow. This discomfort isn’t fatal, but it does draw our attention in the same way that a car crash on the side of the road, or a violent act playing out in front of us, captures our attention. We are stuck, fixated on the account until the story is brought into balance.
The way I see it, balance for this story can come in one of two ways. The first (and preferred) outcome is that Nancy is found safe, meaning she somehow overcame the forces of antagonism. This is preferred not only because an elderly woman is returned to her family, but also because it is a story where the hero has vanquished their villain. The other way for this story to achieve balance would be when her assailant is captured and brought to trial. In this case, the forces of protagonism would still succeed, just not with the hero present. Until either of these two happen, expect to remain uncomfortable.
I know—it’s just a story, and yet it’s so much more.