Most of the time, change is good. For our Learning with Digital Stories class (INTE5340), we were given the option of critiquing a different reading from the book Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community. The author is Joe Lambert, who founded the Center For Digital Storytelling in 1994. The organization’s website, StoryCenter, showcases a variety of digital stories that include themes such as health, family, education and social justice. I’ve already critiqued a couple of these videos on my blog. After reading this chapter, I felt like I was having an “Ah Ha!” moment in realizing the purpose of humans to tell stories.
This first chapter, entitled “The Work of Story”, explored an interesting explanation on the origins of storytelling. From Lambert’s point of view, much of it has to do with human survival and endurance. I found this significant since a major focal theme I am concentrating on in this class is adversity. Lambert nicely explains that:
“The memories associated with our most important life lessons are inevitably those with either strong emotional encoding at the moment, as in traumas or events involving those close to us” (p.8).
After reading this sentence, I thought about not only the pivotal moments in my life, but also those moments in history that other people have witnessed and felt compelled to report to the rest of humanity. The Nazi Holocaust is a perfect example. Under the cover of war, millions of innocent civilians were systematically executed while the German people never suspected a thing under the Nazi propaganda system. It wasn’t until years after World War II ended, when people began listening to the growing number of stories from the survivors, did the public become more aware of the horrific slaughter.
Lambert also discusses how 20th century popular culture tapped into myths to help explore a industrial age society that was feeling dislocated as people were moving from the country to the city. For example, he cites how the Western genre of film “showed us how to bring frontier ethics into our chaotic urban experience, mapping the pastoral ideal of self-sufficiency and family integrity onto a suburban ideal of the single family dwelling” (p.9). Director John Ford was masterful in this genre with films such as Stagecoach, The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The author’s ideas of storytelling in American cinema got me thinking about another classic film: Jaws.
In the middle of the movie, the three main characters discus the origins of their tattoos. Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) asks the boat captain Quint (Robert Shaw) about an old tattoo on his arm. Quint tells Hooper it’s the name of a U.S. Navy ship he served on during World War II: The U.S.S. Indianapolis. Prodded on by local sheriff Brodie (Roy Scheider), Quint tells the tale of how he survived a massive shark attack after the U.S.S. Indianapolis was torpedo by a Japanese submarine. It’s one of the most memorable moments in film history, but when reading this chapter, the scene got me thinking about Lambert’s idea of storytelling.
In reality, those actual crew members from the U.S.S. Indianapolis who survived that horrific ordeal felt a need to tell that story years later for several reasons. First, because they were on a top-secret mission to deliver the atomic bomb to be dropped on Hiroshima, they could not discuss what happened for many years. Secondly, there reached a point after the end of World War II that people didn’t want to hear “war stories”, especially ones that ended in disaster. Due to the fact that for many years, even decades, had passed before the truth could finally be told about the U.S.S. Indianapolis, it was up to survivors to keep the story alive so that others would understand the many sacrifices made by soldiers, sailors and airmen in harm’s way. These such stories need to be told for the benefit of future generations. Lambert mentions the importance of storytelling when he adds, “Story… works biologically to insure the total recall of those events which define we have ingrained as of greatest emotional importance to us” (p.8).
I’m looking forward to the next reading from Joe Lambert’s book.