Mass shootings and narrative power

For the victims at Uvalde.

Bell bottom blues, you made me cry
I don’t want to lose this feeling
And if I could choose a place to die
It would be in your arms

Do you want to see me crawl across the floor to you?
Do you want to hear me beg you to take me back?
I’d gladly do it because
I don’t want to fade away
Give me one more day, please
I don’t want to fade away
In your heart I want to stay

It’s all wrong, but it’s all right
The way that you treat me baby
Once I was strong but I lost the fight
You won’t find a better loser

Bell Bottom Blues / Bobby Whitlock / Eric Patrick Clapton

A friend and I recently had a disagreement about a topic seemingly unrelated to mass shootings. We discussed Disney movies, the classic animated romances, like Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, and The Lion King, and she made the point that they were all stories of unhealthy codependency and gendered stereotypes. The fawning, soft, or gentle female lead, and the flawed, often aggressive, hard, and strong male protagonist mutually rescue and complete each other – the yin to each other’s yang. These stories are sentimental, romantic, and full of passion.

The problem, she remarked, is that there are other forms of relationships, other ways of being with people that don’t lead to the unhealthy dependence characteristic of this traditional relationship pattern, and other ways of self-expression that don’t fit into these gendered categories.

We see a similar relational archetype in Eric Clapton’s song Bell Bottom Blues. My friend argued, again, “This song is so unhealthy.” Verses like “You won’t find a better loser”, “do you want to hear me beg?”, “I don’t want to fade away”, all bespeak the passion, the raw emotion, and the sentimentality of Clapton’s plea for the married Pattie Boyd (her husband at the time was Beatles guitarist George Harrison who she later divorced and, eventually, married Clapton). This is the story of the wounded man begging for the woman he believes will complete him.

Clapton would go on to struggle badly with substance abuse and domestic violence, underscoring the unresolved issues and insecurities in Bell-Bottom Blues.

However, the lyrics and weepy desperation of the guitar in Bell Bottom Blues are also fairly universal human thoughts and emotions, and Clapton channeled them in a more or less healthy way in his music. Later in his life in a less healthy way.

If someone of such tremendous cultural and personal power as Eric Clapton can struggle with such desperation and self-destructive behavior, should it surprise us that under the right conditions, similarly wounded individuals can resort to truly heinous things so that they don’t “fade away”?

Indeed, in the final sentence of Kurt Cobain’s suicide note, he speaks exactly to this impulse: “Better to burn out than to fade away” (a line from a Neil Young song (My My, Hey Hey)) captures the core human fear of disappearing without anyone noticing you were ever around.

I believe that my friend’s implication is that we should all strive for better relationships and different ways of being with others, because these archetypes and stereotyped patterns cause us too much pain and lead to too many issues. In their milder forms these issues lead to a dysfunctional Eric Clapton, and in more extreme forms we get mass shooters. So, this line of thought goes, we should work for something better and change the cultural problems that lead to these issues.

I agree with my friend in part. But there is a point at which these patterns and archetypes go beyond culture and are founded on biological hardwiring of human psychology. The archetypes underlying the Disney movies, the passion informing the writing of Eric Clapton and suicide of Kurt Cobain, and the abhorrent, tragic violence of mass shooters are all rooted in a biological drive to be remembered, to find union with another, to reproduce and pass ourselves on.

The narratives are courtship, like the avian bachelor performing dance and acrobatics and adorned with his most dazzling costume to impress his muse. There is something backwards and decadent about trying to change the core narrative. You can have narrative spinoffs and deviations, but efforts to change the larger narrative are a confusion of the biological roots with culture (perhaps we can get there [I’m skeptical], but it can’t be in one big grand movement. Humans evolved slowly and culture can go faster than biology, but it can’t go as fast as some want it to right now). So, we need to work less on changing the narrative (people will be passionate and dependent on others and that can be both healthy and unhealthy) and more on addressing factors (social media [both its existence and use], capitalist and bureaucratic systems that lead to anomie and alienation, mental health diagnosis and treatment, access to deadly weapons, and rapid cultural change) that lead to unhealthy manifestations of the narrative (e.g. mass murder).

Being a well-publicized mass-murderer isn’t even difficult, and that’s the problem. Morally reprehensible, yes, and for the average person, unthinkable; but logistically, it’s not that hard. Change the variables that make it easy. Get rid of social media, or radically change it. I really mean that, it’s making us fucking sick. Find more human ways of connection. Find ways to radically alter smartphones and other tech so that it isn’t trying to make us addicted. Make gun access more difficult. Find ways to become unified as a country again (I suggest less emphasis on what makes us different and more on what makes us one – that includes conversations about race). And finally, don’t shame people for what they believe (without social media this will likely get much easier). Moreover, everyone wants more mental health screening and treatment, and yes, I think that would be helpful. But what we’ve been doing for mental health is just a band-aid on the wound. We are the most medicated people in history and we have never been more miserable; the other causes I mention are more fundamental.

People want a beautiful and compelling story. They want, even if it’s just in a small way, a sliver of that archetypal beauty. And if they can’t figure out a way to get that, or if they have people telling them they are wrong for wanting that, they may want to burn the whole thing down – not just for them, but for everyone. Currently we have structures in place (largely I lay the blame on social media) that reward abhorrent behaviors by giving them a massive media platform. For the world they are the villain, but they can be the anti-heroes of their nihilistic fan club. The story these men are telling themselves, the story that animates their behavior, is anti-human and anti-life. But, it’s better to burn out than to fade away.