Anatomy of a Folly

Don't rush to judgement. It's complicated

I watched Anatomy of a Fall yesterday and loved it. Everything about the film is superlative, and I won’t attempt a review here. It amplified my belief, reinforced every year by the MAMI festival, that we are in a golden age of cinema. Watch it.

The film reminded me of the strange dichotomy involved in watching a film or reading a story. On one hand, every story has to simplify the real world to be a story. On the other hand, great art and literature always involve an embrace of complexity. As any work of art must do, Anatomy of a Fall has to handle the tradeoff between these two imperatives. Unusually, it is also about this tussle, in another context.

Early in the film — no real spoilers follow — a man falls to his death from his house. His wife is put on trial. Was it suicide or did she push him? The prosecution wants to prove that she killed him, and every fact they come across has to be forced to fit that belief. The fights they had, the things they fought about, the resentments and insecurities. And sure, they can be moulded in that simple direction — but as we realise through the film, everything is complicated.

As the protagonist says during the film — I’m paraphrasing — one cannot judge a relationship by a glimpse of it. Different glimpses will show you different realities.

None of us are fixed points of personhood — we are like rivers flowing across different selves. I believe we can never even truly know ourselves. How can we know another person then? I believe we never even have a handle on our own relationships. How can we know what another relationship is like?

It is not just the prosecution that is trying to nail down a simple narrative — it is also the couple’s son, who is filled with doubts. Did his father jump? Did his mother push? Another character in the film tells him that when one is tormented by uncertainty, one way out is to arrive at certainty by a force of will. Choose a narrative and stick to it.

The Urge to Simplify

Storytelling is the best tool we have to make sense of the world. It is ironic, then, that it involves editing out reality. The world is too complex to understand; we turn to simple stories that helps us make sense of it.

Jorge Luis Borges once wrote a great story about how a true map of the world would have to be as big as the world itself, “which coincided point for point with it.” Though he doesn’t say it in the story, such a map would be immediately out-of-date, because the world is constantly changing.

So we need stories. They are useful tools for us to understand how the world works. Otherwise we would be paralysed. This is the reason we have evolved with the instinct to turn everything around us into a story. But there is a danger to this.

The danger is that we look for a simple story in everything. This can not just give us a false view of the world, it can often make us bad thinkers. The people who understand the world the best, and therefore thrive in it, are those who dive into its complexities most eagerly. Simple stories can be lazy crutches that impede thinking.

This is why Jeff Bezos banned powerpoint presentations in Amazon. He insisted on six-page memos for meetings instead. A powerpoint is a simplification of a narrative. An essay is an elaboration on a theme that forces deeper thinking.

Another way of thinking of it is in terms of joining dots to paint a picture. A simple story has few dots and a pixellated picture. A complex picture would involve more dots, and could even be high-definition.

Or think of podcasts. A five-minute podcast has to aim for the simplest narrative possible. A five-hour podcast has to avoid it.

Don’t Rush to Judgement

Over time, The Seen and the Unseen has moved from being deep dives into subjects to deep dives into people. This format has given me a lot of joy. I like the oral-history quality of some of my episodes. I like sinking into peoples lives and memories with them, being open and vulnerable myself, going to places neither me nor my guest might have expected.

(For example, check out my eight-hour episodes with Shanta Gokhale, Jerry Pinto and KP Krishnan. I love those so much!)

Adopting this form has changed not just my work, it has changed me — as I elaborated on in this essay. Perhaps the biggest change is that I am less likely to rush to judgement. I have a deeper understanding of how we all contain multitudes. This is the opposite of what my Twitter self used to be.

Back when I joined Twitter, the form — 140 characters, later 280 — encouraged simplistic takes. Deep dives were impossible. Even dialogue was impossible, with everyone incentivised to pass judgement on others to appear virtuous themselves. It made us all into worse people.

Think about what happens when we pass judgement on someone as a bad person — we are implying that we are good ourselves. This is an act of vanity, not virtue.

Many of the people I have done episodes with are caricatured online in the most reductive ways, sometimes by both the left and the right. I try to break through that to the real person. Obviously even I can only come up with glimpses — but there are always enough of them for me to begin to see a real, three-dimensional, frail person suffering from the ailment all of us share: the human condition.

Is This a Daily Now?

I posted on this newsletter just yesterday, and here I am again today. Does this mean that this is now a daily newsletter? No, no, no, calm down!

There were times last year when I felt I didn’t know who I was. I lost my sense of certainty about many things, including my own character. I feel like I travelled a lot and ended up at what seems to be the same place, but it is not the same place and I am not the same person. I won’t elaborate on this because I’m not even sure what happened.

But looking ahead, I decided that rather than be paralysed by doubt and befuddlement over my own multitudes, I’d focus on movement. Just do something every day. Write. Or learn. Or have an eight-hour conversation with someone. (That counts as a great day.)

That’s where this sudden regularity of newsletter posts comes from. So no, it won’t be every day. But it will be regular, because one must keep moving.

Chop that wood. Carry water. What’s the sound of one hand clapping?

Illlustrations by Simahina.