Understanding Whiteness Part 20: Growth, death and lessons from Friends
Embracing death
In the world of stories, death is not always a bad thing. As a precursor to rebirth, it can actually be the most desirable outcome. We’ve already discussed Ebeneezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, a character so miserable and misanthropic that he has to die, metaphorically, in order to make way for the enlightened version of himself who loves Christmas and wants to buy everybody a turkey.
For characters like Scrooge, who obviously need to change, these metaphorical deaths are where hope lives. Every character, even the good ones, have to undergo some kind of ego death in order to simply go forward in their journey. It’s the basis of learning. When characters don’t change and their older versions don’t ‘die’, they get stuck. Their narrative development simply ceases to happen.
We see this a lot in television serials, where the initial characterisation of key players is often the fuel all the drama that follows. As a result, the main characters in most long-running TV shows might not undergo any real psychological change at all, if any. The rule is simple, as once outlined by the Seinfeld writer Larry David: no hugging, no learning. It’s the last part that’s most crucial. In his sitcom world, the central characters absolutely, categorically had to stay in a state of suspended development. If they learned anything, their core motivation would wither and the physics of the show’s comedy would cease to work.
Learning from Friends
In a sense, dominant whiteness cannot learn anything if white supremacy continues to reign supreme. This, more than anything, explains why the education system at large (I’m talking about the modern west now) is so bad at teaching its children about white supremacy. If new generations were actually going to learn anything about the true nature of racism and the stories that explain white supremacy, then that story would have to change. And as we know, and as I explored in the section about monsters, white supremacy does not want society to change, because it benefits from the way things are.
To return to the world of TV sitcoms for a moment, I want to look at Friends, one of the most popular sitcoms of all time, charting the hilarious adventures of a group of six (white) twentysomethings living in New York city.
The success of the Friends formula relies on the fact that their basic characteristics can not and do not change. Joey is always a womanising airhead. Chandler is always a neurotic wisecracker. Phoebe is always a whimsical oddball. Ross is always a spoilt, arrogant hopeless romantic. Monica is always a neurotic control freak. And Rachel, is always the loveably ditsy, materialistic popular girl. In the reality of a serialised sitcom, returning week after week to a universe that has to reset back to factory settings, change would be debilitating.
I once described Friends as this:
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