A Night Manager Moral Dilemma

[bratty_jedi]

A week or two ago, I went with a friend to the movies. A trailer for Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, the new comedy with Tina Fey and Martin Freeman about a reporter in Afghanistan, came on. When the trailer ended, I sort of sighed and whispered to my friend that I had nothing against the movie in particular but I'm just tired of and done with movies that

Comments

[unsentimentalf]

I thought the same thing about halfway through the first ep of Night Manager. I didn’t have a problem with it, just an awareness that this was maybe a rather oldfashioned way to tell a story. But then John Le Carre is 84 and has been writing this way for a very long time. To tell him that he can no longer write stories from the point of view of British intelligence officers would be ridiculous.

I tend to the unfashionable view that there are no ethically good or bad works of fiction, just well and badly written ones. Certainly no-one should be obliged to write in a particular way and I don’t think it’s necessary to feel guilty about enjoying anything that’s well done regardless of the viewpoint it’s from. But it’s always good to be aware of how a story fits in with the world and whose stories might be being heard partly because they are privileged and whose perhaps aren’t being told.

I also think there’s an important difference between story and characterisation. If your main characters are upper class, straight and white, that might just be a consequence of the setting of the story you’re telling, but if your non white, non straight characters are all poorly characterised plot devices, or if your characters are all straight and white for no apparent reason, that’s bad writing and people can legitimately call you out on it.

People are obviously a lot more aware now of gaps in coverage when it comes to what reaches the screen, and that's undoubtedly a good thing, but if you watch the Night Manager and think "why don't we see more of the Arab Spring from the POV of those involved", the answer is to push for more of those programmes to be made, not to boycott a perfectly good thriller because it isn't from that viewpoint.

(Edit: for clarification I think the BBC and other broadcasters have an obligation to commission programmes from a wide and representative base, and they should be held to that, but I don't think they have an obligation *not* to commission individual programmes from any given viewpoint.)