The OA Tells a Story
Brit Marling really wants you to understand how narrative works
I want to talk about The OA. And that means SPOILERS. Seriously, like major ones. We can’t have a talk about narratives and consequences if you aren’t, like, clued in.
GET IT?
Ok, everyone who is currently here has either seen The OA or is totally and 100% ok with the discussing the plot of said Netflix experience? Right, right.
It is almost impossible to cram a discussion of all the amazing things that The OA does with narrative and meta-storytelling into a reasonably sized blog post; no one wants 4,000 words of amateur narratology. So let’s talk it slow and start with Episode 1. This will not be a re-cap of The OA (I loathe recapping). But in the structure of the show, Episode 1 functions as a unit all by itself, so it is the best place to start.
Ok, I lied, just a smidge. There is just a little bit more I need to say to be in the A+ double good best place to start. Narrative, storytelling, is always, on some level, a lie. You can take issue with the harshness of the use of the “L” word, though one of my favorite filmmakers, Wim Wenders, certainly doesn’t. However you judge it, narrative is always a deliberately manipulative act that knowingly creates order where none exists to make a point. In the best versions of events, narrative lies the truth, in Paul Verhoeven’s charming phrase (which I’m sure he stole from someone else, entirely in keeping with the weirdness on display in The Fourth Man). You can find the worst version of events in the pages of Breitbart (no I will not link to that trash). Reality is significantly more complex than our ability to process it. Because reality is mediated through imperfect perception, each part of reality that we experience ourselves, let alone through the words of others, is incomplete and possibly untrustworthy (memory itself is also faulty, even collectively). We can overcome these obstacles, to a certain extent, but only by focusing on one or two things at a time (up to seven). There is just toooooo much reality. So we simplify, elide, and leave out of the frame. We create order from chaos. We do this in words, but the words themselves are already not the events. Consciousness, which happens in language, is always at least one step removed, a representation of an unreliable impression and it gets worse from there. You can lose yourself in the evanescence of meaning, the fleeting and utterly imperfect nature of human communication amidst the overwhelming sensory tide of history. Stories help us stay sane.
Are you freaked out yet about even having the possibility of understanding, like, anything at all? Good. This is where The OA starts. Marling doesn’t waste as many words as I just did explaining it, she just shows us shaky cell phone video of a woman jumping from a bridge. How’s that for knowing nothing? Our first experiences with this woman, we share some of the same sense of dislocation and loss that she experiences at finding herself in the hospital (orders of magnitude less, but still). Eventually, we learn that this woman, Prairie, is now, “home,” or at least a place where she was, though not where she wants to be. She was blind and now can see (*cough*miracle*cough*). She has mysterious scars. She has PTSD, at the very least. She makes intense connections with apparently random people. None of this makes sense for a long time (maybe ever, depending your reading). Over the course of the first episode, by the slow accumulation of events and conversations, we are allowed to believe that we understand, not necessarily Prairie and what happened to her, but whose story is being by told. Prairie is our protagonist and we are going to watch her re-acclimate to society and improve the lives of her motley crew. We think that right up until we get to the unfinished house at the end of Crawford St. We get the very first frame of the credits at the 57:31 mark of an episode that is 1:09:00 long, as the OA begins the elaborate telling of a very different story.
When we talk about the suspension of disbelief, what we are really talking about is trust. “I grant that this story is not real and I place my faith in the person doing the telling that I am being lied to for a good reason” is the unspoken disclaimer. What the OA does in the attic of that unfinished house is invert that sequence and demand that we, her audience, abandon that disclaimer: “You don’t trust me yet, but I need you to pretend that you do.” It’s a very subtle beginning in some ways, even as it plays as a large, possibly hokey, statement in the moment, as we will come to understand, but it forces us to think about trust, whether and/or what to believe. Not all narrators are trustworthy and first person narrators often make mistakes (see the body of work of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler) and the OA combines the two right in front of our eyes and asks us to deliberately choose to trust a narrator whose reliability we have not yet established. The story Prairie tells is fundamentally at odds with our daily experience of the world: blind people don’t just see. As the details add up, the natural response to every impossible thing that the OA says is to think “Well that’s just crazy, she’s crazy.” But if you made it to the end of episode 1 and you made it all the here to think about this, and if you were at all like me, you found a way to trust Prairie because of her emotional abilities, because she connected with people in a positive way. I should act like I trust her, even though I have no reason to, and I did.
What enables, or destroys, the ability to lie the truth is found in the balance between trust and disbelief. Destroy an audience’s trust too soon and they just resist the lie (too late and they question why they bothered). Brit Marling knows that and wants to make sure the OA said it aloud before the story even really starts. She’s telling you what the show is about and then directing your attention elsewhere for awhile.
And now I am going to do the same, leaving you with that cliffhanger to ponder while you go out and live your life, or find a protest, or whatever.
