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The Screen Became a Mirror · Infinite Threads with Bob Barnett

• 0:00
  [music]
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: and time.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: Back to Infinite Threads, I'm your host Bob.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: All week we've been looking at something I don't think I fully understood when I was younger.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Television was teaching me.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: Not in the obvious way.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody sat me down and said, tonight's lesson is empathy.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: I was just watching shows.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: That's it.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: Laughing at Archie.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: Watching Ed Brown complain.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: Following Hawkeye through another impossible day.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: Seeing Florida Evans hold a family together.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: But looking back now, I think those stories were doing something to me.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: They were teaching me to stay with people long enough to see more than the first thing.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: And today, Well,
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: today I want to finish this week with a show that may have understood that better
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: than almost anyone.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: The Twilight Zone.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: Rod Serling had a remarkable way of taking something uncomfortable
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: about human beings and moving it just far enough away that we were willing to look
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: at it.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it became aliens.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe a strange town.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe a future society.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: The setting changed every week.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: The human behavior usually didn't.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: That was the trick.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the strongest examples is the monsters are due on Maple Street.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: I brought this one up before.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: The story begins in an ordinary neighborhood.
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  SPEAKER_00: Nothing especially frightening.
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  SPEAKER_00: People, they know one another.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: Kids are outside.
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  SPEAKER_00: Neighbors are talking.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then something strange happens.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: The power goes out.
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  SPEAKER_00: Cars stop working.
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  SPEAKER_00: Nobody knows why.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: And very quickly, uncertainty becomes suspicion.
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  SPEAKER_00: One neighbor starts wondering about another.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: Someone remembers something odd.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: Another person becomes suspicious because his car happens to start
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: when everyone else's does not.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: Before long,
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: the people of Maple Street are doing,
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: well, they're doing most of the damage themselves.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Not really surprising, is it?
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: The supposed outside threat barely has to do anything.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: Fear does the work.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: That episode aired in 1960, guys, but the mechanism still feels painfully familiar.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: Something happens that people do not understand, and then we become afraid.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: Then we start looking for somebody to blame.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: And once somebody becomes suspicious enough, Ordinary details begin looking like evidence.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: That's not science fiction.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: That, guys, that's human behavior.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: The science fiction simply gave us enough distance to watch ourselves doing it.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why I think that the screen became a mirror.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: We thought we were watching those people on Maple Street.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: Then if we were paying attention, the uncomfortable question appeared.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: Would I have behaved differently?
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you like to hope so, but I can't know for certain.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: Fear changes people.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: Group pressure changes people.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: That's one reason empathy and self-awareness matter so much.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: If I know that fear can distort the way that I see someone,
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: maybe I become a little more cautious about what fear is telling me.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: And that's useful.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: Then there's the episode called The Eye of the Beholder.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: A woman is undergoing treatment because society considers her face horribly abnormal.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: For most of the episodes, We don't clearly see the faces of the doctors and the nurses.
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  SPEAKER_00: We mostly see her.
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  SPEAKER_00: She wants desperately to look normal.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then the bandages come off.
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  SPEAKER_00: And to us, she looks beautiful.
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  SPEAKER_00: I mean, model gorgeous.
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  SPEAKER_00: The doctors, though, they recoil.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: Then we finally see them.
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  SPEAKER_00: Their faces are distorted, by our standards at least.
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  SPEAKER_00: But in their world, They are normal, and she is the outsider.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: That reveal is famous because it flips the entire story in one moment.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: But underneath the twist is a very simple question.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: Who gets to decide what normal means?
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  SPEAKER_00: And once a society decides, what happens to the people who don't fit in that normal?
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: Again, Serling could have given us a straightforward lecture about conformity
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: and prejudice, but instead he made us feel the assumption first.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: Then he turned it around on us.
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  SPEAKER_00: That is super powerful storytelling.
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  SPEAKER_00: He was a master.
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  SPEAKER_00: You discover that you brought something into the episode, an expectation, a judgment.
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  SPEAKER_00: A definition of what a human face is supposed to look like.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: Then the story exposes it.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: I think great television did that over and over.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: Not always with science fiction either.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it happened around Archie Bunker's dining room table.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes in Ed Brown's garage.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes in a police squad room.
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  SPEAKER_00: Or an operating room during a war.
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  SPEAKER_00: The setting changed.
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  SPEAKER_00: The question underneath it often sounded surprisingly similar.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: Can you see the person?
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  SPEAKER_00: Not just the behavior,
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  SPEAKER_00: not just the label,
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  SPEAKER_00: not just the thing that makes them different from you, but the person.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: That's what I keep coming back to after this week.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: Archie taught us that a prejudiced man could also be frightened,
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: wounded, loyal, and capable of deep love.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: Ed Brown showed us what could happen
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: when somebody he had categorized became somebody that he cared about.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: Florida Evans reminded us that
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: the person holding everyone else together might eventually need somewhere safe
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: To fall apart.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: And Hawkeye, Hawkeye showed us that humor can be both joy and armor.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: Those stories complicated people.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: I think that was a good thing for us.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: That was good for us because real empathy begins when people become complicated.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's easy to hate a cardboard cutout.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's harder once the person has a history,
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  SPEAKER_00: once we know who they love,
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: once we understand what frightens them, once we recognize something of ourselves.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: That last part may be the most important
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: because sometimes television didn't introduce us to somebody different.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: It exposed something familiar.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: Archie's stubbornness, Hawkeye's Tendency to joke when things become uncomfortable.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: Florida's instinct to stay strong because everybody else needed her.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe we did not share their exact circumstances, but we recognized the mechanism.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: And when that happens, the distance between viewer and character gets smaller.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's where empathy grows.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: Not from thinking, I'm exactly like you.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: But sometimes it begins with, I recognize something in you.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: That is enough.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: I've been thinking a lot this week
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: about how much those old shows may have shaped my own beliefs.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: My God, I got it from other places too, but those shows did something.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: I cannot prove exactly what came from where.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: Human beings do not develop that neatly.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: But I know these stories were there, week after week, year after year.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I was a TV baby, guys.
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  SPEAKER_00: I watched it all.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: They showed me people who could be wrong without being completely disposable.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: They showed me that prejudice could be challenged.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: They showed me that a difficult person might have a wound underneath the difficulty.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: That's an important one.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: And they showed me that understanding the wound did not mean pretending the harm was acceptable.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: That sounds an awful lot like the philosophy that we keep turning to on Infinite Threads.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: Stop the harm.
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  SPEAKER_00: Protect people.
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  SPEAKER_00: But keep looking for the human being.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because if we stop doing that, we may stop asking the most useful question.
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  SPEAKER_00: What happened here?
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  SPEAKER_00: What made this person?
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  SPEAKER_00: What could interrupt this pattern before it becomes somebody else's wound?
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: I think television taught me to ask those questions long before I knew I was asking them.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe that's what stories do at their best.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: They let us practice being human.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: We sit in a chair.
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  SPEAKER_00: We watch somebody else's life.
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  SPEAKER_00: For half an hour, that person becomes real to us.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then the show ends.
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  SPEAKER_00: But sometimes, something stays.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
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  SPEAKER_00: those ripples,
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  SPEAKER_00: a scene,
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  SPEAKER_00: a line, a moment when the character we thought we understood became something more.
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  SPEAKER_00: Years later, we remember it.
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  SPEAKER_00: A bunch of you,
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  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure, have remembered several of the scenes that I've talked about in this week.
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  SPEAKER_00: And maybe the next time we meet a real person who is difficult, angry, frightened, or unlike us,
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  SPEAKER_00: Well, there'll be a tiny bit more room inside of us to wonder what we're not seeing.
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  SPEAKER_00: That curiosity is good.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's not nothing.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's how a story becomes part of a person.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: I think that happened to me.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe Archie did teach me something.
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  SPEAKER_00: In fact, I believe he did.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe Chico and Ed did too.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe Florida,
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  SPEAKER_00: Hawkeye,
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: George Jefferson, Barney Miller, and Rod Serling all left little pieces behind.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: Not instructions, but threads.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: This is what storytelling needs to get back to.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: Somewhere along the way, those threads became part of the way that I learned to look at people.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe that is one reason that Infinite Threads exists at all.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: The shows ended.
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  SPEAKER_00: The lessons did not, guys.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: And think about that.
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  SPEAKER_00: This applies to your whole life.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: How easy it is sometimes for people to vote for war.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: Because we don't know those people that we're going to war against.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: We don't see their families.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: We don't see...
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: The baby's born and all of that.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: And that keeps us separated from what we should be thinking about.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: I hope that this week has given you all something to think about.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: That if you don't know the person on the other side,
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: But you've already categorized them as the enemy,
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: the lazy person, whatever category that you want to throw them into.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't know them,
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: then stop for a second and imagine what they could be going through.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: What would happen to you that might make you do something silly, wrong, hateful, whatever?
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: What could happen to you to cause that?
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: Take that.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: You've got an imagination.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: You have a brain.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: So think about that.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: Put it in your head and go,
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: what would happen to me that could make me do the same thing that those people,
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: those others are doing?
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: And once you do that,
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: You learn that there are whole lives on the other side,
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: that so many things could have added into the recipe to make what you've got now.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: And it doesn't mean that we let them continue to hurt us or whatever,
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: but it also means that we need to remember that we humans
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: Are all pretty much the same.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: I love you guys very, very much.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: And thank you for sticking with me this week.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you got something out of it.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: You know what I need you to do, don't you?
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: Go out there and pass it on, okay?
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: Later, Gators.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: Bye-bye.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_02: Every
• 16:05
  [music]