Drama and the Ethics of Simulation
The underappreciated miracle of fiction.
Act 1 — Exposition
A man walks into a police station covered in blood. His shirt, ice-white, melts red. His face belies the massacre written on his hands. He has killed, and killed, and killed, and killed… no fewer than seven deaths, each in the image of divine reparation. Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Lust, Pride, Envy, Wrath. The list is gruesome. There is the fat man, force fed until his stomach explodes. And the lawyer, made to pay for his self-interest in self-incised flesh. And the prostitute, fucked with a blade by an adulterous lech. And the paedophile—chained and starved and rotted while breathing. And more. And more.
The man is a monster. There is no question. He is a white collar criminal who kills by choice and with a vengeful determination maintained over years. He is exacting, meticulous, patient, and creative. He is outright morally insane (there is again no question) basing most his most mortal decrees on archaic religious superstition unworthy of medievalism let alone modernity. But he is also intelligent with an internal logic worthy of explanation, understanding, criticism, and rebuke.
But by far the man’s most terrible feature is his style. He is an artist, make no mistake, a painter who sketches with violence and whose portraits hang like vandalised corpses in damnable protest. There is no questioning the aesthetic effectiveness of Dantesque judgement encoded in sacrifice, coloured in sangre, and staged in a city that never stops raining. Seven sins, seven days, seven deaths. Seldom has a killer had the procedural discipline let alone the creative vision to construct such an opus of murderous form. (Kemper is a hack!) And seldom have they combined such sickening vanity with genuine talent: not merely does he invite us to witness his crimes, he dares us not to appreciate them in all their intricate structure. (“What I've done is going to be puzzled over, and studied, and followed... forever.”) Because he is exactly right: we can’t. His arrogance is only matched by his brilliance—equal measures genius, idiot, master, moron; he is beauty and virtue in conflict, form and content in paradox; style and evil and order and chaos.
At least he would be. If he existed.
Act 2 — Conflict
Many will have guessed it: the man outlined above is a fiction, his victims are a fiction, his oeuvre: fiction. Many will have also recognised his particular case as that appearing in a film released in 1995. (I will not name the work, to avoid spoilers, but you can find it easily enough using the date and description above.) I will however name in isolation two men important to the analysis: John Doe and Andrew Kevin Walker. The killer described and the screenwriter who scribed him. Because between these two men lies an ethical vastness defining one of our most underappreciated ethical miracles: the miracle of drama.
Of Monsters and Men
The choice is simple. If one wants to create the artwork outlined above there are only two options.
Be John Doe. Torture and kill innocent people to protest impiety.
Be Andrew Kevin Walker. Write a screenplay where John Doe does these things.
In the first case, a minimum of seven people must die, in terrible agony, and in support of an aesthetics hijacked by wickedness. In the latter: one person must sit at his typewriter and simulate wickedness; no one must suffer beyond the odd carpal tunnel; and aesthetics acts in agreement with ethics to create both a great piece of art and a gentle night’s sleep. The measure between these two scenarios is the measure of all dramatic virtue: entertainment from evil. Not voyeuristic—because no one is harmed—and in the majority of cases morally opposed to the horror on screen. This holds true for our case study. Despite many popular misreadings of the film as endorsing Doe’s terrible work—the opposite is true. The film uses the killer's structural genius to refute his moral ignorance; it is a tragedy, yes, but with a veiled optimism resisting destruction. The same contrast holds for the men. Unlike Doe, Walker demands our respect without the burden of qualifiers. Indeed, every single artistic tribute applies to the writer as much as the killer; but none of the moral scorn can be levelled against his imagining of a chaos harmless by design. In reality we are reliably thankful for those narrative artists whose works challenge us most with conflicts both physical and abstract. They are fun, and stimulating, and educational, and so often therapeutic against genuine suffering in everyday life. On every conceivable level the dramatisation of conflict takes the worst things in reality and makes the best things in fiction: terror, horror, sorrow, heartbreak—into laughter, excitement, comfort, release. Men stand where monsters stood. And audiences are transformed from powerless victims damaged by trauma into spirited critics kindled by challenge. Drama and its understandings are nothing short of moral and aesthetic alchemy. A miracle written on paper and film.
Act 3 — Rising Action
Drama Reconsidered
I should clarify. My use of drama in this argument is somewhat atypical. The concept incorporates at least three distinct yet overlapping uses of the term in common discussion. They are as follows.
Conflict. A disagreement. Elementary courses in creative writing will outline the skeleton of story progression: exposition, action, climax, resolution. But the muscle and fat and lifeblood connecting such tissues is fundamentally strife. In our case this takes the form of a cat and mouse relationship between killer and cops. One party wants to end life. The other wants to save it. The conflict is clear. And beneath the obvious text lies veiled contentions between the natures of sin, virtue, dejection, and hope. Conflict in this sense is the singular content of dramaturgy. Yet it is insufficient alone for its unique moral value.
Fiction. The thing did not happen. As explored above, fiction is the necessary requirement for many of the ethical transformations conjured by drama. The most meaningful difference between Walker and Doe is the absence or presence of violence in beauty. If the thing happens in reality you are wicked. If it happens in imagination you are at worst a bit weird. (Indeed, Walker is somewhat rare amongst horror writers to so successfully distance himself from the content of his narrative—more on that below.) Only in confluence with the third dramatic tenet do most fictional conflicts emerge into triumph and most of their architects transform into heroes.
Irony. Saying one thing and meaning another. It is important to distinguish this from the traditional “dramatic irony” developed in ancient Greek tragedies and made famous by pantomimes and Scooby Doo serials. (A literary technique where the audience has more knowledge than the characters in the story i.e. “He’s behind you!”) Irony in this context favours the more general definition of conveying meaning with contrary language. And while fiction itself does contain an inherent irony of the structure “happened” / “not happened”, irony in this context extends further to the propositional contents of dramatised narratives. John Doe argues that the world is evil and that only through violence can it change towards good. The film, by staging Doe as such, argues the opposite. There is an irony inherent to most (but not all) great fictional conflicts from Hamlet to Harry Potter to Thanos to Doe. It is with irony that stories convey their true meanings and it is with this final feature that drama is realised.
Act 4 - Climax
The Principle of Drama
Conflict, fiction, irony. Taken together, these three concepts alone generate beauty from foulness and virtue from sin. And using these elements we can formalise a principle of drama in ethics more broadly.
That which is evil in reality can be good in simulation.
Of course, there are no guarantees. Many stories fail, their conflicts are contrived or overblown, their fictions are strange or illogical, their ironies are trite or obvious. Or perhaps their very motivations for existence are misplaced; or perhaps the methods of their production are problematic. I chose perhaps the best example of drama in action because all three components—conflict, irony, drama—as well as those external factors I have just listed, are radically successful. But the principle maintains that merely the capacity—not the guarantee—of ethical value belongs to simulation. There can indeed be immoral stories. For a variety of reasons. The principle merely states that any action, however evil, can be simulated as some fictional conflict, enjoyed as art, and considered to be moral. That no action is beyond the metamorphosis. Another reason why I chose the specific tale of Walker and Doe is because theirs is an evil superlative in magnitude. Rape, torture, murder, infanticide—nothing is beyond such singular devilry. Yet if Doe can be dramatised anything can. There is no fundamental limit to the ethical distance measured between reality, fiction, writer, and words. And by conjecturing a dramaturgy unbounded in its content, the principle also alludes to a future of simulated conflicts far greater than our own. More moral people can write more immoral stories and become more moral for it. This is not to claim that the content of all narrative arts can be reduced to the measure of their simulated evils. Indeed, many great stories contain little conflict, depict real events, or display meaning using direct methods (or do all three). It is merely the claim that all actions are, in principle, legitimate in drama. And that that is good.
Act 5 - Falling Action
Drama Applied
The extent of the influence of a drama in society is not yet appreciated. In truth it extends from writing and cinema to politics and sex. Here are some quick-fire applications of drama as I have outlined in everyday discourse, culture, entertainment, and art. This list is by no means exhaustive; there are undoubtedly more examples—but it illustrates the principle in both action and extent.
Horror
As explored above, horror is without a doubt the starkest example of drama. Some of the worst things ever witnessed have been witnessed on screen. They never happened. Cormac Mccarthy, like Walker, never hurt a fly in the writing of “Blood Meridian”. And when Ruggero Deodato, director of the 1980 found footage horror “Cannibal Holocaust”, was arrested on suspicion of murdering his cast—he paraided them unharmed in Italian court to confirm both his innocence and his genius of craft. Every case is the same. From Mary Shelley to James Wan horror creators play at the terrible to work at the good. And we rightfully love them for it.
Tragedy
If horror is fear without danger, tragedy is sorrow without loss. The exact same logic applies to every negative emotion in sentimental art in combination with drama: that which is bad can become good. Watching perhaps Ingmar Bergman; or reading perhaps John Keats; or hearing perhaps Elliott Smith—we are indeed made to feel sad. But the sorrow from tragedy, I would argue, is equally as harmful as the fear from horror. Negatively so. In truth, sentiment in art is so often soothing to those miseries in the real world, and does indeed form the basis of multiple schools of therapy. It is exciting to consider the future of such techniques with advancements in virtual reality. The art of the art cry is only just beginning.
Action
“It’s not violence—it’s action!” This is literally true. For the same reasons outlined above, violence in drama, like both horror and tragedy, is fake. Tarantino films contain precisely zero real violence against real people. (Save perhaps Leo’s hand.) Yet they contain a great deal of simulated action between characters. This is precisely what early pundits criticising “violent" media (“Mortal Kombat”, “Grand Theft Auto”—and basically every other video game) failed to understand. That which is evil in reality can be made good in fiction. We still see this today, with various dramatised music genres (hip hop, heavy metal) ostensibly “glorifying violence” and demonised by the media. This is false. The violence espoused in modern gangster rap is largely performative; and the Satanism expressed in modern hard rock is, for the most part, an ironic expression of hate by some of the nicest men in society.
Sex
Without going into too much detail, drama is everywhere in sex. BDSM is one great simulated conflict using pain to spark pleasure and shame to speak love. When the person you trust most in the world degrades and belittles you; when they restrain and denigrate you—that betrayal, within the transformative auras of dramatised irony, is as much an admission of love as poetry or flowers. Not all sex is dramatic in this way, of course; “making love” represents a sincere alignment of both spiritual and physical communion without the need for contrary action. But “role play”, “kink”, and other forms of sexualised play are as functionally dramatic as television or theatre.
The Dramatic Fallacy
I have explored some of the positive applications of drama. There does however exist an unfortunate misfiring of the concept that inverts its effects. The dramatic fallacy states.
That which is true in simulation is true in reality.
In short, the dramatic fallacy is the dramatic principle with both fiction and irony removed. Only conflict remains. So much of our psychology operates under this misconception. Journalism, activism, politics, pop-culture—even our most influential philosophies make the fundamental error of mistaking ironic, simulated conflicts for sincere, realistic ones. Consider disaster movies. What are intended as frivolous fantasies of globalised destruction are interpreted as proofs of man’s fated end. Indeed, a great deal of “doomer” dispositions can be traced back to our love for the climactic; yet removed from its context the miracle is wasted. It is the equivalent of taking horror at face value and agreeing with Doe—or action as real danger and running from his projection. (This is precisely what happened, in fact, in the case of the train frontispiecing this essay: audiences literally fled from the image for fear of collision.)
The purpose of drama is to take the worst of reality and make the best of imagination—to overcome evil, not succumb to it. By taking art literally we invert its great virtue and legitimise violence in everyday life. This is most evident in the dramatic fallacy’s most terrible application: copycat killers. There are multiple cases of real life psychopaths taking inspiration from art in the course of their crimes, stylising their sadism in trashy homage. (It is easy to picture someone copying Doe; somewhat less easy to picture them succeeding.) There are even dramatised stories about such killings—”Human Centipede 2”, for example, whose meta-narrative stages a real world man recreating the myriapod horrors witnessed in its predecessor. By far a lesser work than those explored above—it is at least a triumph of principle over fallacy.
Act 6 - Resolution
The lesson is this.
Drama is fictional disagreement with contrary meaning made up of conflict, fiction, and irony.
Conflict makes stories exciting; fiction makes stories safe; and irony makes stories good.
The best dramas, across all media, combine all three elements to stylise simulated violence and contrast its real world practice.
In doing so, it allows for pleasant exploration of potentially dangerous ideas.
The principle of drama states that all actions are able to be dramatised in a moral fashion, and that the measure of their normative value can be expressed as the distance between character and author.
The dramatic fallacy is the inversion of the dramatic principle, realising simulated evil.
There is, I maintain, no question: drama as an ethical artefact is sorely undervalued in modern discourse. Popular entertainment is wrongly dismissed as shallow escapism when it is, in reality, one of our most powerful tools of moral discovery. One need only choose: Walker or Doe? A man, walking into a police station covered in blood; or a man, sitting as his typewriter covered in ink? The answer is simple. The show must go on.
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"That which is evil in reality can be good in simulation." Yes. The other side of the equation: that fiction can be unethical, even evil. It's interesting to consider what qualifies as such. I've long considered "London Has Fallen" (2016) to be a banal example of evil fiction.