Castle and Seeing the Narrative In Your Own Life
The moral case for understanding your own narratives.
All of us tell stories in some way.
What did you do today? That's the beginning of a story. Where did you come from? That's a story. How are you feeling? That can create the beginnings of a story. Pretty much all dialogue creates some kind of a story or can. It's hard to get away from them. These stories are an important part of our lives in so many ways. Our stories are things we tell each other which makes us part of other people's stories. It makes our lives so much richer and more interesting. Being able to remember that time from your past when you went to the park with your parent and they pushed you on the swing. Or the time you were hanging out with your friends playing video games and you played until you passed out which was the best time of your life.
Even if you no longer hang out with your friends or have stopped speaking to your parents. You still have the story you can tell. Hopefully to someone who means as much to you and you could tell a similar story about them at a later time. We look back fondly on these stories most of the time. Though it's not only stories that we think about happily which can create stories for us to tell. The bad things in our lives are also stories. When thinking back about the bad ones, we tend to try and focus on the parts where we feel better about ourselves. Usually because these bad stories can bring us down emotionally and prevent us from telling better stories. So we distort these ideas about the world.
Not that our memories about these stories are the best. The more we tell the stories, the more it can change. You remember aspects of the story because other people tell us about their experience of the same events. It changes what we think happened and becomes part of our stories. Almost to the point where we can't be sure exactly which part of the story we remember from when it happened and the ones other people told us about. Doing this makes it hard when remembering these bad situations might lead to something we want. Like catching a criminal. We want the story of a criminal to be the kind of story that will cause the criminal's story to involve jail time. Because we like the idea of criminals going to jail.
Castle is very much about the stories we tell about ourselves. How our lives play out and the way in which the story changes over time when we realize there are parts of the story we don't know. Richard Castle, as played brilliantly by Nathan Fillion, and Detective Kate Beckett, played equally as brilliantly by Stana Katic, are experts at understanding the stories people tell. Mostly about the murders people commit and the stories they tell about why they either did or didn't do it. Together they can tell what parts of a story makes sense and which don't. Allowing them to bring criminals to justice, changing the stories of others powerfully.
In doing so, they learn how people feel about others and to some extent how they tell stories about themselves.
It's a fascinating story and you should take the time to explore the story of Castle as soon as you can.
You can check out Castle on Disney Plus as well as Hulu and Amazon.