Contrast Instruction: Narrative Logic

Our instruction from William Poundstone’s Prisoner’s Dilemma comes from Bertrand Russell’s innovation of conceiving of the dare game “Chicken” as “a metaphor for the nuclear stalemate. His 1959 book, Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare, not only describes the game but offers mordant comments on those who play the geopolitical version of it” (197).

Poundstone explains that the game “Chicken readily translates into an abstract game. Strictly speaking, game theory’s chicken dilemma occurs at the last possible moment of a game of highway chicken. Each driver has calculated his reaction time and his car’s turning radius (which are assumed identical for both cars and both drivers); there comes a moment of truth in which each must whether or not to swerve” (198). The drivers’ decision is irrevocable, and it is made without knowing the other’s decision. There is no time for either party to know the other’s decision. Poundstone state that “In its simultaneous, life or death simplicity, chicken is one of the purest examples of John von Neumann’s concept of a game” (198).


James Dean, 1955.

 Russell correlates chicken with the famous 1955 James Dean film Rebel Without a Cause. Our instruction comes specifically from Russell’s correlation of the game with this film and, particularly, the game’s application to the larger political implications of international relations in time of unrest.

Elmer G. Wiens, created a "game tableau of [that] represents the payoffs for James and Buzz [the two characters who play chicken in Rebel Without a Cause] for each choice of strategy" (par. 4). He explains that "there are four possible outcomes of the game. The worst that can happen is that both James and Buzz chose to jump after the other driver jumps. Both cars will plunge over the cliff killing James and Buzz" (par. 3). The tableau he created is below, and his website includes a detailed description of the numbers and an overview of every possible strategy available for each character:

The site of our Contrast is the model of Russell using a movie to describe the game chicken. We are to think of how policy makers, decision makers, movie makers, and, really, every external aspect of our lives as drawing fron the same mythologies. The people that wrote and directed Rebel Without A Cause were expressing the values of the culture. With this in mind, our instruction is to identify a pop narrative (preferably a film) that is to my disaster what James Dean's film is the Cuban Missile Crisis. In order to do this, we have to anticipate the idea of fate (Baudrillard will provide instruction on this) and personify human destiny (again, Baudrillard will give us much to consider regarding destiny) like Greek mythology's three fates: Clotho (how spins the thread of life), Lachesis (who allots the length of the yarn), and Atropos (who makes the final cut in the thread):

Flemish Tapestry, The Triumph of Death, or The 3 Fates, ca. 1510-1520.

The Fates' thread is like the bindings that hold life together in the manner of a "feeling of constraint" (class notes).  People can't escape fatality because it is a pattern of fate--a predestination that brings thing, events, ideas to us.

The concept of a fatal strategy is grounded in the notion of fate (and its tensions) today.

Narrative / Commodity of Gift Exchange

Narratives are forms of mythology that the societies use to make sense of themselves (and our mortality).  Baudrillard in Fatal Strategies turns back to the alternative commodity of gift exchange in terms of symbolic exchange.  Symbolic exchange is the equivalent practice of economic gift exchange in the form of storytelling (class notes).  The below image is a re-creation of the image of narrative actants that professor Ulmer showed us in class.  This image shows us the template that narratives, public policy decision-making, and perhaps even the choices we make on day by day basis, generally follow because they all draw from the same history of influences (mythologies):

The protagonist of a story is always simply an ordinary person who has etiquette: he or she respects the social order of behaviour and politeness.  To prove the protagonist's (subject) a donor tests the him or her.  If the protagonist passes the test, the donor gains the protagonist's magic tool. 

Game theory helps us figure out how and why people are compelled to reciprocate.  It helps us address the question and space of interaction in terms of symbolic relationships--scripted routines, as such, that guide the right and wrong paths we follow.  The gift economy of the donor represents a power of reciprocity that is personal.

INSTRUCTION: choose a film and analyze its strategy by looking at its structure, determining the protagonist(s), donor(s), and the field of characters that guide the narrative and establish its tensions and trajectories. The relationship between the protagonist and donor is key: the power dialogue between the two simulates a type of sacrifice.