A week of strong expressions of certainty highlights their power in an uncertain era.
FILE - In this March 26, 2019, file photo, Actor Jussie Smollett leaves the Leighton Criminal Courthouse in Chicago after prosecutors dropped all charges against him. Smollett was indicted on 16 felony counts related to making a false report that he was attacked by two men who shouted racial and homophobic slurs.
Such certainty across the board. Such vigorous, declarative statements — crystallized, workshopped, simplified into sound bites containing a single message: It didn’t happen. I didn’t do anything wrong. Case closed. End of story. Incontrovertible. Don’t question it. “We have a lot of binary thinking and really overly simplistic storylines that we try to drive to because, for whatever reason, that’s how we’re wired,” she says. “We’re not comfortable in the space where things aren’t so cut and dried.”With Smollett, for example, prosecutors made clear that dropping the charges didn’t mean they’d exonerated him. In Avenatti’s case, prosecutors expressed confidence — maybe even certainty — that they had the goods to secure a conviction.
Now, though, humans carry around the ability to talk to the wider world, and Twitter-style fragments abound. Opinions, informed and otherwise, buzz about like gnats. A certainty-based central narrative — the kind that was often calming, but also shut out and silenced Americans by the tens of millions — seems lacking. That can encourage critical thought. It can also sow confusion.
The production code that governed Hollywood movies from the mid-1930s to the 1960s required, for example, that moral order be maintained and “the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.” Style guides for romance-novel writers offered similar strictures — and usually demanded happy endings.
“There is this fondness for absolutes in this country,” he says. “The upside is you project this aura of certainty. The problem is that reality often moves past it and proves it to be wrong.”It’s behind the question of why, in the face of what was generally believed to be strong evidence, prosecutors inexplicably let the Smollett case go and moved on, sealing it from prying eyes. It’s in the revelations that will emerge if and when Michael Avenatti faces trial.
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