A note on the role of story and narrative in a life.
Over the past few days, I watched the French series Lupin, now offered on Netflix. In fact, it’s one of Netflix’s most popular shows right now – and while I wouldn’t say I was a superfan of the show, ultimately, I’d say it’s popularity is a good sign. It’s a show that plays on cleverness of the heist variety, is nice to look at, isn’t gross violent, not overwhelmingly profane at all and doesn’t have any sexual content that some viewers might find offensive. Maybe people just enjoy seeing good-looking people do smart, conflicted things in beautiful settings. Could be worse.
Anyway, that wasn’t my point.
Lupin, in case you don’t know, is inspired by the famous French character, Arsène Lupin, a “gentleman thief” created, in part, in reaction to Sherlock Holmes. It’s set in the present day, centered on Assane Diop, a man of Senegalese descent, who is, like the show’s title indicates, a self-styled “gentleman thief.” The central focus of the 5-episode series is Diop’s efforts to avenge his late father, evidently wrongly accused of theft by a wealthy employer, who then died by suicide in prison when Assane was a teen.
I found it mostly enjoyable, although it was definitely stretched out – the creator is the same fellow who created Killing Eve and I had the same complaint there. Everything was just an episode or two too long. Here, I think the third episode was the main bump in the road.
My point in talking about Lupin today, though, is to connect it to the importance of story in our lives. For the reason Diop does what he does in the way he does it is because, at a critical moment, his father shared the Lupin stories with him. Actually, he never had the chance to do so directly – he selected the book off the library shelf when his employer’s wife offered him the chance to take any book as a gift. He wrapped it for Assane, who found it and began reading it after his father had been imprisoned (and perhaps died – I can’t remember).
He then, of course, takes the style and career of Lupin as a framework for understanding his own life and a guide for making his way in the world.
Which is what all of us do in one way or another. It might be a book, it might be our family story, it might be the narrative of the place where we’re born and live – it might be any story and it is probably a lot of stories all at once. But the fact is, we understand at a deep level that our own lives are a narrative with an earthly beginning and end, and one of the ways we make sense of it all is to tell ourselves the stories of our lives and try to relate to other stories we know.
Which is why it’s so important, from the beginning, to give children the one, absolutely true foundational story that grounds us all – that narrative of our own existence as God’s gift and deliberate act of love, and one that fits into a broader story of salvation, of saints and sinners from all over the world, responding to that Creator as well.
No matter what other stories we see as a meaningful frameworks, we owe our children and ourselves the gift of that true story as a foundation. All those other stories? Some are true, good, beautiful and helpful, and others enable us to define ourselves and our journeys in negative, destructive ways. We need the True Story at the core, always, as a corrective, a reminder, and a guide.
By the way, the most memorable scene to me of Lupin was in the last episode, when Diop, his wife (partner? I couldn’t work out whether they were married or not – this is France) and their teenaged son, born on December 11, the birthday of Lupin (the book) creator Maurice LeBlanc, head to Étretat in Normandy on that date to celebrate. Étretat is the site of some important event or other in the Lupin canon, and the site of a Lupin museum. Well, for this episode, they decided to create a scene in which, in honor of LeBlanc’s birthday, Étretat is overrun with Lupin fans, all dressed in the characteristic Lupin top hat and cape.
Now, I did some research, and it doesn’t seem this is actually a thing – sadly, for it was an absolutely charming scene (with a bad ending, but you know…) – the seaside promenade filled with people of all ages and sizes strolling in their Lupin garb, capes whipping in the brisk wind.
It might not really happen in this way, but even one who doesn’t think much about these things would recognize it as perfectly plausible, knowing, as we all do, about the missing piece between our lives and the stories we rely on to understand them: ritual.
On another note – I read the novel The Cold Millions by Jess Walter. As I mentioned the other day, I did enjoy it more than I expected, and it was interesting to learn the history of labor activism in that part of the country and the IWW in general.
But the point of connection with Lupin is, of course, about story.
The novel has a wealth of characters, but at the center are two brothers, one in his early twenties and early, Ryan, seventeen years old. They are orphans and traveling laborers (it’s 1909-1910), the older consciously and enthusiastically engaged with the labor movement (at first), Ryan mostly following along for the work and the ride – at least at first.
At one point, Ryan begins a slow, deliberate reading of the book his brother had been reading before his was incarcerated for riot involvement – War and Peace. It’s challenging, but he takes it slowly and finds himself fully immersed in the story in a way that impacts not only his imagination, but his life and his decisions as well:
And the deeper he got into the story, the more he began to imagine his own life as part of an epic story. It was the thing he felt the count got right, the comings and goings of all of these characters in and out of each other’s lives, as if Tolstoy were able to re-create the breadth of life as well as its depth.
Sometimes, late at night, the count’s words swirled around with Rye’s own thoughts, and descriptions of characters became descriptions of Rye and his brother, as if some tramp Tolstoy had created them….and it was in one of these swirling late night thoughts…..that Rye came to the conclusion that, instead of merely waiting for Gig to come back, he had to do something. (261)
The truth is, we do live a story. It’s really one of the most important gifts we give our children, as family and on a social and cultural level as well. This is the story of creation, of human being. You’re a part of it. Do something.
The question is…what? And…what story?
Charlotte was Both 