The Problem With Dominant Narratives

It's not my turn to blog (and please don't ask why I'm doing this at 4 in the morning), but I wanted to write this down before I forgot it. I was reading the Horace Newcomb article on 1950s Television and I was struck by the argument he makes towards the end of the last paragraph on page 119:

"...most plots developed along lines of social discourse, asking over and over, Why should things be the way they are? The answer--because that is how we hold it all together--necessarily involved the repeated questioning of gender roles, family structure, the nature of authority that drove episode after episode of that series."

Basically, the idea is that in order to say that one way of doing things is better than another way, you have to acknowledge that the alternative way even exists, which gives the alternative a certain innate credibility -- the reader/viewer may not consider the alternative desirable, but they are aware of it. In attempting to establish a dominant narrative, no matter what the subject or context, the narrator inevitably establishes the seed of discord against their own ideas.