STORYTELLING is at the core of any art form. In our mediated world, stories are flung at us whether we are interested or not.

At times we aren’t even aware that they are “stories” to begin with. What I mean by “mediated world” I’m referring to not only technological mediums like the internet (in which social media is the greatest enabler of endless stories).

It’s even a terminology used on Instagram and Facebook for you to post short clips, images (or even texts), film and television (which is often associated with entertainment and news where stories are our form escapism from daily drudgery and news either informs or panics you ceaselessly) and radio (which by default being purely audio has the ability to be ubiquitous and doesn’t necessarily demand our full attention).

I’m also referring to the seemingly unintrusive forms of media advertising like those huge billboards selling questionable slimming and beauty products that dot our highways to those grafitti-esque spray painted texts on the walls and pillars of interchanges that offer a range of services from the sexual (“volcano massage”) to more practical services for motorcyclists (“tukar tiub”).

While seemingly random for me to suggest that all of these constitutes “stories”, it’s worth consideration to approach all of these mediated messages as a montage of stories that says something present or lacking in Malaysian society and culture. This is where some background knowledge in film helps.

A montage is, according to that deep well of knowledge of our epoch known as Google, a film editing technique in which a series of short shots are sequenced to condense space, time and information.

The term has been used in various contexts. In French, the word “montage” applied to cinema simply denotes editing. So how does “film editing technique” relate to how my reality and stories are shaped, you ask?

Let’s consider the limitations of our knowledge of the world around us. It is impossible for you as a person to know everything about the world we live in simply because no one can be in two places at the same time nor can we travel back in time or to the future (well, not yet).

We make a lot of assumptions about the world we live in through a montage of mediated information and those assumptions are often not our own.

Stories are similar: they are merely vignettes or snapshots of a moment in time and they are finite in their form. In other words, stories structurally have a beginning, middle and end.

Stories are convenient, pre-packaged, ready-to-eat forms of information that we often assume carry some truth or knowledge about the world and humanity.

For example, Hollywood has a dominance over the assumed notion of global disaster or alien invasion – just count how many times aliens invade Earth or a catastrophe of a global scale tend to always happen first in New York City.

Or that villains often have English accents even if they are not British (but always played by British actors because, well, they are better actors). All of these are playing at a cinema near you or on Netflix as I write this. The stories being told are endless and happening all the time.

Now back to how those billboards and grafitti-esque ads that patiently await our gaze as we pass them daily constitutes a montage of stories: they tell stories of our desires and fears because fears sell.

As a popular culture scholar, all of these are valid sites of investigation for me, worthy of being peeled layer by layer to reveal stories that we tell ourselves collectively that we don’t want others to know in public.

Everybody harbours private desires that even those closest to us are oblivious about and this is where stories we tell ourselves sometimes match those that are being advertised to us, hoping our gaze will respond in some false eureka revelation that the answer was always in front of us. This is how advertising works and the mediated world depends on advertising for its own survival.

All of these mediums began as art forms to communicate stories – think of those cave painting archaeologists often discover. They aren’t random scribblings – they are etchings to also declare “I was here”.

But in this increasingly noisy digital world, everybody screams “I was here” but the etchings are illusory and impermanent as the Instagram story you posted yesterday (these “stories” disappear in 24 hours). Technically speaking, those “volcano massage” graffiti-esque ads have greater permanency than any social media posts, until the city or town council decides to clean it up.    

So, think about the stories you tell yourself that nobody knows about and reflect on the outside world around us. Each and every one of us are more similar than we give credit because the stories that we tell each other publicly are essentially the same: I was here.

There is truth in mundane if one discards the idea that the mundane is unworthy of our collective attention. This is your inoculation against the apathy towards our modern consumerist lives – keep telling stories but try to tell those stories you tell yourself but in other forms be it a sketch, painting, poetry or song.

Something that doesn’t cost you money and you can do at will without much fuss. That is the power of stories – not the tale itself but how it is told.

The most affordable therapy has always been around us if you take a moment to reflect on “boring” things. – December 10, 2021.

* Azmyl Yunor is a touring underground recording artiste, and an academic in media and cultural studies. He has published articles on pop culture, subcultures and Malaysian cultural politics. He adheres to the three-chords-and-the-truth school of songwriting, and Woody Guthrie’s maxim “All you can write is what you see”. He is @azmyl on Twitter.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.