Killing Purdy

I think James Cameron and Mark Burnett are in a special category of cinematic storyteller. They have the most important quality required of the tribal bard. Cameron and Burnett create storylines that do hand-to-hand combat with atavistic fears.

Burnett deals with more prosaic fears, of the kind Survivor and Apprentice 'reality show' contestants face: fear of being cast out of the tribe, fear of being humiliated by the tribe. Cameron tackles the big stuff: fear of humanity's limitations, fear of the wrath of the gods unleashed upon the tribe, the fear that humans are no match for the Unknown.

(The Alien can symbolize a new strain of killer microbe. The heroic Canadian doctor who put everything on the line--her life, her career, her reputation--to get SARS in a deathgrip is medicine's version of Ripley.)

Burnett and Cameron tell essentially the same story again and again. They recount the "Killing Purdy" game. The game takes its name from a man named Purdy, who opened gunfire on an elementary-school playground and massacred some of the schoolchildren playing there during recess.

After the school and playground reopened, psychiatrists set up hidden observation of the children during the recess periods. This was on the concern that the children would be scarred for life by the carnage they witnessed and the terror they experienced during the massacre.

To their amazement, the observers discovered that left to their own devices the children worked through their trauma by making the horrific incident they lived through into a game!

One child would play Purdy and 'shoot' the other children, who would fall down 'dead.' As the game progressed the children revised the event they witenessed until it reflected how they would liked to have dealt with it. They would kill Purdy before he could shoot at them. The next game might return to Purdy killing the children; the next might have the children killing Purdy.

This game, played out in many variations over weeks, gave the children a sense of mastery over the incident and allowed them to chop the killer down to human size in their minds.

That's what the storytelling of Cameron and Burnett does so well; it reflects the most important function of the tribal bard: Bogeyman-slayer.


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