Held hostage and living it twice through ‘De Dag’ (‘The Day’)
Hostage situations have a built-in dynamic for tension. There’s the thrill of the “will-they-won’t-they” as deadlines approach, reset, and approach again. There are innocents in peril, perpetrators who may have evil but often perversely just reasons for their action, and we don’t immediately know which. Then there are the police, negotiators, and other authorities ready and able to disagree and then mess everything up.
Think of Dog Day Afternoon, that 1975 masterpiece of director Sidney Lumet, with a young Al Pacino playing what, in those days, could have been a career-ending role. It has all those aspects and a hostage-taker we so very much want to win.
More than three hundred books have the label “hostage-situation” from reviewers in Goodreads. The number rises to more than nine hundred for “hostage” alone. Wikipedia records 166 movies involving “hostage taking.”
By contrast, only nineteen TV series are listed in The Movie Database dealing with hostage situations. “De Dag” is one of them.
“The Day,” as it’s called in English, aired on Belgian television in 2018 but only recently appeared on my screens, with English subtitles for the Flemish dialogue, courtesy of Walter Presents. It’s twelve episodes long – more than nine hours of viewing – and more than I usually want to watch of any story, even one with the twists and surprises that this one offers.
But what most caught my attention was the structural device that also carries underlying justification for a larger truth:
That truth is dialogic, that understanding differs between the two sides of any dialogue;
That each party’s truth evolves as any dialogue develops; and
That we might never be certain that we understand its full implications, even at the end.
Call this a postmodern or better, perhaps, a post-structural, epistemological truth. It will be familiar to those familiar with the writings of Paul Ricoeur (1991), whose works have had a strong influence on literary theory and how imagination – what some call sensemaking – shapes our understanding.
Hostage negotiation ought to be a prime example of that – and it is in “De Dag” – as the negotiators and hostage-takers engage in a back-and-forth of demand and counteroffer. One side (the authorities) wants to give away nothing at all, while the desires of other side (the perpetrators) remain unclear, often even to themselves.
How that structural device works in this drama is one of the main reasons for its length, its twelve episodes covering twenty-four hours – and covering each period twice.
In the first episode we see the police and negotiators scrambling to the seen of a bank robbery, trying to see without eyesight what’s happening inside – inside the bank and the brains of the hostage-takers. They open a phone connection, talk to one perpetrator, listen to his muffled, digitally distorted voice, and then engage in developing a strategy with the other authorities. There are tensions in the team, not just between the team and the guys inside the bank. If anyone asked, we viewers could become third-person-close narrators. We’re inside the heads of each negotiating team member. But this is television, so we don’t need narration. The pictures do that for us.
In the second episode, we viewers gain a wider perspective, the back stories begin to emerge on both sides. Then, suddenly and without warning, we’re listening to exactly the same dialogue we heard when the first phone contact occurred. Except, this time, we’re sitting with the hostage-takers, not in the police van with its array of communication devices and its internal bickering over the meaning of the dialogue. Two hostage-takers – are there more? – bicker with each other about the meaning of that same dialogue, as they, like the police, try to make sense of the conversation. Once again, we could be third-person-close narrators, but don’t need to be. Then, just as suddenly, the story moves forward, and we’re seeing snippets from inside each camp. We’re seeing what happens, if not quite what it means – to either side or the various members of each camp.
This pattern of presentation persists across each pair of episodes. Inside with the negotiators, then inside with the hostage-takers, each interaction on view twice, first with the reactions only of one end of the line, then with the other.
We viewers, gradually, come to deepening views about each of the characters on each side of the negotiation. We keep being surprised at each minor addition to the picture being painted before our eyes. Seeing the most important pieces twice – an episode apart in time – gives us time to reflect. Once we see how the device works, we expect and soon demand to know what the others are thinking.
Despite all this back-and-forth – this repetition with variation that comes up often in discussing art, music, fiction, and the practice of persuasion[1] – we still can’t see the whole picture, the truth, until the very end, and perhaps not even then.
The structural device gives corroborating evidence of the post-structural truth that truths may have more than one justification, and justifications may support more than one truth. Was this one worth twelve episodes and more than nine hours of viewing? Yes, especially when you contemplate the larger truths that underpin the drama.
Abreu-Rodrigues, J., Lattal, K. A., dos Santos, C. V., & Matos, R. A. (2005). Variation, Repetition, and Choice. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 83(2), 147-168. doi:https://doi.org/10.1901/jeab.2005.33-03
Bartlett, F. C. (1940). Political Propaganda. Cambridge: The University Press.
Dailey, S. L., & Browning, L. (2014). Retelling Stories in Organizations: Understanding the Functions of Narrative Repetition. Academy of Management Review, 39(1), 22-43. doi:https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2011.0329
Deleuze, G. (2001). Difference and Repetition (P. Patton, Trans.). London: Continuum.
Merton, R. K. (1946). Mass Persuasion: The Social Psychology of a War Bond Drive. New York: Harper.
Ricoeur, P. (1991). A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
[1] Repetition with variation has been a recurring theme of these posts. See Repetition and variation grabs us in 'The Gone' and Looking for ‘The One That Got Away’ (‘Cleddau’) as well as various studies (Abreu-Rodrigues, Lattal, dos Santos, & Matos, 2005; Bartlett, 1940; Dailey & Browning, 2014; Deleuze, 2001; Merton, 1946).