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Toronto narratologists certainly must be noticing Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre’s narrative-based fund-raising campaign. You can see the ads on television, on radio, in print, and, if you’ve missed them in the media, on the Sunnybrook Foundation’s website (http://sunnybrook.ca/foundation/).

Sunnybrook, located in the Don Valley in suburban Toronto, was established as a veterans’ hospital after World War II. While still retaining its veterans’ wing, it has now evolved into a major research and teaching hospital, and is affiliated with the University of Toronto’s downtown-based University Health Network. I think the separate location and identity have encouraged Sunnybrook to adopt innovative approaches, in this case in development.

As part of its Campaign for Sunnybrook, the Sunnybrook Foundation has developed six narrative-based ads dealing with trauma, burns, a stroke, a heart attack, and breast and cervical cancer. The ads combine words spoken by a gentle-voiced male narrator, images of the patients being treated at Sunnybrook (as well as pictures of their families), and background music that evokes both anxiety and calm.

The stories have the following narrative and textual structure: this is the medical problem, this is the response by Sunnybrook’s doctors or treatment teams, this is the patient (sometimes shown being treated), this is the patient’s family, and this is the patient recovering. They then conclude with a gentle exhortation, “to learn more about life-saving Sunnybrook innovations, visit our website,” as well as the slogan “innovation when it matters most,” and the message in text, “give – invest — support.”

Let’s look at this in a bit more detail. The medical problems are sometimes catastrophic events, such as a car crash (trauma) or industrial accident (burn), and sometimes medical images understood only by experts (brain scans, CAT scans, or mammograms). The Sunnybrook physicians or treatment teams are the heroes who bring patients back from the brink of death. The patients are sometimes shown being treated in a high tech-high touch operating theatre (trauma, burn, stroke, heart attack) and sometimes just showing anxiety (cancer). The family members (spouses, children, a newborn infant of a woman being treated for cervical cancer) represent the human stakes, those to whom the patient is most connected, the patient’s rationale for recovery. (The only instance where there is not a family is the auto crash, where instead we see a determined young woman learning to walk with a prosthesis that has replaced an amputated leg.)

These are all redemptive fables of the kind I referred to in my post last week about The King’s Speech. The individual redemption refers to the patient and his or her family: the patient is healed and can resume his or her role in the family, continuing to provide for family members who rely on him or her. The institutional aspect of redemption refers to Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. To continue to provide the heroic medical practice referred to in the narratives, it needs resources that go beyond normal base budget funding from the government.

The Sunnybrook ads resonate with me and I imagine they would resonate with most people (something that could be tested in focus groups or with sophisticated brain monitoring technology). I’m sure the ads are successful at raising public awareness about Sunnybrook, in particular about the variety of leading-edge treatments it delivers. Do these narrative-based ads bring in more support than other types of advertising? I don’t know, but as the local narratologist, I’d be interested in finding out.

In my study of management and narrative, I occasionally confront a work that challenges the genre’s boundaries. So is The King’s Speech in or out? Is it primarily a buddy story and a therapeutic saga rather than a political or managerial story? Anticipating that to be the case, I concentrated recently on overtly managerial movies like The Social Network and Inside Job and explicitly political movies like Fair Game and Client 9. Then I turned to The King’s Speech.

Even in a constitutional monarchy, the monarch has some responsibility for governing. As the movie’s King George VI put it, “I am the seat of all authority because [the people] think that when I speak, I speak for them.” The movie was titled “The King’s Speech,” rather than “The King’s Stammer,” to indicate that it ultimately concerns, not just the king’s personal disability, but the impact of that disability on the exercising of his role in government. So, yes, The King’s Speech is in.

Andrew O’Hehir, the reviewer for Salon and, as his surname suggests, no supporter of the monarchy, with a bit of condescension summed it up as an “old-school openhearted audience-pleaser aimed at a wide adult public,” but concluded it was “both a great night at the movies and a terrific yarn of unexpected human and historical depth.” I agree completely with O’Hehir. Here is my explanation why The King’s Speech resonates on several levels.

I have developed a conceptual framework for understanding political or management narratives. It’s a four quadrant diagram, with the protagonist’s narrative arc on one axis and the narrative arc of the organization or polity in which the protagonist is located on the other axis. For both the protagonist and the organization/polity there are two possible outcomes, renewal or decline. The conceptual distinction between the protagonist and his/her organizational or political context makes explicit the managerial aspect of the narrative.

Without characterizing all four quadrants, let’s look at the one The King’s Speech inhabits. In it both the protagonist and the polity experience renewal. This is what I call the heroic narrative, or “feel-good” movie, or O’Hehir calls an “open-hearted audience pleaser.”

At both the level of the protagonist and the polity, there is much with which the audience can identify. Bertie’s symptoms were most acute speaking in public. Glossophobia, as it’s called, is so common a fear that Wikipedia tells us that 95 per cent of all public speakers – and all of us at some point speak in public – experience it. It is thus a movie about the King conquering his fear to the extent that he could give – with the broadcasting studio coaching of his speech therapist Lionel Logue – a serviceable speech. But it is also about Logue’s achieving personal vindication and professional respectability, because in his success with the King, he overcame the suspicion that, lacking credentials and using unorthodox methods, he was a charlatan.

The renewal of the polity is also set out very clearly. Bertie’s brother Edward VIII was a royal disaster. Not only was he in Mrs. Simpson’s thrall, attributed by Bertie’s wife Elizabeth to “certain skills she acquired at an establishment in Shanghai,” but from the nature of his socializing and his conversation he entirely lacked the thoughtfulness and gravitas to be king. The imminent war demanded a king who could play his appropriate part, and, with his stammer under control, King George could do that. As events unfolded, the most important contribution the royal family made to the war effort was the physical bravery of remaining in embattled London. The movie defines the renewal of the polity as the end of the era of appeasement and British resolve to fight Nazism. Historically, this cause is still one with which audiences most readily identify.

The movie has some of the visual markers of the heroic narrative arc, for example it begins with Bertie’s disastrous attempt to speak at the 1925 Empire Exhibition, and most of the movie is set in deep British fog. In contrast, after the King makes his speech calling the nation to war, he goes to the balcony of Buckingham Palace, waving to the gathered crowd in bright sunlight.

The speech itself could have been presented triumphally, but that would have been over the top, as well as unfaithful to the record. Logue was in the room with the king when he made his broadcast to the nation and the empire, urging him on, syllable by syllable. We see that Logue has marked up the text, to indicate emphasis and phrasing for every word. Triumphal music (Land of Hope and Glory?) could have accompanied the speech, but wisely director Tom Hooper chose the 2nd movement funeral march from Beethoven’s 7th symphony. Its lugubrious chords echoed the King’s painstaking efforts and labored diction. The music ends with only a hint of optimism, reflecting the historical outcome that the king will, with supreme concentration, be able to play his appropriate role in the war effort.

Bertie’s process of renewal, described by New York Times reviewer Stephen Holden as “a semi-improvisatory mixture of elementary gymnastics, primal scream therapy, and psychoanalysis” was very democratic and contemporary. It first involved breaking down class distinctions and indeed lese majeste. Then the interaction between patient and therapist depicted what New Yorker critic Anthony Lane termed “not a slice of Masterpiece Theatre but a [psychoanalytic] case study.” This process of archeology of the mind entailed digging back into repressed memories of the aspects of Bertie’s upbringing that led to his stammer. It reminds me of Ishiguro’s emotional archeology of the butler Stevens in The Remains of the Day. This, too, is something that resonates with audiences.

The movie ultimately has thematic unity in the idea of finding one’s voice. At the personal level, Bertie finds his. At the monarchical level, Parliament, speaking for the nation, rejects the besotted appeaser Edward III, choosing his more patriotic, more dignified, and wiser brother George VI as spokesman. At the political level, soon after the events presented in the movie, Parliament will overthrow the misguided appeaser Chamberlain and replace him with the defiant orator-warrior Winston Churchill.  The nation will have found its true voice.

As is always necessary, the actors – Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush, and a supporting cast that includes the aristocracy of British cinema and theatre – were, to a person, excellent. But my point is structural, namely that director Tom Hooper and writer David Seidler presented this slice of recent British history in a way audiences find compelling and inspirational. A+.

At first glance, Republican House leader John Boehner, the chain-smoking “congressman from K Street,” didn’t appear to be the sort of person I could in any way identify with. But, reading Peter Boyer’s profile of him in The New Yorker of last December 13, I recognized something in common in our family backgrounds.

Like my parents in Toronto, his parents in Cincinnati owned a tavern that served a blue-collar clientele. Boyer recounts John’s father Earl opening up early to serve shots and beer before work, John himself tending bar, and the whole family doing an annual cleaning, attempting to remove the layers of cigarette tar from the walls.

All this sounds very familiar. In the fifties my father and his father owned a tavern in Toronto near the Massey-Ferguson factory and in the sixties my father and mother owned another one thirty miles away in Whitby, near the GM factory. As I recall them telling me, it was hard work, but it provided a decent living.

Taverns were regulated in Ontario, and there was a standard draft beer glass with a line approximately 1/16 inch thick near the top. In serving, the trick was to pour so that the meniscus just touched the bottom of the line at the sides of the glass. Doing that consistently contributed substantially to the profit margin.

The clientele usually ordered draft, so the owner’s big decision was which brewer’s draft to sell. As a reward from one brewer or another, my parents often received free tickets to Toronto Maple Leafs games (at a time when they were contenders for the Stanley Cup).

John’s parents, devout Catholics, had a family of twelve children, and that stretched the income very thinly. As second oldest, he had considerable responsibility for minding his younger siblings and helping in the tavern. It took him seven years of part-time study to earn his undergrad degree, and he was the first in his family to do so.

He then hit it big in industrial marketing for a plastic packaging company in the late seventies, earning $74K, which was a very hefty salary at that time. (I know from personal experience that entry level academic salaries at Northwestern’s business school were then around $20K, and $40K was a very good academic salary). In his own eyes, he had pulled himself up from poverty to claim his share of the American dream.

In contrast, I had it a lot easier than John. First and foremost, my parents had only three children. None of us ever worked in the tavern. We all attended university and, in my case, with some help from my paternal grandfather, there was enough money to pay for Ivy League tuition. John’s parents both smoked heavily and his mother died of smoking-related pulmonary failure. While my grandfather, father, and mother all inhaled far too much second-hand smoke, they were all spared lung disease.

According to Boyer, John’s reaction to his having achieved his version of the American dream was resentment at being placed in a high marginal income tax bracket, and a conversion to free-market fundamentalism. I can’t help but wonder if John didn’t also resent his parents for their rejection of family planning and the younger siblings who became his responsibility. Because such resentment would have been psychologically unacceptable, he may have transferred his resentment of his parents to the state and of his siblings to those citizens who were dependent on the state.

The trajectory of my political beliefs was also very different. Like most Canadian Jews, we identified with the Liberal Party. Reform Judaism, the branch with which we affiliated, had a strong social action tradition, comparable to the social gospel among Protestants or liberation theology among Catholics. For us, the phrase “because we were slaves unto Pharoah in Egypt” stood as a strong mandate for identification with those who were oppressed.

From my perspective, the version of the American dream for which John Boehner so readily tears up is self-seeking and narrow-minded, simply sucking up to the corporate elite and advancing their political agenda so that he can get to play at their golf courses and ride in their private jets.

But there is a bigger issue here, something Tony Blair put his finger on in his discussion of the origins of New Labour in his recent memoirs. Politically, what happens to people of modest means who work hard and achieve some measure of success? As Blair noted, in Britain they would normally convert from Labour to Tory. New Labour was an attempt to retain their loyalty by combining some tax cuts with efforts to improve public services.

Is Boehner merely the enabler of Tax Party activists intent on preserving the version of the American dream they have achieved and preventing the state from helping those less fortunate than themselves to aspire to it?

The attempted assassination of Representative Giffords is leading to political soul-searching, particularly in the House of Representatives. Is Boehner the sort of person to lead it to greater political civility? The two hopeful things I can see in his background are that tavern owners must learn to deal with dissatisfied and irrational customers and that people in marketing must be attuned to the needs of others. We’ll see.

A comment on my post about Eliot Spitzer asked about the role the media play in disseminating stories about the personal lives of its politicians, and suggested that the Canadian media are less likely to do so than the American media. I think the point is well-taken, and have some suggestions why this may be so.

In the US, the constitution mandates that the Senate provide “advice and consent” for presidential appointments of executive officials, ambassadors, and judges of the Supreme Court. Confirmation hearings have thus provided a forum for rigorous public scrutiny by senators of the professional and personal lives of nominees. Such hearings provide a rationale for the media to undertake its own investigations. Canada has no comparable forum.

On the Canadian side, Pierre Trudeau, hitherto the most successful politician of Canada’s second century – and someone who lived a colorful personal life – famously proclaimed that the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation. This influenced public attitudes, and the nation’s media appear to have followed, and continue to follow, this dictum.

We have an interesting case in point right now. Noted blogger, and Globe and Mail columnist, Norman Spector, posted last Dec. 24, that Laureen Harper for the first time accompanied Prime Minister Harper in his Christmas eve interview to dispel rumors that they had separated. Within six hours, the Globe and Mail pulled the post, with the justification that “it fell short of [the paper’s] standards with respect to fairness, balance, and accuracy.” So far, the MSM have not returned to the topic.

Spector’s rationale for posting was that if the Prime Minister’s marriage was in trouble, it could affect his performance and lead to bizarre decisions and hence “the troubled marriage could impact all Canadians.”

The counter-argument is based on the value of privacy and the assumption of professionalism. In this view, politicians, like all other citizens, have a right to privacy about their personal lives. The assumption is that the Prime Minister is a professional, in the sense that, when acting as a public official, he is able to put aside all personal matters and focus solely on his public responsibilities. Like most Canadians, I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt, in that I assume they can keep their personal baggage from affecting their performance at work.

I think it isn’t a bad thing if this story stays in the blogosphere for now. Because it is in the blogosphere, the MSM are watching it carefully, and, if there are any further developments, they won’t be able to ignore it any longer. If Prime Minister Harper and his wife are attempting to work out strains in their marriage, they should be able to do so without the attention of the MSM. And, if there is absolutely no truth in the rumors, little harm has been done to Prime Minister Harper.

While visiting the Whetung Ojibway Arts and Crafts Gallery last week, I learned that the Metis artist Michael Robinson died last summer at the untimely age of 62. I never met him, but I mourn his passing.

I had the good fortune to discover his glass sculptures at Whetung’s thirty years ago. As I understand it, glass was his original medium, but injuries from a traffic accident in the mid-Eighties forced him to shift to less demanding art forms.

I collected eleven of his vases over the years. They are all solid and substantial, yet also graceful and beautiful. The designs are abstract, rising from broad bases to flattish tops, generally with a small hole for inserting a flower. But I think they were meant to be seen on their own, rather than as a vehicle for flowers.

They often remind me of the shape of a human torso, clad in a robe or tunic. The glass itself is usually deep blue, purple, or crimson, though I also have one that is clear. While the glass is strong and thick on the outside, somehow Robinson was able to pull delicate threads of glass through the openings of the vases. The contrast between power and delicacy captured my imagination, and I bought one or two on every trip to Whetung’s.

I note on Michael Robinson’s website remembrances of his creativity in printmaking, etching, and poetry, and his role in his family, but nothing about his glass work. So I hope this post stands as recognition of that important element of his artistic output. These works stand in my home, and inspire me with their beauty and their demonstration of a unique talent. Thank you, Michael Robinson.