Schopenhauer and “Fringe”

“…the representation of a great misfortunate is alone essential to tragedy (which may be caused by a) character of extraordinary wickedness…blind fate…by the mere position of the dramatis personae, through their relations, so that there is no need either for a tremendous error or an unheard of accident, nor yet for a character whose wickedness reaches the limits of human possibility; but characters of ordinary morality, under circumstances such as often occur, are so situated with regard to each other that their position compels them, knowingly and with their eyes open, to do each other the greatest injury, without any one of them being entirely in the wrong. This last kind of tragedy seems… to surpass the other two, for it shows us the greatest misfortunate, not as an exception, not as something occasioned by rare circumstances or monstrous characters, but as arising easily and of itself out of the actions and characters of men, indeed almost as essential to them, and thus brings it terribly near to us. In the other two kinds we may look on the prodigious fate only from afar, which we may very well escape without taking refuge in renunciation. But in the last kind of tragedy we see that those powers which destroy happiness and life are such that their path to us also is open at every moment; we see the greatest sufferings brought about by entanglements that our fate might also partake of, and through actions that perhaps we also are capable of performing, so could not complain of injustice; then shuddering we feel ourselves already in the midst of hell.”

I’m not a big fan of Schopenhauer, since it appears his best ideas were better said by the Buddhists, but when I was reading this I couldn’t stop thinking about “Fringe.”

On the surface, “Fringe” is about people suffering from either blind fate or the actions of wicked men and the heroes fighting back, but as “Fringe” evolves as a show, it moves towards the superior sort of tragedy. The wicked man turns out to be the wronged man, for his son was stolen by one of the main characters, and yet the kidnapper, from his point of view, was saving the boy’s life.

As the curtains of the plot are pulled back, we see again and again that the heroes and villains are not good vs. evil, but relatively normal people pitted against each other, seeing themselves as the heroes and the others as the villains. Some of the most interesting moments in the show occur when they realize how their own mistakes are causing the problems.  It is their abnormalities that make them interesting to us, but their abnormalities were created in part by each other’s decisions.