52 pages • 1 hour read
Noah HawleyBefore the Fall
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Media and the Cult of Celebrity
David Bateman’s position as head of a major news network gives Hawley the opportunity to explore and satirize the shifting media landscape in the United States and its role in promoting a cult of celebrity. ALC, on David’s directive, adheres to an opinion-based model of news, and Bill Cunningham is the ideal avatar for this model. While it’s a risky experiment at first, ALC’s success validates David’s instincts. The public, it seems, wants to be told what to think, especially if the message is delivered by one of their own, one who shares their anger and feelings of disenfranchisement. When Scott’s survival and epic swim becomes public, the media can’t get enough of the story, particularly because of Scott’s reclusiveness. The more he hides, the more vigorously they hound him. As a celebrity and a bona fide hero, Scott’s life no longer belongs to him but to anyone who wants a piece of it. Under the guise of the public’s right to know, the media’s desperate attempts for a sound bite, a video, or an image pushes them to extremes, parking their trucks outside his home, following him to Layla’s and then to Eleanor’s. A single act of bravery has robbed him of his privacy and surrendered his very existence to the masses.
The paradox of celebrity is that while some in the media have praised and glorified him out of all proportion—Scott shuns the attention, believing anyone would have done the same—others, like Bill Cunningham, feel the need to cloak his heroism in unfounded conspiracy theories. Cunningham becomes obsessed with Scott, wondering why he’s avoiding the press, what he might be hiding, and if he was somehow involved in the crash. Cunningham is less interested in the truth than in ratings, and if tearing apart a man’s reputation with no evidence garners a bigger audience, so be it. While the public may have legitimate reasons for celebrity worship—a therapeutic escape from their own routine existence, for example—the media’s presumptive claim on Scott’s life and work goes beyond straight reporting. To be sure, this is nothing new, but the explosion of digital media and the 24-hour news cycle has greatly exacerbated the problem, creating a ravenous need for ever more figures to be exalted and, when they’ve become old news, discarded.
The Instability of Memory
Memory as both a theme and a narrative device features prominently in the novel. Scott’s memory of the crash is fractured and non-linear. He remembers isolated moments and images, but for a team of investigators trying to pinpoint a cause, those memories are only partially helpful. Likewise, Rachel’s memory of her kidnapping is similarly sketchy (partly due to her young age). She remembers only an attic and a rocking chair. Scott’s memory of his sister’s drowning is simply of himself, sitting on his bike, waiting for her to emerge from the lake. Traumatic events are not etched in the mind, moment by moment. Rather, the brain pushes to the forefront moments that it can process, and it buries the rest. Hence, Scott’s memories of the plane crash are innocuous ones—getting up from his seat to retrieve a dropped pencil, watching Rachel with her headphones on, and hearing David and Ben discuss a baseball game. He remembers the plane’s sudden drop, but after that, nothing until he finds himself treading water in the Atlantic. On the other hand, Emma has a distinct memory of her father punching a man in the face at a gas station, a memory that remains largely intact and linear, a memory that elevates her father to hero status in her eyes. While the memory may have been traumatic had she heard the man’s “lewd” comments to her mother or if her father had flown into a rage, his calm demeanor as he approached the man to “exchange words” followed by the lightning strike punch has the opposite effect—it’s a memory she treasures and has relived countless times. Whether her memory is entirely accurate or selective is never revealed, but for Emma, the memory is the reality.
Hawley also uses memory as a narrative device. The characters’ backstories are flashbacks, memories of these people’s lives which add depth and nuance and justify motivation and action. Charlie Busch’s ego, it turns out, is a way to compensate for an inferiority complex. Scott’s memory of watching Jack LaLanne pull a ship across the San Francisco Bay inspires him to become a champion swimmer. Maggie Bateman’s friendship with Scott, while never sexual, has a tinge of physical attraction, with roots in Maggie’s dissatisfaction with her husband’s long work hours. Without these flashbacks, memories shared by both character and audience, Busch’s fatal nosedive or Scott’s eight-hour swim are isolated events, without context or justification.
The Interplay Between Perception and Reality
Throughout the novel, the narrator ruminates on the question of how perception and reality influence and sometimes contradict each other. The character sketches of people like Scott, Ben Kipling, and the Batemans provide a relatively conventional view of the theme, demonstrating that people are, in general, more complex than the way that they present themselves or are presented to others. Scott is particularly invested in the way that different stories—different ways of perceiving a given situation—can shape reality, an attitude that can, at least in part, be traced to his longstanding admiration for fitness and self-discipline guru Jack LaLanne. A belief in fate gives him the energy to swim to shore with JJ after the crash, for instance, even if that fate cannot be proven in any clear way. Indeed, each of the character sketches reveals the kind of complex information that remains far beyond the purview of “fact” and public consumption.
Yet the novel does not merely use this juxtaposition to critique the shallowness of the 24-hour news cycle and social media. Gus’s presence in the text offers a different view of this theme. As an engineer in charge of investigating transportation disasters, Gus believes himself to be firmly rooted in reality. His job is to deal with facts and physical evidence, providing a scientifically sound explanation for each event. Yet, more than any other character in the novel—including Scott—Gus is acutely aware of the power of mediation to shape and distort reality, even blocking access to certain parts of it entirely. He ruminates directly on the question of the connection between art and life in Chapter 34, as he gazes at Scott’s photorealistic disaster scenes. Unlike his sometime colleague O’Brien, Gus is not naïve—or conspiratorial—enough to think that Scott’s paintings offer evidence of a mind bent on causing harm to others. Nevertheless, Gus understands that the power of Scott’s paintings, and “Art” in general, has an intangible aspect, capable of unsettling him and counteracting his ability to craft a coherent narrative. Later in that same chapter, as he watches the video feed from the crash site, Gus ponders how screens mediate access to reality. He knows intellectually that the divers themselves are experiencing reality as they explore the wreckage. He is less sure what is happening to him, viewing the scenes on a screen. What he does know is that the dread he feels is something that goes beyond the boundaries of the room he is in.
Ultimately, the novel casts doubt on the ability to disentangle perception and reality, showing instead how the two are mutually-informing, interacting with each other even if, at other times, they appear to be opposed.
