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Resist the narrative: thoughts on John Scalzi’s "Red Shirts"

It’s all about story.

That short sentence sums up what’s believed to make for good communications today.

This maxim is applied to everything from popular entertainment, business and academia, to the (high) arts. According to scholar Christian Salmon, the cultural obsession with storytelling started back in the 90s and became an unquestioned “best practice” with the explosion of the web. Today, as he notes, terms like “narrative branding” and “storytelling management” have become part of job descriptions.

The rationale behind the trend, of course, is that storytelling touches on something deep in human nature. The cave people did it, we’re told. Stories go deeper than the so-called “rational mind” (that we’ve been trained to despise as phony), sinking beneath it, touching something more “real.”

I’ve wondered about storytelling a lot myself. In my work as a freelance copywriter (or “content provider”, as this job is now called today), I have, in fact, marketed my own skills as a professional “storyteller” quite aggressively.

What strikes me about this trend is that while a lot has been written about its upside, there’s not much out there about the potential dangers of getting swept up in a narrative, especially one that is not your own. John Scalzi’s Hugo award winning science fiction novel, Redshirts, can be read as a witty critique of our "storied" culture.

The book takes the viewpoint of the rank and file crew members on a space exploration voyage. After participating in a number of dangerous missions, they notice that the elite officers who lead these expeditions (a group of five or so prominent characters) always make it back alive, while they, the enlisted orders, tend to get knocked off. 

This unequal distribution of risk is not just the result of the prototypical class war between officers and crew. A character named Jenkins discovers that somehow, “a fictional television show intrudes on our reality and warps it.” The reason the top five officers don’t get killed is because they are this TV show’s main characters. The crew, meanwhile, is expendable — just like movie extras, or “redshirts”, as they are called by fans of the old Star Trek Series.

Characters who accept what’s called “The Narrative” without question end up getting killed. This is because “The Narrative” not only puts them in ridiculously dangerous situations — it even impairs their thinking capabilities. When “The Narrative” takes over, things quit making sense”, Scalzi writes, and…

“People stop thinking logically and start thinking dramatically. ‘The Narrative’—Jenkins’ term for when the television show crept into their lives, swept away rationality and physical laws and made people know, do and say things they wouldn’t otherwise. You’ve had it happen to you already, Jenkins had said. A fact you didn’t know before just pops into your head. You make a decision or take an action you wouldn’t otherwise make. It’s like an irresistible impulse because it is an irresistible impulse—your will isn’t your own, you’re just a pawn for a writer to move around.”

The danger of buying into popular narratives, as Redshirts illustrates, is that the interests of the people telling the tales sometimes don’t coincide with those of the players in the drama.

Popular wisdom recognizes this fact. In the business world, when some new motivational narrative comes down from management, it’s common for the rank and file to talk about the dangers of “drinking the Koolaid.” Or think of those war movies in which the soldiers who are most gung-ho often end up getting themselves and their crew killed.

But what fascinates me most about Redshirts is how it shows that once narratives get inside you, so to speak, they can change both your thinking and perception of physical reality.

The story that changed taste buds

Marketing guru Seth Godin illustrates how this process happens on a more mundane level. He shows how a story changed the way wine tasted, even for the most discerning drinkers. In his classic All Marketers Are Liars Tell Stories, he describes the success of a manufacturer of wine glasses, George Riedel.

Riedel, Godin tells us, is a “tenth-generation glass blower”, “an artisan pursuing an age-old craft”, who believes that the shape of a glass dramatically affects the taste of the wine. There is a poetry to the way Riedel’s brand tells this story. Godin remarks:

“According to Riedel’s Web site: ‘The delivery of a wine’s ‘message,’ its bouquet and taste, depends on the form of the glass. It is the responsibility of a glass to convey the wine’s messages in the best manner to the human senses.’”

Riedel’s story convinced connoisseurs. Robert Parker, “the king of wine reviewers” was sold on the taste-shaping power of the product, remarking: “The effect of these glasses on fine wine is profound. I cannot emphasize enough what a difference they make.”

What happens when such glasses are tested scientifically? Godin comments:

“And yet when the proper tests are done scientifically — double-blind tests that eliminate any chance that the subject would know the shape of the glass — there is absolutely zero detectable difference between glasses. A $1 glass and a $20 glass deliver precisely the same impact on wine: none.”

Rewriting the narrative

Our current political climate is thick with narratives, many of which, if believed, can result in great danger. Think of the stories told about how gun regulation and background checks threaten the American tradition of freedom and individualism. Or the tall tale about how climate change is an exaggeration by nutty, doomsday, leftist scientists.

One way to fight such narratives is the way Scalzi’s characters do.  They find a way to seize control of the story themselves — and revise it, so they don’t get whacked.

Why are we whispering? Thoughts on "Blade Runner 2049."

I finally saw Blade Runner 2049 on cable the other night. Beautiful to look at, sometimes moving, but what really struck me was the degree of low-talking going on.

At times I thought of those comic bits in films where two characters find themselves needlessly speaking in hushed tones. One of them inevitably notices and blurts out, “why are we whispering?”

There are lots of answers you could give to such a question. Perhaps the characters in this dystopia feared surveillance (but would a whisper really mask your speech to the future’s presumably hyper-sensitive bugs?).

Or maybe, since the main characters are androids, they speak in even, quiet tones like AI traditionally does (think of Hal in 2001) in science fiction films. I guess this is to connote emotional control — an inhuman equanimity. But then again, the replicants in this case seem desperate, rather than icy cool.

Or perhaps the voices of these beings are simply muffled by the ambient noise of their chaotic urban landscape, which sometimes seems scored to a track reminiscent of the Beatles’ classic “Revolution number 9.”

None of these answers satisfied me, though. There was something holy about their quiet. Combined with the dark lighting (as I remember it, the movie takes place mostly at night), the whispering made me think I was in a church. I could almost smell the incense.

The religious vibe of the film is inescapable; it’s literally dripping with the biblical. The narrative is centered around a miraculous birth, as a subculture of replicants is excited to discover one of their own was “of woman born.” The mother is Rachel, Sean Young’s character from the first film. At one point, a replicant describing this birth alludes piously to a verse from Genesis: “And God remembered Rachel; he listened to her and allowed her to conceive.”

Religious themes are common to science fiction. Reverential awe often underscores that moment when the wonder of a new technology is revealed: some new device or process cool or horrible enough to promise utopia or threaten apocalypse. The genre never tires of extrapolating on Arthur C. Clarke’s famous maxim: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

But Blade Runner 2049 is not that kind of film. The technology isn’t really new.  These androids have been around since at least 1982, when the original film was released. Add to this the fact that the movie centers on a specific form of technology.  Blade Runner 2049 doesn’t feature alien craft, doomsday weapons or time travel devices. It’s object of meditation is the digital.

This focus is unmistakable, as revealed in a particularly poignant scene. Ryan Gosling’s “Officer K”, a replicant cop, views a comparison of android “genetics” to human: the former binary, the latter triplicate (the nucleotide groups of three that make up the human gene). K says something like, “That’s the difference between us and them…” in a despairing tone.

Alexander Galloway’s Laruelle: Against the Digital

A book I’ve been reading recently, by cultural theorist Alexander Galloway, addresses what might be called the “digital despair” alluded to in the film. In Laruelle: Against the Digital, Galloway argues that the way digital technology shapes our worldview produces a sort of alienation — one of the symptoms of which are weird fantasies of transcendence.

Galloway’s argument is complex, and I can’t do it justice here. But to simplify it greatly, he makes the case that digital technology, based in a binary code, is the latest in a tradition of Western thought, from Plato to Heidegger to Derrida, that attempts to describe the real by dividing it into two. Typically, a thinker decides upon two elements as key (whether these be mind/body, being/nothing, self/other, etc.). We are then shown how the two interact, synthesize or build into bigger structures, and voila, how reality “works” is defined.

The problem is, of course, that the “real” is an unwieldy beast, that refuses to be corralled into such schema. In the case of digital media, Galloway traces two results from such framing. First, it produces a feeling of unreality, for “digital relations are always already fake or simulated, for they arise from radical standardization at the atomic level.” And this leads to a second result: a drive to transcend.

A good example of the way this theory plays out, as Galloway alludes to, might be the widely accepted theory that the brain functions like a digital device — i.e. a computer.  This leads to thoughts of transcendence, i.e., the search for a “ghost in the machine.” Or better yet, the fantasy that immortality will one day be attainable, once we upload our “minds” into heavenly digital clouds.

This dynamic is at the heart of Blade Runner 2049. The replicants, aware they are digital products, feel “less than.” They have been programmed to serve rather than to decide. They are alienated beings seeking, in contemporary pop lingo, to become “authentic.” In other words, like us chromosome-based machines, they struggle to be free. 

And I guess there’s nothing holier than that.

Celebrities: What Are They Good For? Thoughts on Paul Fericano's Hollywood Catechism

Recently, a wonderfully witty and satiric book of poetry came my way -- Paul Fericano's The Hollywood Catechism.  Among other things, it takes a playful look at the way celebrity worship almost resembles a religion.  Here's the first poem:

The Actor's Creed

I believe in Brando,
the Godfather of enormous weight,
creator of mumbling and angst,
and in James Dean, his only ward, our Jim,
who was sold into celluloid by Jack Warner,
born of the hustler Strasberg,
suffered under Rock Hudson,
was speeding, died, and nominated;
descended into gossip hell;
and on his third film was chosen
again from the dead;
ascended into Giant heaven,
and is seated in a bathhouse with Brando
the Godfather of enormous weight;
from where he will come to judge
all performances.

I believe in the Holy Spielberg,
the holy casting couch,
the communion of press agents,
the forgiveness of Sally Field,
the resurrection of my career,
and life everlasting without Tom Hanks.
Amen.

Anyone who was raised Catholic will recognize that this is a rewrite of the Apostles Creed, recited during every Mass.  Living up to its title, Fericano's Catechism features a number of poems that recast prayers, substituting famous movie people for sacred figures. There is "The Director's Prayer," which rewrites the Our Father, "The Halle Berry," a redo of the Hail Mary, and in place of the Sign of the Cross, here's "The Sign of the Double Cross":

In the name of the Bogart,
and of the Cagney,
and of the Holy Edward G.
Amen, see?

We Have Never Been Disenchanted

As I was thinking about why these poems work so well, I came across a fascinating essay by cultural critic Eugene McCarraher. In it, the author takes issue with a cliche about modernity -- that with the coming of science, technology and the skepticism of the Enlightenment, our world became, in the words of Max Weber, "disenchanted" (i.e., divested of the spirits, oracles and animism of an earlier age).

McCarraher argues instead that "we have never been disenchanted."  For once the old gods and spirits fled the modern world, the holy beings and objects of popular culture replaced them: movie stars, celebrities, and an endless chain of luxurious products that carry their own magical auras and promises of power.

McCarraher reasons that this new "mysticism" is made possible by the spectacles of Capitalism, in which the rich and famous are portrayed as nearly miraculous, and the products they promote almost sacramental.  All of which suggests that we are just as brainwashed by this new creed as people once were by older beliefs.

The Pragmatism of Celebrity Worship

Such ideas are useful for explaining the source of the wit in Fericano's book -- for what these poems do is make explicit what's implied by celebrity culture: they pretend to take the idea of celebrity worship literally.

But I say pretend (and this is where I differ a bit from the essay I mentioned) because, of course, no one really worships celebrities.  Ripping a picture of Brando in half won't get the same reaction as doing the same thing with the Pope's.  Despite the common belief that we're living in a "secular age," there's still a hierarchy of the sacred and profane.  If this weren't true, these poems wouldn't be as funny as they are.

All of which leads me to wonder -- if we don't use celebrities in search of a (lost?) sense of transcendence, what are they good for?

I think a poem like "The Actor's Creed" offers a clue.  Actors do, after all, follow a creed: the vocabulary of gestures established by the "greats" who came before them.  And so do we.  Like actors, consciously or not, we also sometimes incorporate the mannerisms, expressions and even fashion sense of our favorite stars into the way we perform our identities and the roles we're asked to play.  Among other things, this is a way of displaying a sort of (pop) culture literacy.

In other words, instead of using such images to transcend daily life, we take them up as tools to participate in it.  (See Alva Noe's Strange Tools.) This is why, as "godly" as they are, such figures are always marked by an amusing sense of worldliness.

It's also why invoking them in poetry, usually thought of as the realm of "high art," can sometimes have a satirically corrosive (and populist) effect -- even when it comes to literary "holiness."  In this book, for example, Ginsberg's Howl becomes The Howl of Lon Chaney, Jr. (the actor who played the Wolfman in the classic 1941 film).

Frank O'Hara once wrote that people shouldn't be forced to read poetry, especially because most of it wasn't "as good as the movies" anyway.  I like to think he composed poems beginning with lines like "Lana Turner has collapsed!" to help remedy the situation.

In The Hollywood Catechism, I found lots of the same sort of irreverent attitude -- and fun.

The "Science" of Literature: Thoughts on a Poem by A.R. Ammons

Recently I came across a passage in Sphere, A.R. Ammons' long poem, that caught my interest by the way it drew a parallel between natural and cultural evolution:

15

in the generations and becomings of our minds, anthologies,
good sayings are genes, the images, poems, stories
chromosomes and the interminglings of these furnish beginnings

within continuities, continuities within trials, mischances,
fortunate forwardings: gene pool, word hoard: the critic
samples the new thing, he turns it over in his consideration,

he checks alignments, proportions, he looks into the body of
the anthology to see if the new thing hooks in, distorts, to raise
or ruin: he considers the weight, clarity, viability of

the new thing and reconsiders the whole body of the anthology:
if the new thing finds no attachment, if energy, cementing,
does not flow back  and forth between it and the anthology,

16

it dies, withered away from the configuration of the people...

The "sphere" Ammons writes about in this poem is the earth.  And though I'm still in the midst of reading Sphere, I can see how integrating the two "evolutions" is in keeping with the poem's themes, as all the topics and images it presents are swept up into a single, self-modifying ecology.

But there's also a historical aspect about these lines that interests me.  Ammons' poem was originally published in 1974.  Two years later, science writer Richard Dawkins offered a similar analogy between biological and cultural evolution in The Selfish Gene.  Except, instead of referring to "literary" genes and chromosomes, as Ammons does, Dawkins coined the now famous term "memes" (which sounds a little like "genes," but also connotes [cultural] memory).  Here's how he defined his new word:

"Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches.  Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.  If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students.  He mentions it in his articles and his lectures.  If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain."

Dawkins casts a wider cultural net than Ammons but, nevertheless, if you replace the "scientist" in his prose with the "critic" in Sphere, you have a fairly good  analogy between the two concepts.

The Decline and Fall of the "Meme"

Since the 70s, I've read, the whole idea of "memes" has been pretty much discredited as far as its scientific value goes.  The philosopher Massimo Pigliucci writes that "we don't know how to define memes in a way that is operationally useful to the practicing scientist, we don't know why some memes are successful and others not, and we have no clue as to the physical substrate, if any, of which memes are made.  Tellingly, the Journal of Memetics closed a few years ago for lack of submissions."

The "meme" concept has also come under fire from cultural criticism.  It's often seen as another "reductionist" product of scientism -- that form of intellectual overreach through which materialist thinkers seek to explain things they know little about by ascribing them, in some crude way, to processes borrowed from the natural sciences.

The only area, in fact, where the concept still has currency is the web.  But rather than something governed by "critics" or "scientists," the meme has become a populist, occasionally (mildly) subversive creation, as people joyously replicate, mutate and circulate endless goofy pictures of cats, celebrities, politicians and optical illusions.

The Return of Cultural Evolution

Despite the fate of "memes," the desire to discover patterns of cultural evolution has not gone away -- nor, for that matter, the pursuit of approaches to literature that use tools pioneered in the natural sciences.

The relatively new field of "digital humanities" is a case in point.  Because of the quickly growing digital archive of texts, both popular and "canonical," scholars are now able to pursue increasingly systematic, quantifiable approaches to literature.  They are beginning, for example, to be able to trace the way basic stylistic traits in the novel change between centuries.

Science scholar Armand Marie Leroi has written recently that this area of study may result in "something resembling the theory of organic evolution..." and will draw on fields such as "epidemiology, cognitive psychology and behavioral economics," along with the literary analysis of critics who interpret what these methods discover.

All of which makes me wonder if we're witnessing a shift.  Over the past 30 years or so, cultural critics have often been fascinated with the idea of viewing science through the lens of literature.  Perhaps now they are becoming enchanted by imagining what literature looks like in the eyes of a scientist.  Thoughts? 

Do We Live in an "Atemporal" Time? Thoughts on a Poem by William Bronk

Nowadays, one hears so much about innovation that the very concept has become banal.  It almost seems like there is nothing less innovative than the pursuit of innovation.

This is why I found a poem I came across recently by William Bronk so fascinating.  Instead of offering more of the breathless rhetoric of change, it paints a picture  of a world where everything remains stubbornly the same.  It's titled "We Want the Mark of Time," and it begins like this:

We know what men felt once, as if they feel
forever, as if we feel.  The anguishes
of ancients, their ecstasies, recorded once
and unforgotten, even their trivial times,
are so much ours, it is as if we were
no more than ants, a bird, or any beast
fixed in a closed, instinctive pattern...

I remember reading somewhere that what supposedly distinguished humanity from the rest of the animal kingdom was our ability to create history -- through recording, remembering, and hopefully learning from it.  In Bronk's poem, this capability vanishes; we are just as repetitively instinctual as the rest of living creatures.

It's almost as if we live in the type of universe once proposed by Parmenides, where all is one and static -- the changes we notice merely an illusory play of surfaces.  This sense of stasis seems almost painful to Bronk's speaker.  He states, a little later in the poem:

.....................................We look almost
in puzzlement at someone younger about
to feel or learn what we, as if for him,
as if for everyone, have learned, have felt.
There is no need, we think.  We move as if
to stop him.  Why should he do what we have done?

The poem goes on to ask, "How shall we think of time without a change?" Instead of an answer, it ends with a haunting image and a sense of longing:

Oh, it is with desire we read of suns
that some day burn themselves to darkness.  At night
we search the sky for such a sign: that there
should be time, an ending.  We want the mark of time.

Of course, such lines, which long for evidence of change, run contrary to the common sense of our own times -- marked by, as I mentioned, a breathlessness  regarding everything from the speed of globalization, digitization, and human self-transformation, to troubling realities like the degradation of the environment.  But Bronk's poem (circa 1956) must have seemed at odds with its own time as well.

Sontag and "The Imagination of Disaster"

As Susan Sontag analyzed in "The Imagination of Disaster," popular culture, beginning in 1950 and up until the time time of her essay (1963), was obsessed with images of catastrophic change, not unlike the dying stars Bronk's poem longs for, but does not witness.  Sontag hypothesized that the reality of the bomb inspired this; she proposed that translating the possibility of annihilation into entertaining, fantastic films enabled people to cope with such fears better in daily life.

Reading Bronk's poem brought to my mind, for example, the classic science fiction disaster film When Worlds Collide (1951), where a "rogue star" (or burning sun, as Bronk might put it) is due to crash into the earth.

But there is another element in Sontag's essay that suggests Bronk was also right about the lack of change he registers.  For she writes that her time is not only afflicted with "inconceivable terror," but also "unremitting banality" (a reference, perhaps, to the much written about conformism of the era).  Thus, the other function of the films she covers is to provide a vision of relief from the humdrum:

"The lure of the generalized disaster as a fantasy is that it releases one from normal obligations.  The trump card of the end-of-the-world movies...is that great scene with New York or London or Tokyo discovered empty, its entire population annihilated.  Or, as in The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1959), the whole movie can be devoted to the fantasy of occupying  the deserted city and starting all over again -- Robinson Crusoe on a world-wide scale."

In light of all this, I think there's a sense in which Bronk's poem is relevant to our own time.  Ever since the dawn of so-called postmodernism, there is a common complaint about the changlessness of our culture -- that we're in a mere recycling mode, with nothing new on the horizon.  Only the other day, for example, I attended a show at MOMA titled: "The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World."

The same dynamic Sontag discusses may be behind the contemporary popularity of the dystopian film.  Such offerings may not only help us cope with our own fears of catastrophe, but also offer a strange sort of hope that the old order will someday be gone, so that we can start anew.

Or, as Bronk would put it, perhaps we too want the mark of time.

Philip Whalen Talks to the Animals in "The Turn"

Recently, I came across a Philip Whalen poem that offered an amusing example of interspecies communication.  Check it out:

The Turn

Walking along Elm Road
Handful of nasturtiums, butter, some kind of bread
75¢ the loaf no advertising included
Bread and air and a price tag wrapped in plastic
The dogs come out as usual to roar at me
I find myself screeching wildly in reply
Fed up with suppressing my rage and fear
I bellow and roar
The dogs are scared and their people scandalized
"What are you trying to do?  HAY!  What are you trying to do?"
I had nothing to tell them; I was talking to their dogs.

One of the charms of this poem, for me, is its ordinariness, even banality.  Who hasn't, out of sheer frustration with being barked at (by angry dogs or other beings), lost it, and barked back?  I know I have, though, unlike Whalen, the last time I remember barking at a dog (a Doberman in my case), I don't think I was able to silence him.

But paradoxically, it's the very unexceptional quality of the event narrated here that makes it unusual.  For there's a rich, imaginative tradition, spanning culture high and low, that paints the talent for "talking to animals" as a mysterious, nearly superhuman power.

In fact, in psychic/new age jargon, this talent has got a name --"zoolingualism" -- and it's a power possessed by everyone from Tarzan, Dr. Dolittle and St. Francis, to horse whisperers, like the one Scarlett Johansson once portrayed.  Or like the shaman, in Elizabeth Bishop's great poem, "The Riverman," which begins:

I got up in the night
for the Dolphin spoke to me.
He grunted beneath my window,
hid by the river mist,
but I glimpsed him -- a man like myself.

When it comes to the mythologies surrounding poets and the act of writing poetry, the tradition of zoolingualism becomes (excuse the pun) even more pronounced.  Orpheus, the archetypal poet, could understand the language of birds.  And his song tamed even the fiercest beasts, as celebrated in this medieval mosaic (in which you'll notice a few wild dogs).

Whalen himself, for that matter, wasn't averse to this more mythic type of interspecies communication.   Here's his poem "Never Apologize; Never Explain":

A pair of strange new birds in the maple tree
Peer through the windows
Mother and father visiting me:
                    "You are unmarried,
                    No child begot
                    Now we are birds, now you've
                        forgotten us
                    Although in dreams we visit you
                        in human shape"

They speak Homer's language
Sing like Aeschylus

The life of a poet:  less than 2/3rds of a second.

The Language of Barking

What's especially interesting, though, when it comes to a poem like "The Turn," is that the down-to-earth way it portrays such communications suggests how the sounds we emit as natural, rather than supernatural, beings actually can resemble the language of dogs, or other (nonhuman) species.  Alva Noe, a philosopher grounded in cognitive science, comments:

"One of the very many false ideas about language is that its primary function is to express information or communicate thoughts.  Speech has many functions, but surely a large part of it is more like the grooming behavior of chimpanzees or the shepherding behavior of dogs than it is like reasoned discourse among parliamentarians.  We bark so that our kids get out the door in time to get on their bus and so that they feel safe and loved...The bulk of what we do and say each day is more like the grunts and signals baseball players use to indicate who'll catch the pop fly than it is like genuine conversation."

All of which is to say that language involves the performance of acts as much as it does the transmission of ideas.  The dogs bark to chase Whalen away.  He barks back to stand his ground.  You could say at this moment -- one animal communicating with other animals -- he's "one with nature," as a Romantic might put it.  But this doesn't mean, in the poem's realist version of this idea, that man and beast are necessarily going to get along.

Then again, to complicate matters a bit more, perhaps the language the dogs and the poet speak here has nothing to do whatsoever with anything the least bit "natural."  For aren't the dogs stand-ins for their owners, speaking a social message for which they've been trained, one that can simply be translated as "no trespassing"?

And by answering the dogs, rather than their owners, perhaps the poet implies that such social aggression, unleashed on whoever's in the mere vicinity of a private property, doesn't deserve a civil reply.  Thoughts?
                       

Artifice as a Path to Authenticity: Thoughts on Chuck Close, Charles Bernstein and Video Realism

Continuing to think about our habit of reading into facial expressions (see last post), brought to mind an experience I had once viewing an exhibit of visual art.

I was at MOMA a few years back, checking out the Chuck Close retrospective.  In the room that housed his early works from the 60s, I came across the giant, photorealistic portraits for which he is well known.

I had an odd experience viewing these huge "heads" together in one place.  Close has made it clear that his portraits are paintings of photographs -- not studies from "real life."  Because of this fact, you'd think you were several steps away from attributing psychological presence to these works.  In fact, I'm told that if you view them up close, you can actually see the grid of tiny boxes through which they're created; it's as if you're looking at a mosaic made of hundreds of tiles, each with a miniature abstract painting inside.

Yet, oddly, the paintings also seemed to carry symbolic messages.  In the portrait of Philip Glass, for example, the swirling patterns of Glass's hair and skin rhymed, for me, with the epic, circular movement of his music.  It seemed as if his face were some sort of medieval emblem, in which the spirit of his inner creativity manifested in the flesh.

What I found striking was how this inner spirit fought its way through the artificial quality that Close foregrounds.  It was as if a certain presence would not be denied -- even if the artist telegraphed this was a simulation of a simulation; even if you knew the painting's effect was the result of Close's own "smoke and mirrors."

It was almost as if the artificial aspect of the work was precisely what made it more absorbing.

Charles Bernstein's "Artifice of Absorption"

An especially lucid analysis of the phenomena I've just described is found in a piece I alluded to in the last post: Charles Bernstein's essay-in-verse titled "Artifice of Absorption."  Toward its end, Bernstein describes the experience of watching Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape.

In this play, the character "Krapp" listens to autobiographical diary entries he made via tape recordings during earlier periods of his life.  But just as he, and we, as audience, begin to be absorbed in these accounts, Krapp reminds himself and us of their artifice.  He frequently switches off the tape, interupting the narrative flow, fast forwarding at times, stopping at others to make sarcastic comments on his own youthful naivete.

But our heightened awareness of the mechanical device through which Krapp's "heartfelt" confessions are communicated, rather than make us more distanced, draws us in.  Bernstein comments:

"Indeed, the very jagged moments when the tape is
abruptly turned off -- moments in which the 
listener's absorption may seem to be
ruptured -- only serve to heighten the dramatic power
of the play.  Beckett's incisively spliced
dislocations have a spellbinding
theatrical effect..."

The emotional content of the performance seems more real, then, precisely because the work refuses to become "absorbed" in the "vain hopes" of the stories the character once told himself.  It's as if a higher degree of honesty -- and hence authenticity -- results from the very acknowledgement of the ephemeral quality of the stories Krapp tells himself.

And the presence of a tape machine in the play underlines the fact that even our most basic sense of our lives and identities is unavoidably mediated -- that an immaculate perception of ourselves is impossible.

Video Realism

Both Close and Beckett come from the realm of high art, but I've also seen forms of popular culture that achieve "realism effects" by doing something similar.

Recently I watched an indie horror film titled Alien Abduction (about so-called true events involving disappearances and "strange lights" that occurred in the Brown Mountains of North Carolina).

 

The story, of course, was far-fetched.  But what made it gripping, nonetheless, was the technique through which it was told.  As we watch this tale of alien abduction involving a small family, we are constantly reminded, by its shaky, hand-held quality (and occasional blackouts) that we are watching a homemade video (in this case, one filmed by an autistic boy).  The camera, in fact, is as much a character in the movie as the people.

As such, the movie is the latest in a low-budget genre that began with the Blair Witch Project, in which outlandish tales gain a degree of realism by seeming to be filmed by "real" people on poor quality equipment.

All of which leads me to wonder whether if, today, in order to achieve a "suspension of disbelief," it helps to have a recording device somewhere nearby.  Thoughts?

Also of Interest:
My new book of poems, The Cheapskates, from Lunar Chandelier Press, is now available from Small Press Distribution.  Click here.

Review of The Cheapskates by David Lehman,  click here, and another by Michael Lally (with my poem on Chuck Close),  click here.

On the Eyes Not Being Windows of the Soul: Gertrude Stein, James Franco and Mind Reading

I've recently been reading The Making of Americans the way Gertrude Stein says she wrote it: little by little, day by day.  Stein loves to teach, and some of my favorite moments are when she shares bits of wisdom, practical and artistic, in her witty, hypnotic fashion.

The other day I came upon a passage which makes the point that a person's facial expressions don't necessarily reveal his or her moods:

"Sometimes the boy had a way with him, and it would show clear in spite of the fair cheery sporty nature he had in him, a way of looking sleepy and reflecting, and his lids would never be really ever very open, and he would be always only half showing his clear grey eyes that, very often, were bright alive and laughing.  Later such a way of looking could be of great service to him.  It would not matter if he never really could have wisdom in him, this look could help him always in his dealings with all men and be of much service too to him with women.  He will listen then, and with his veiled eyes it will be as if he were full with thinking, and with himself always well hidden, and so he will be wise; or for a woman it will be as if he were always in a dream of them.  Wisdom and dreaming, both good things when shown at the right time by a young grown man, who wants to be succeeding, always, in every kind of living."

Even though we know that a person's demeanor doesn't always reflect his or her state of mind, as Stein's passage indicates, we often assume it does.  So much so, that she suggests her character can potentially use this assumption to his advantage: if he cultivates his tendency to "look sleepy" he can make himself seem more wise or romantic than he really is.

The cognitive cultural critic, Lisa Zunshine, attributes our habit of reading outward expressions as indicative of inner states as the result of what she terms "the myth of embodied transparency."  This is the traditional belief that not only the eyes, but the face and bodily attitude, are windows to the soul.

In Zunshine's view, our tendency to make this assumption -- almost like a reflex -- says something about our lives as social beings: we are constantly compelled to try to "read people's minds" by hints like facial expression because we need to guess at others' thoughts and intentions in order to make our way in society.

Is James Franco Bored or Stoned?

One of the reasons why I found the Stein passage amusing is that it brought to mind an actor known for his sleepy look: James Franco.  It seems much of the irritation surrounding him has to do with whether he "embodies transparency" or not.  His detractors claim he does; they read his demeanor as signifying boredom or intoxication.  But Franco claims his face doesn't mean what it appears to; he says it's the result of a medical condition.

Whatever the truth is, the ambiguity of his look seems to fascinate.  On a recent Comedy Central Roast, it was a touch point for many of the jokes.  "If at any point James fully opens his eyes tonight, there will be six more weeks of summer," said one roaster.  And another: "I've heard of a lazy eye, but that left one is collecting unemployment."

But despite the habitual pull of the idea of embodied transparency, there are moments, Zunshine argues (in her book Getting Inside Your Head), when our belief in it evaporates.  As she puts it:

"As soon as a culture becomes aware of an established niche for representing embodied transparency, this niche is vulnerable to subversion and parody."

One "niche" where this occurs in our times is Reality Television.  As a genre, such programs promise a raw look at the inner emotional states of their characters.  As Zunshine writes, because the people on such shows are not professional actors, "the assumption...is that participants...are not good at faking or concealing their feelings."

Yet, because the emotive situations and gestures seem overdone (and are repeated with such regularity on so many reality shows), the genre is frequently mocked for being "stagy."  As a result, though Reality TV aims for authenticity, it's often written off as artificial or manipulative.

But then, to make things even more complicated, there are also times, as Charles Bernstein has described in his now classic essay, "Artifice of Absorption," when literary or artistic works can actually heighten their emotional impact precisely by making us aware of their aesthetic devices; i.e., when creative work gains authenticity by admitting to its artificiality.

More on this fascinating twist in the next post...

A New Brand of Poetry: Apple's iPad Air Commercial

Can you market unmarketability?  A commercial that's been running everywhere lately caught my interest by doing just that.  It's the new iPad Air spot, that sells its product by associating it with a genre that's normally equated with box office poison: poetry.  Check it out:

 

The voice-over you hear is Robin Williams.  As Rob Walter on the Yahoo.tech blog points out, this entire sermon about the glories of poetry is lifted right out of the movie The Dead Poets Society. He also notes that this isn't the first time Whitman has been used to sell product; Levi's did it in 2009 (covered by this blog here).

But to a poetry fan like myself, such precedent doesn't make this choice any less odd.  Poetry is generally the most hated of all art forms.  It seems almost once a month that some generally uniformed expert holds forth about its irrelevancy.  When it's not accused of being unreadable, it's written off as merely corny.

So why invoke this outre form of communication to sell one of the world's hippest new reading (among other things) devices?  The rationale for such a strategy can be deduced by comparison with a competitive spot: the one for Kindle Fire's HDX that takes an aggressive swipe at the iPad Air:

 

Two ways to sell.  The Kindle Fire is portrayed as a rational choice.  It's lighter, claims it has a sharper picture, and most of all, it's at least $100 cheaper than its competitor.  But the iPad Air promises you something more, if less tangible.  Instead of  just a tool, it offers you the prospect of a more creative life -- one in which you can make a difference.

All of which brings to mind a comment the critic Slavoj Zizek made recently about the current state of consumer culture: "today we buy commodities neither for their utility nor as status symbols.  We buy them to get the experience they provide; we consume them to make our lives meaningful."

You could argue, of course, that the visual lyricism of the iPad commercial really is about specific, rational benefits: it tells you, in so many direct and indirect images, that the Air can be used as much for creating content as it is for consuming it.

But, despite their generally superior operating systems,  Apple products  have always been about more than mere functionality.  

Since its famous 1984 spot, when Apple promised that its computers could help you escape the thought control of conformity, the brand has offered magical experiences rather than merely cool things.  What this translates to here is the idea that there are some things the money you save on a Kindle Fire just can't buy.

That's why the reference to poetry fits. Whatever value one sees in it simply doesn't translate into cash.  Do even the most famous poets get rich on what they write?

Poetry, in fact, is so against the common sense economic mind that when it is taken at all seriously in popular culture, it often leads to dire consequences.  Think about what happens in The Dead Poets Society film.  Robin Williams' ("Keating" in the movie) poetry recitations are meant to waken "the boys" from their utilitarian slumbers, i.e., to show them there's more to learning (and life) than becoming a lawyer, doctor or executive.

Those who take this message to heart, though, meet with bad ends.  One boy, hopped up on Romantic poetry, chases the girl of his dreams into jock turf.  Of course, he promptly gets his ass kicked.  Another, inspired by poems to disobey his dad's wishes (to become a doctor) ends up shooting himself.  Williams' himself, as a result of such rantings, is fired from his teaching gig.

But with the iPad Air's mini movie, of course, such qualms need never arise.  Because the commercial takes such anti-economic tendencies and marries them to a brand people love to buy -- one they believe in almost like a religion.  The spot offers you a safe way to spend your money on a commodity that promises to take you above and beyond the boring world of money.

As such, you could say it's in love with the idea of poetry, rather than poetry itself.  Perhaps, then, the commercial invents a new brand of poetry -- or, to be more exact: the idea of poetry as a brand in and of itself.

Keeping It Weird: Thoughts on the film Dark Skies (with help from the philosopher Graham Harman)

Just saw an alien abduction film via Pay-per-view that received mixed reviews, but that I found a provocative, even philosophical treat.

It's called Dark Skies.  It's produced by the people who developed the Paranormal Activity series, and incorporates some of the "video realism" technique of those films.

 

What I liked about the movie was what some reviewers hated: its vagaries and slow pace.  Rather than following action/horror film conventions, i.e., lots of special effects and overly-long chase sequences, it builds to a slow boil.  When the aliens do appear, they're mostly in shadows, probably due to cost constraints.  But rather than look cheesy, this just adds to their menacing otherness.  And its the chill of this otherness that intrigued me most about the film.

The movie centers on a middle-class suburban family, down on its luck because of the economy.  The father (Josh Hamilton) is looking for a job.  The mother (Keri Russell) sells Real Estate but, since her conscience won't let her hype dingy properties to close a deal, her career is hurting too.  Their adolescent son is becoming alienated from these "losers"; their younger kid is haunted.   He draws pictures of strange beings holding him by the hand.

Disturbing signs build as the movie proceeds.  Flocks of birds dive bomb into their windows.  Some mornings, they find toys, canned food and kitchenware built into bizarre towers in their living room, as if some outsider artist were at work.  Menacing bruises appear on the kids' bodies and behind the ears of the grown-ups.  A web search by Russell reveals that these are all signs of an alien home invasion.

This discovery results in a trip to the city to visit the local ufologist, who, judging from his even dingier apartment, is even more down-on-his-luck than our suburban couple. (Whom the alien gods would destroy, they first make unemployed.)

After reviewing the family's symptoms, he offers a dire prognosis.  They're being readied for the abduction of one of their members.  This can only be prevented if the family sticks together to fight off the alien invaders.

During this scene comes the most crucial conversation of the flick: "why" Russell asks, "did they choose us?  What makes us so special?"  To which the abduction expert tells them that there's actually nothing at all special about them, and that, in fact, mere humans can't understand why they choose who they do.  This would be like being  lab rats trying to understand the mind of the scientist performing the experiments on them.

It's this sentiment, I think, that justifies the murky, vague quality of much of what goes in this this film.  If there are beings we never see clearly, and clues and loose ends that are never tied up neatly, this all goes to support the general incomprehensibility of the characters' experience.

H.P. Lovecraft's "Weird Realism" (According to Graham Harman)

All of which brought to mind a book I've been reading by the philosopher Graham Harman.  Titled Weird Realism, it examines the stories of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft.  Though some consider Lovecraft Poe's true successor, others complain that his "purple prose" is merely sensationalist, kitschy and most of all, vague.

Harman defends Lovecraft on this score, arguing that what his work is actually about is how impossible it is to capture reality through our representational systems.  And in this light, the garish, literal approaches of much conventional pop culture often miss the boat.  As he puts it:

"The meaning of being might even be defined as untranslatability.  Language (and everything else) is obliged to become an art of allusion or indirect speech, a metaphorical bond with a reality that cannot possibly be made present.  Realism does not mean that we are able to state correct propositions about the real world.  Instead, it means that reality is too real to be translated without remainder into any sentence, perception, practical action or anything else."

This explains why, in Dark Skies, though an alien figure is eventually recorded by the elaborate home surveillance cameras the father sets up, he doesn't go to the police -- insisting he won't be believed.  Because he won't be.  What appears on video is too traumatic for a mere camera to represent.  Presumably, the police wouldn't believe their eyes, even if they saw it.

And what makes the film scary is in fact this pervasive "unstranslatability."  This quality even adds a touch of horror to the precariousness of the characters' economic prospects (that seem controlled by incomprehensible forces as well).

In short, what makes the fear in Dark Skies seem real is the fact that the film can't fully articulate what it's scared of.  Thoughts?