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Whenever I observe that a certain movie, book, or TV show seems unfit for adult consumption, the adults who nevertheless consume it heartily always respond with the same defense: "But it's a great story!"
This bothers me in the same way that it bothers me when I hear some professional being interviewed — writer, filmmaker, musician, journalist PR flack, whatever — describe themselves as "basically a storyteller."
At I Q&A I once asked the head of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation why the buses on Wilshire don't have their own lanes. She replied that "we'll have to do a lot of storytelling to make that happen," an answer that obscurely infuriates me whenever I think about it.
For quite some time, the elevation of story above all else seemed to me to lie at the heart of many dissatisfactions, especially of the cinematic variety. "Cinema now is simply illustrating bedtime stories for adults," Peter Greenaway has often said, and I know what he means.
The more I thought and wrote about it, the more I realized the disease actually had to do with plot. As E.M. Forster put it, "The king died and then the queen died" is a story, but "The king died and then the queen died of grief" is a plot. Plotting involves more rigid causality.
"One is anxious reading Jude the Obscure, or Disgrace, because one quickly senses that the authors are so intensely engaged in following through their characters’ dilemmas and predicaments that they would not hesitate to have things end badly if that is where their genius leads."
That's Tim Parks on what he calls "the distance between genre writing and literature." He credits the latter with "no easy division into good and evil and no feeling that order need necessarily be returned to the world in the closing pages."
We all grow up reading genre stories, and there is genuine satisfaction to be derived from paying close attention to their conventions and variations. If Norbert Davis was good enough for Wittgenstein, he's good enough for us.
But we don't have to go farther than the nearest movie theater to see an insidious process at work: the ever more aggressive tarting-up of essentially juvenile story forms with ostensibly "adult" themes, content, and swears https://twitter.com/dril/status/1116767352438149121
I could bemoan an excess of stories, but I could just as easily bemoan a poverty of stories, or rather a poverty of imagination about the range forms a story can take. We all have a vast creative field open to us, yet we tread the same patch over and over — and claim to enjoy it!
There may be a kind of Dunning-Kruger effect at work: it's not so much that we substitute length and convolution for narrative sophistication, but that we can't perceive the difference. Or maybe it's a kind of Stockholm Syndrome. https://twitter.com/You_Need_A_Lift/status/1191772264087334912
This got me looking for the essence of story, the purest form of story — or at least the purest form that can still satisfy us. I'd say it needs to comprise a sequence of events made up of two "tracks," one of them basically predictable and one of them basically unpredictable.
Hence the appeal of journey stories, which find one robust modern form in the road movie. The predictable or known track is geographical: where the characters start, where they're going, and what's in between. The unpredictable or unknown track is what happens along the way.
I've enjoyed many a road movie in my time, but I've drawn much more satisfaction from Chris Marclay's "The Clock," a 24-hour, real-time chronological assembly of clock shots from hundreds of films throughout cinema history.
In "The Clock," the known track is, of course, the 1,440 sequential minutes in a day. The unknown track is which movies — new or old? One we've seen or one we haven't? Related to previous selections? Serious? Funny? Funny because serious? — the corresponding clips will come from.
One might object that "The Clock" doesn't tell a story because it has no characters, or at least no characters the viewer can reasonably expect to follow. But as in all stories, the character we're really following isn't anyone onscreen but the storyteller himself.
The protagonist of "The Clock" is Christian Marclay, and the suspense we feel watching the story is the suspense of not knowing how he'll solve the known problem of finding just the right movie clip to match with each minute. Every time I watch I'm surprised he pulls it off.
Marclay worked with collaborators, but the storyteller — the single guiding intelligence we imagine generating any story — is "Christian Marclay," just as Vladimir Nabokov is the guiding intelligence, and thus the real protagonist, of every Nabokov novel. https://twitter.com/colinmarshall/status/1116492147857866752
If we think back to childhood, we find that we couldn't — or didn't instinctively — watch, read, or listen this way. We were exclusively (and sometimes obsessively) interested in the doings of Superman and Batman, Luke Skywalker and Indiana Jones, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys.
Of course, no adult can be expected to relate to — to "identify with," in easy-reader parlance — superheroes or teenage detectives. But we can relate to an adult taking on the challenge of communicating with other adults in a way that strikes a balance between known and unknown.
The storytellers worthy of our attention create textual or audiovisual spaces in which each of us has our own experience. The storytellers unworthy of our attention attempt to provoke the same emotions in all of us, at the same time, with the same techniques.
Years ago, I overheard a 25-year-old man enthuse about how "the new season of Battlestar Galactica goes to some really dark places." The surge of contempt I felt must have had to do with his childlike surrender to an entertainment attempting to disguise its form with its themes.
The paradigmatic entertainment of 2010s America is "Riverdale," a television series that takes the material of a children's comic — one I too enjoyed in childhood — and juices it with "adult" themes. Murder! Financial fraud! Homosexuality! Metatextuality! https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/arts/television/review-in-riverdale-archie-is-hot-and-haunted.html
One could argue that the show is "well done." No doubt, on some level, it is, but on the deepest one it remains a children's story, an inferiority only underscored by how thrilled and shocked we are by the transposition of killing and fornicating into the realm of Archie comics.
Yet when we think of "adult entertainment," "Riverdale" is what comes to mind first. (Well, second, anyway.) We assume that being made for adults means being filled with precisely that which was forbidden and therefore titillating to us as children.
In food and drink this condition has arguably produced more illustrative grotesqueries. Take, for example, @ThomasChattWill's observation of Dunkin' Donuts' "Girl Scout Cookie
Inspired Espresso Drink": https://twitter.com/thomaschattwill/status/1100105296075284480
Inspired Espresso Drink": https://twitter.com/thomaschattwill/status/1100105296075284480
There are no doubt adult men out there who would defend the "Girl Scout Cookie Inspired Espresso Drink" on the grounds that it "tastes good," justifying it on the very same grounds the use to justify their pursuit of children's entertainment: that it gives them pleasure.
Inspired Espresso Drink" on the grounds that it "tastes good," justifying it on the very same grounds the use to justify their pursuit of children's entertainment: that it gives them pleasure.
What troubles me every time isn't so much the pleasure defense itself is the lack of shame with which these guys deliver it. Not only do they not hide these consumption habits, they trumpet them and dare others to question their choices. https://twitter.com/chickenpaprika/status/1185996613883486208
Hence the importance of warding off dependence on the "great" story by seeking out the purest form of story itself, just as you would ward off dependence on the "good" taste of a cookie-derived coffee by seeking out the purest form of coffee itself.
POSTSCRIPT: Though not a believer, I recommend the Bible as a means of understanding what is in many way the core story of current Western civilization. Even the hardest-core lifelong Western atheist can't hope to excise its influence from his worldview. https://twitter.com/dissolvedpet/status/1200982575767904256
POST-POSTSCRIPT: Dril has spoken https://twitter.com/dril/status/1208776137171587072
