TLJ is also remember for its moments, much like TFA, but it's moments are remembered primarily because it checks off all the Good Media boxes for good consumers in a post-20th century post-irony world. It doesn't matter if they don't logically follow, it EMOTIONALLY follows and that's what they want.
In a sense modern entertainment is not about reinforcing a concrete world of shared standards (even through the abstract), it is about remaking the world as it should be and filtering out the undesirables that stand in its way. This is why so much garbage is excused by Media Literacy crowd. They excuse anything to get the end result of their perfect new world free of the sins of the old. (Indecently, this is why IP franchise reboots piss all over the originals, but I digress)
All of this mess is caused by allowing the Fanatic total control over the property. Without a clear, measured vision of the world outside their toybox, they are easily influenced by any Wormtongue that says the right thing in their language to allow any tempering of their cherished Reality they want above all else. Without some sort of bellwether, something tied to reality, to steer the ship, it will eventually lead into the rocks. This is why the "just give control to the real fans" crowd were always fighting a losing battle. Your youth was a bump on the downhill slide, it was not the top or the destination. There is no going back there.
This is why I'm not convinced the future is just Making More IP. Nothing is going to stop this same thing from happening again with the way things are now, and nothing prevents them from getting even worse in the future.
This idea of "moments" in movies really resonates with me. I've noticed how people in my family don't seem to care much about whether a movie is objectively good, only if they felt good about the things that happened in it.
"Ever hear of the expert’s dilemma? Neither have I, because I just made it up. Or maybe someone else did, and I am just reconstructing the idea from the philosophical ether."
That's a bit like the "curse of knowledge," albeit maybe not quite identical.
"The normie is a passive watcher; he doesn’t actively think much about the craft, if at all, of movie making, and certainly not what makes a story good or bad. The audience instead reacts emotionally to “moments” that they remember either positively or negatively."
As a writer, you're used to thinking of stories as the product of the craft and skill that went into writing them and analyzing them based on the criteria of how well each part is crafted and integrated with the others.
Most people watching movies are not doing so from that mindset; they just want the mental escape of suspending disbelief and enjoying the movie. In a sense, they are pretending that the movie is real while watching it, unless something ruins the suspension of disbelief.
In real life, one doesn't generally think of a time or an experience being good or bad because of how well-crafted the events of a day, or a week, or an event are as a "story." A good birthday party isn't good because of a well-crafted, clever plot and good character development, and a miserable day with a head cold likewise isn't bad because it's poorly-written. Experiences are judged as good or bad based on what it was like to experience them, which, yes, largely comes down to the percentage and intensity of good vs. bad moments. Most movie-watchers go about enjoying the events and characters of a movie the same way they would enjoy events in their life or interacting with the people they hang out with.
In a way, it's not very different from how many bakers might be unable to avoid analyzing each aspect of a pie while eating it (thinking about the ingredients that went into the crust, how well-cooked the filling is and whether the amount of sugar is exactly right, etc), whereas the average person mostly just knows whether the taste and texture are good or not, and doesn't think about it on a deeper level. The baker does think about it on a deeper level because he needs to know these things in order to be able to bake good pies. But people who only eat pies and don't bake them don't need to know these things, and as a consequence generally don't know them. It's similar when it comes to books and movies. People tend to only know what they need to know in order to be able to do the things they do.
In a way, Rian Johnson's failure to understand how most people relate to stories and characters is part of why there was so much backlash against "The Last Jedi." He was thinking like a writer, writing for other writers. He wanted to create what he saw as clever twists to subvert clichés, because that's the type of thing that writers appreciate. But much of the audience just wanted to hang out with their old pal Luke Skywalker and were upset that he was a cranky misanthrope now. It's two completely different lenses from which to look at a story.
One of the most insightful comments I've ever seen on how most people relate to characters and stories is this quote from nostalgebraist's GoodReads review of Jonathan Lethem's book "The Disappointment Artist":
"The types of engagement with art that I see most frequently fall into two very distinct bins: the engagement of Fans and the engagement of Critics. (Capital letters because the way I'm using these words here is a little more specific than their ordinary definitions would suggest.) The Fan treats the world depicted by the work of art as a real place, and engages with the characters as real people. This can be very fulfilling, but it necessitates a certain distance from the artist, since to engage with the artist as a person you need to remind yourself that the characters originated in someone's head. To a Fan, the artist is like a God: revered but distant, nothing like a friend or colleague. To the Critic, on the other hand, the artist is a craftsman whose work can be evaluated as though it were a machine. Does it perform its intended function? How efficient, sturdy, innovative is it? (Note the popularity of "this works" / "this doesn't work" as a critical term.) To the Critic, emotional engagement with the artist is precluded not because they're distant, but because their qualities as a person are irrelevant to the evaluation of their creation. To a Critic, developing an emotional relationship with an artist would be like developing one with the people who designed your toaster (and consequently forgiving the toaster when it sets your kitchen on fire)."
And of course, the way another artist (such as a writer or filmmaker) relates to stories is a bit different from either a regular fan or a regular critic, although I think it may be slanted a little more toward the critic side of things.
I also think that this phenomenon (fans engaging with characters as real people) is the best explanation of why so many people have strong attachments to certain characters and universes, to the point that some will be invested in hoping for a comeback of a good iteration after bad iterations of them. If a writer or filmmaker does a good enough job of creating a likable, interesting character, people will form an emotional attachment to that character. The same goes for an enjoyable setting, like Middle Earth or the Star Wars galaxy. People form emotional attachments to these characters and settings because they experience them emotionally as if they were real. Thus, the settings become places they like to visit and the characters become sort of like friends to them. They form an attachment similar to the attachments they have to real people and real places; not quite as strong, perhaps, but fairly strong nonetheless.
Probably the most successful character of all time as regards this phenomenon is Sherlock Holmes, as he was such a compelling character that a few people came to believe that he was actually real, and many who knew he wasn't pretended as if he was. When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Holmes in 1893, about 20,000 people unsubscribed from the Strand Magazine (in which the Holmes stories appeared), some people wore black armbands in mourning, newspapers printed obituaries, and some people even held mock funerals with coffins and eulogies. Doyle was inundated with angry letters until he gave in and retconned Holmes' death in 1903. When the Abbey National Building Society moved to 221B Baker street in 1932, it employed a full-time secretary just to answer letters addressed to Sherlock Holmes, and this job remained a fixture there for years. This is because most people, when reading Sherlock Holmes stories, were not thinking of Holmes abstractly as the product of a writer's mind, but connected with him as if he was an actual person. Most people, of course, knew on a conscious level that Holmes wasn't real, but on an emotional level, they connected with him as if he was anyway. And that mindset is probably the norm rather than the exception.
As far as the expert's dilemma, I think I'm talking about roughly the same idea, but I would specify that the expert (or aficionado, etc.) has a qualitatively different experience from the casual fan. It's not just that I evaluate things differently; I see and hear them differently. But, as artists, we have to think about the casual fan, too, and how he is likely to experience things.
Thinking of music theory, it takes a lot of knowledge to know how to set up emotional moments, even when they are a kind of magic to the layperson. I've met so many people who don't want to know music theory because they don't want to "lose the magic" or they "just want to play music." On the one hand, it's difficult to step back into the shoes of the normie; on the other, you are just hoping for magic to happen, which is not a good strategy if you are trying to reach others.
There is a side-subject here, which is the idea of characters or media being "real." It's something I think about with my kids. We have brains that are not made for the media age, and media is "real" to us, and only becomes unreal with experience and discipline, which is why fiction can be such potent propaganda. It's "real" to the untrained mind (and children have untrained minds).
I have been thinking about this self-referential nature of much modern fiction. People can only produce what they were raised on. Many people were only raised on popular films and cartoons. These movies and shows were made by people who were raised on classic stories of the past, stories that were often based on great works of fiction of at least inspired by them.
It is basically an example of the copy degrading from the original.
A core part of breaking out of this cycle is to delve into classic works of fiction, and literature, going back millennia. The problem is, even if we do this, the general public is being raised in an education system that deliberately shuns these works, in favour of copies, of copies, of copies, of copies of greater works. That have far lesser glory.
Personally I have dedicated the last decade of my life reading many of the great works, going back to the ancients. I was writing fiction when I was young, but realised I did not have a deep well to draw from. This year, I am seeking to put that effort into some of my own stories.
Some of the better stuff will survive the ending of time. The Greeks and Romans had a lot of slop, that did not stop the process of art going on, and rejuvenating. Our responsibility is to just add what we can, and let God and the circumstances of time do their thing.
Slop always increases as a society is in decline. But new life rises still.
The disconnect that you mention in your article was something I had been feeling for a long time, but it got completely explicit when I saw all the rage about the latest two Dune movies. I couldn’t understand what the fuss was all about. It was being praised up to seventh heaven, and there I was unable to understand why
In my opinion, everyone in Hollywood is lazy, wanting all the success with 1% of the work. Hence the nepotism and the slop. I'm just repeating a consensus, but it's worth repeating.
I do wonder how to build a community while you write the foundational fiction.
It's difficult. The current strategy (which I have discussed elsewhere) is to produce a lot of value/content, which then sells the art. Basically, the content is the fat mouth, the book is the long tail.
But I don't like this. I don't want it to be that way. But realistically, the community has to come before the sale if you don't have access to pre-existing sales channels.
The same people that criticized TLJ on how it treated its characters and politics were also extremely critical of its plot. It was a movie that was decent in some technical areas and horrendous on virtually everything else, and spiritually sick on top of it all. Just a perfect storm.
It's considered gauche and eye-rolling "slop" content to make long video essays picking it apart now, but those videos exist for a reason. There's just so much there.
TLJ is also remember for its moments, much like TFA, but it's moments are remembered primarily because it checks off all the Good Media boxes for good consumers in a post-20th century post-irony world. It doesn't matter if they don't logically follow, it EMOTIONALLY follows and that's what they want.
In a sense modern entertainment is not about reinforcing a concrete world of shared standards (even through the abstract), it is about remaking the world as it should be and filtering out the undesirables that stand in its way. This is why so much garbage is excused by Media Literacy crowd. They excuse anything to get the end result of their perfect new world free of the sins of the old. (Indecently, this is why IP franchise reboots piss all over the originals, but I digress)
All of this mess is caused by allowing the Fanatic total control over the property. Without a clear, measured vision of the world outside their toybox, they are easily influenced by any Wormtongue that says the right thing in their language to allow any tempering of their cherished Reality they want above all else. Without some sort of bellwether, something tied to reality, to steer the ship, it will eventually lead into the rocks. This is why the "just give control to the real fans" crowd were always fighting a losing battle. Your youth was a bump on the downhill slide, it was not the top or the destination. There is no going back there.
This is why I'm not convinced the future is just Making More IP. Nothing is going to stop this same thing from happening again with the way things are now, and nothing prevents them from getting even worse in the future.
I'm not sure what the future will be, but at some point you have to have something original, even if the vampires are salivating over destroying it.
This idea of "moments" in movies really resonates with me. I've noticed how people in my family don't seem to care much about whether a movie is objectively good, only if they felt good about the things that happened in it.
"Ever hear of the expert’s dilemma? Neither have I, because I just made it up. Or maybe someone else did, and I am just reconstructing the idea from the philosophical ether."
That's a bit like the "curse of knowledge," albeit maybe not quite identical.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge
"The normie is a passive watcher; he doesn’t actively think much about the craft, if at all, of movie making, and certainly not what makes a story good or bad. The audience instead reacts emotionally to “moments” that they remember either positively or negatively."
As a writer, you're used to thinking of stories as the product of the craft and skill that went into writing them and analyzing them based on the criteria of how well each part is crafted and integrated with the others.
Most people watching movies are not doing so from that mindset; they just want the mental escape of suspending disbelief and enjoying the movie. In a sense, they are pretending that the movie is real while watching it, unless something ruins the suspension of disbelief.
In real life, one doesn't generally think of a time or an experience being good or bad because of how well-crafted the events of a day, or a week, or an event are as a "story." A good birthday party isn't good because of a well-crafted, clever plot and good character development, and a miserable day with a head cold likewise isn't bad because it's poorly-written. Experiences are judged as good or bad based on what it was like to experience them, which, yes, largely comes down to the percentage and intensity of good vs. bad moments. Most movie-watchers go about enjoying the events and characters of a movie the same way they would enjoy events in their life or interacting with the people they hang out with.
In a way, it's not very different from how many bakers might be unable to avoid analyzing each aspect of a pie while eating it (thinking about the ingredients that went into the crust, how well-cooked the filling is and whether the amount of sugar is exactly right, etc), whereas the average person mostly just knows whether the taste and texture are good or not, and doesn't think about it on a deeper level. The baker does think about it on a deeper level because he needs to know these things in order to be able to bake good pies. But people who only eat pies and don't bake them don't need to know these things, and as a consequence generally don't know them. It's similar when it comes to books and movies. People tend to only know what they need to know in order to be able to do the things they do.
In a way, Rian Johnson's failure to understand how most people relate to stories and characters is part of why there was so much backlash against "The Last Jedi." He was thinking like a writer, writing for other writers. He wanted to create what he saw as clever twists to subvert clichés, because that's the type of thing that writers appreciate. But much of the audience just wanted to hang out with their old pal Luke Skywalker and were upset that he was a cranky misanthrope now. It's two completely different lenses from which to look at a story.
One of the most insightful comments I've ever seen on how most people relate to characters and stories is this quote from nostalgebraist's GoodReads review of Jonathan Lethem's book "The Disappointment Artist":
"The types of engagement with art that I see most frequently fall into two very distinct bins: the engagement of Fans and the engagement of Critics. (Capital letters because the way I'm using these words here is a little more specific than their ordinary definitions would suggest.) The Fan treats the world depicted by the work of art as a real place, and engages with the characters as real people. This can be very fulfilling, but it necessitates a certain distance from the artist, since to engage with the artist as a person you need to remind yourself that the characters originated in someone's head. To a Fan, the artist is like a God: revered but distant, nothing like a friend or colleague. To the Critic, on the other hand, the artist is a craftsman whose work can be evaluated as though it were a machine. Does it perform its intended function? How efficient, sturdy, innovative is it? (Note the popularity of "this works" / "this doesn't work" as a critical term.) To the Critic, emotional engagement with the artist is precluded not because they're distant, but because their qualities as a person are irrelevant to the evaluation of their creation. To a Critic, developing an emotional relationship with an artist would be like developing one with the people who designed your toaster (and consequently forgiving the toaster when it sets your kitchen on fire)."
And of course, the way another artist (such as a writer or filmmaker) relates to stories is a bit different from either a regular fan or a regular critic, although I think it may be slanted a little more toward the critic side of things.
I also think that this phenomenon (fans engaging with characters as real people) is the best explanation of why so many people have strong attachments to certain characters and universes, to the point that some will be invested in hoping for a comeback of a good iteration after bad iterations of them. If a writer or filmmaker does a good enough job of creating a likable, interesting character, people will form an emotional attachment to that character. The same goes for an enjoyable setting, like Middle Earth or the Star Wars galaxy. People form emotional attachments to these characters and settings because they experience them emotionally as if they were real. Thus, the settings become places they like to visit and the characters become sort of like friends to them. They form an attachment similar to the attachments they have to real people and real places; not quite as strong, perhaps, but fairly strong nonetheless.
Probably the most successful character of all time as regards this phenomenon is Sherlock Holmes, as he was such a compelling character that a few people came to believe that he was actually real, and many who knew he wasn't pretended as if he was. When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Holmes in 1893, about 20,000 people unsubscribed from the Strand Magazine (in which the Holmes stories appeared), some people wore black armbands in mourning, newspapers printed obituaries, and some people even held mock funerals with coffins and eulogies. Doyle was inundated with angry letters until he gave in and retconned Holmes' death in 1903. When the Abbey National Building Society moved to 221B Baker street in 1932, it employed a full-time secretary just to answer letters addressed to Sherlock Holmes, and this job remained a fixture there for years. This is because most people, when reading Sherlock Holmes stories, were not thinking of Holmes abstractly as the product of a writer's mind, but connected with him as if he was an actual person. Most people, of course, knew on a conscious level that Holmes wasn't real, but on an emotional level, they connected with him as if he was anyway. And that mindset is probably the norm rather than the exception.
As far as the expert's dilemma, I think I'm talking about roughly the same idea, but I would specify that the expert (or aficionado, etc.) has a qualitatively different experience from the casual fan. It's not just that I evaluate things differently; I see and hear them differently. But, as artists, we have to think about the casual fan, too, and how he is likely to experience things.
Thinking of music theory, it takes a lot of knowledge to know how to set up emotional moments, even when they are a kind of magic to the layperson. I've met so many people who don't want to know music theory because they don't want to "lose the magic" or they "just want to play music." On the one hand, it's difficult to step back into the shoes of the normie; on the other, you are just hoping for magic to happen, which is not a good strategy if you are trying to reach others.
There is a side-subject here, which is the idea of characters or media being "real." It's something I think about with my kids. We have brains that are not made for the media age, and media is "real" to us, and only becomes unreal with experience and discipline, which is why fiction can be such potent propaganda. It's "real" to the untrained mind (and children have untrained minds).
Just about ready to launch some of my fiction on here this week, so this has been a rather interesting read to say the least.
I have been thinking about this self-referential nature of much modern fiction. People can only produce what they were raised on. Many people were only raised on popular films and cartoons. These movies and shows were made by people who were raised on classic stories of the past, stories that were often based on great works of fiction of at least inspired by them.
It is basically an example of the copy degrading from the original.
A core part of breaking out of this cycle is to delve into classic works of fiction, and literature, going back millennia. The problem is, even if we do this, the general public is being raised in an education system that deliberately shuns these works, in favour of copies, of copies, of copies, of copies of greater works. That have far lesser glory.
Personally I have dedicated the last decade of my life reading many of the great works, going back to the ancients. I was writing fiction when I was young, but realised I did not have a deep well to draw from. This year, I am seeking to put that effort into some of my own stories.
Some of the better stuff will survive the ending of time. The Greeks and Romans had a lot of slop, that did not stop the process of art going on, and rejuvenating. Our responsibility is to just add what we can, and let God and the circumstances of time do their thing.
Slop always increases as a society is in decline. But new life rises still.
*survive to the ending of time..."
The disconnect that you mention in your article was something I had been feeling for a long time, but it got completely explicit when I saw all the rage about the latest two Dune movies. I couldn’t understand what the fuss was all about. It was being praised up to seventh heaven, and there I was unable to understand why
In my opinion, everyone in Hollywood is lazy, wanting all the success with 1% of the work. Hence the nepotism and the slop. I'm just repeating a consensus, but it's worth repeating.
I do wonder how to build a community while you write the foundational fiction.
It's difficult. The current strategy (which I have discussed elsewhere) is to produce a lot of value/content, which then sells the art. Basically, the content is the fat mouth, the book is the long tail.
But I don't like this. I don't want it to be that way. But realistically, the community has to come before the sale if you don't have access to pre-existing sales channels.
I agree. It's always a will they, won't they game with building a community.
The same people that criticized TLJ on how it treated its characters and politics were also extremely critical of its plot. It was a movie that was decent in some technical areas and horrendous on virtually everything else, and spiritually sick on top of it all. Just a perfect storm.
It's considered gauche and eye-rolling "slop" content to make long video essays picking it apart now, but those videos exist for a reason. There's just so much there.
Also the best thing to come out of TLJ was John C. Wright's review, the Last Word. Highly recommend.