A method to its madness

There's a hidden email address.

Many of the things I like often get accused of being too random. This is a continuous debate among the fandoms of any given form of narrative: the one between the random and the you-just-don-t-get-it factions. Get in any 12 Oz. Mouse, No more Heroes or David Lynch forum thread and there’ll be people on both sides hurling their feces across the room. These discussions have become so clichéd that they are no longer boring, just plainly annoying. But I’ve been wondering if it was always that way.

Acually, I’ve been wondering a lot, lately. For example: I used to have to explain what “meta-language” meant, and now there are TV shows that self reference their humor as “meta”. We all know that nerd culture has become commercially successful, but we don’t, that often, ask ourselves how has that changed the way we perceive the world, and especially narrative, in its consumption and development. Don’t worry, I don’t even pretend to tackle such big subjects in one post. But I wanted to let you know this subject might become a series.

Anyways, back to the randomness debate…

… I admit that I might be a little biased. I was taught at a very impressionable age that Eugène Ionesco and Alfred Jarry were amazing artists, un-understood by the critics of their time. The way they painted those critics made them seem old, dated, resentful, embittered, totally-not-hip and, worst of all, plainly stupid. Who would want, by instinct, to belong to such crowd? Don’t misunderstand me: to this day I still love those authors; but I don’t know how much to attribute to  their geniuses and how much to my conductist programming/education.

Anyways, I am always compelled to find a method within madness. It feels like a puzzle where the pieces don’t quite fit, and there is some sort of satisfaction in joining the dots and finding a shape within chaos. I think in psychology the Gestalt schools deal with this kind of reasoning and I think they might have a point about why we enjoy absurdist plays or random shows, but I don’t want to dwell into that because it’s not my field of expertise.

Now how does this tie in with that commentary about the nerd culture taking over? The way I see it, the nerd crowd used to be the smart crowd. Random references used to have relevance because to know them demanded and effort, a search, a sort of quest that would forge our temperament. You couldn’t google the source of obscure quotes in Kill Bill or look in the Tube the ways Disney recycled its own animation. They were things that you had to look up, memorize, know by hard. They were signs of a culture we could all share, a collective memory we were all building.

Cryptic works, or works that defied our sense of understanding, used to be subjects of great debate, but also of great bonding. The internet era, where upon watching a perplexing movie you can almost immediately find a synopsis, a debate of its symbolical elements, an analysis by acts, an interpretation based on Campbell’s Hero with a thousand faces, and, of course, a pissing contest between those that do and consume all this paraphernalia and those that think that the original work doesn’t deserve such attentions.

The knowledge to understand these subtleties, which in the past was so evasive and added new flavors to an already tasty product, became easy to access and, thus, works which relied on the consumer’s input became less impressive. As a consequence of this, the arguments of debate and the tools of analysis became crystallized. Even if this means that we have expanded the language at our disposal, it also means that we have crippled our point of view, that we’ve become less and less able to leave our comfort zone to tread into uncharted waters.

Take a stroll into TVTropes. I love the site. But by having a common denominator for what a Red Herring, a Chekhov’s Gun or a Mind Screw are, we deny the potential for meaning that these things have. I should clarify that we have at least two ways of understanding “meaning”: 1) as something stable, given by the product we’re consuming, even if it’s hidden, and 2) as a dynamic, something created by our interaction with said product. This two, of course, don’t exclude each other. The former is the way we usually understand meaning, as a unilateral correlation between symbol and its content. The latter breaks the correlation between these two and opens up the work to have a historical significance, to add meaning to something that previously had none.

The problem is that by gaining access to all this information, our very approach to media has become less personal and more socially constrained. The possibilities of creating works of significance are muddled by the limited meaning we can attribute to said work. If everything that leaves our comfort zone immediately becomes labeled a Mind Screw, how are we going to distinguish the old from the new, what could work from what doesn’t?

The answer is pretty obvious to foresee, but hard to accomplish: forget about the “randomness” being a valid argument. As a matter of fact, forget about the tropes and rules. I once heard that Robert Fripp said that, in order to play guitar like him, one was supposed to learn how to play guitar, then forget it and then learn it again. And I think that every time something seems uninviting, you should make a special effort to watch again, watch it anew, try to understand why it was made, why other people liked it. Forget everything you know about the show or movie or game and start over.

For example, there’s a strange notion that every form of narrative should tell a story, with well defined characters that grow over a period of time to resolve the conflict of their storyline. It tends to work better that way, but it’s not the only one. Trying to convince someone to watch 12 Oz. Mouse because of its plot is a worthless effort. The show is a paranoid horror piece and, also, a parody. You will enjoy much more as you try to grasp its meaning and are engulfed in a Lovecraftian sense of insignificance (Lovecraft’s horror is about humanity’s insignificance, not about giant tentacled monsters) than if you try to guess who is Shark working for. It just doesn't work that way.

On a less radical example, try taking a peek at Doctor Who's fandom. Each Doctor, director, producer and writer will have his/her followers and detractos, both with very reasonable arguments. I don't think it is a matter of getting or not getting, of that series or movie being better or worst than that one. It's a matter of fitting tastes and defying personal conventions.

To make matters short (I’d like to talk about this all day and round up the idea better, but I’ve been going on for a while and don’t want to bore you to death), next time you find something you just don’t enjoy, try giving a honest new try from a new approach. Who knows? You might like it the second time around.