In 1983 Donatella Baglivo filmed an interview with the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. It was an extensive interview that covered a number of subjects, and fortunately so as Tarkovsky was to die but three years later. About an hour into the piece Baglivo asks Tarkovsky what advice he had for …]]>

In 1983 Donatella Baglivo filmed an interview with the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. It was an extensive interview that covered a number of subjects, and fortunately so as Tarkovsky was to die but three years later. About an hour into the piece Baglivo asks Tarkovsky what advice he had for young people, to which he responded with the following -

“I think I’d like to say only that they should learn to be alone and try to spend as much time as possible by themselves. I think one of the faults of young people today is that they try to come together around events that are noisy, almost aggressive at times. This desire to be together in order to not feel alone is an unfortunate symptom, in my opinion. Every person needs to learn from childhood how to spend time with oneself. That doesn’t mean he should be lonely, but that he shouldn’t grow bored with himself because people who grow bored in their own company seem to me in danger, from a self-esteem point of view.”

What immediately struck me upon hearing Tarkovsky’s words is how they contradicted not just the lyrics of The Beach Boys song I’d had on in the background (Don’t Worry, Baby), but also they seemed at odds with my overall instinctual grasp of the situation. After all, it’s not unfair to state that a recommendation that one spend adequate time alone in order to be comfortable with oneself is unexpected advice. What’s more interesting however is that looking around now, 40 years since Tarkovsky said these words, our culture has made it increasingly difficult to find the solitude he recommends at all. The latest advances in technology have filled even those moments when we are physically distanced from people with the constant sense that we have  a distracting amount of company. It would be no exaggeration to claim that it’s actually difficult to be by ourselves, nor do we feel like we want to, a situation that the psychologist and MIT social studies professor Sherry Turkle has suggested is more symptomatic of our loneliness than a cure for it. So as Tarkovsky suggests, perhaps despite our social pretensions we are all hiding from ourselves in plain sight.

Further exploration of this notion took me down a line of thinking which led me to quite unexpected conclusions both about what technology’s radical rewiring of our social interactions could mean for the future of our society, and the meanings of the words ‘god’ and ‘art’ to us now.

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Nine years before Tarkovsky conducted that interview, the philosopher of communication theory Marshall McLuhan posed the notion that -

“The most human thing about us is our technology.”

The statement certainly would explain the exponential spread of social-based technologies throughout our culture. These days connectivity runs like water from half of the holes in our immediate vicinity. We don’t just feel the urge to constantly update people with our state of being; we are developing an emotional dependency on the response it might glean. In fact research conducted this year by the Psychology Department at the University of Michigan suggested that -

“The more people used Facebook at one time point, the worse they felt the next; the more they used Facebook over two-weeks, the more their life satisfaction levels declined over time. Interacting with other people “directly” did not predict these negative outcomes.”

So could McLuhan in fact mean ‘mortal’, ‘imperfect’, or maybe just simply ‘revealing’ when he uses the word ‘human’?

A year or two back the comic and actress Sarah Silverman pondered aloud (on Twitter) that she felt that the existence of Twitter itself must have prevented many suicides. Joking or not, it’s something worth thinking about. On the one hand, the ability to reach out in the dark for validation when feeling very alone is something the internet has granted us in many new ways. On the other hand, like the Beach Boys’ song, contemporary culture is always reaching back to grab that hand, and might as well be mouthing the words, “if you knew how much I loved you, baby, nothing could go wrong with you.”

To quote Sherry Turkle from her 2012 TED talk Connected, but alone? -

“When I ask people “What’s wrong with having a conversation?” People say, “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with having a conversation. It takes place in real time and you can’t control what you’re going to say.” So that’s the bottom line. Texting, email, posting, all of these things let us present the self as we want to be.

Human relationships are rich and they’re messy and they’re demanding. And we clean them up with technology. And when we do, one of the things that can happen is that we sacrifice conversation for mere connection. We short-change ourselves. And over time, we seem to forget this, or we seem to stop caring.”

Given that a noticeable quantity of seemingly personal relationships are seen as part and parcel of public online engagements, it’s perhaps expected that businesses are now heartily involved in the matter and reward you as much as they can for keeping things that way. In so doing they augment our growing addiction to it. There are now very few websites, apps or social networking tools that one can use for work or pleasure that don’t enticingly suggest that you should share everything you do with your friends. This means that the line between staying in touch with friends and promoting products has also somewhat blurred in our minds, and has added further complexity to the psychology of the matter – an issue I will return to later.

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It’s easy to believe now that every passing decade represents the natural evolution of our greater understanding of the human condition. Thanks in part to the Dark Ages, it has taken us centuries to understand that different sexualities should be encouraged and that perhaps nationalism, religion, traditions, cultures, languages and money are all, whilst certainly instrumental in the growth of our civilization, in fact limiting factors in humankind’s rather precarious journey toward some kind of improbable universal harmony. One possible path to this harmony is via The Singularity that futurist Ray Kurzweil has championed -

“The Singularity is an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today—the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity.”

This is a concept which, as noted by Kurzweil in his 2005 book The Singularity is Near, could present the following conundrum-

“The Singularity will allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains … There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine.”

Like Marshall McLuhan, it’s easy to be awestruck at how technology is evolving in our hands and at the part it is playing in our self-discovery. After two decades of ideological transfusion, the Internet would appear to have become the new blood flowing through our various technological devices, and these all the more lifelike pet machines of ours are proving particularly well behaved in times of war and civic unrest. In the last few years Twitter has brought power to revolutionaries in Iran, Tunisia and Egypt, Julian Assange’s Wikileaks controversially pulled back veils on many levels of government deceit, and the 4chan forums have heralded the birth of Anonymous, an online, arguably peerless, headless political group of doubtless great influence – to name but a few instances.

Online, technology’s increased utility in times of strife and its inherent insistence that we all ‘stay in touch’ further contests Tarkovsky’s dictum. However in his defense again the Professor of Critical Theory at Toronto University, Mari Ruti, alludes to how we commonly and unfortunately mistake our projected ‘personality’ for what she calls our ‘singular self’. Not to be confused with Sigmund Freud’s Id and Ego, this is a point that bears closer scrutiny when thinking about the psychological side effects of social networking. PhD student Daniel Tutt paraphrases her forthcoming paper thusly -

“Your ‘personality’ is thus the most artificial self, constantly undergoing change and flux. It remains the primary zone by which the self-help discourse seeks to repair. What [they miss however is another] dimension to your self, the ‘singular self’.

Your singular self is the self touched by the real, what we might call your character. The singular self expresses something about your desire and its relation to your drives. The singular self is composed of the unsocialized elements of ones life. What makes life unique is our relation to this core of undeadness, which connects us to a sort of innate existential loneliness.

The singular self is the bruised self. That part of the self we are told we should keep at bay in self-help discourse, that part of the self that we mustn’t let out of its cage less we lose our power or it limits our advancement at work, etc.”

It’s amusingly coincidental that on the one hand you have Kurzweil arguing for a ‘singularity’ that is perhaps the ultimate ‘togetherness’ and on the other Ruti is arguing for a greater awareness of the ‘singular self’, which could so easily be buried by The Singularity. I say buried because if machine processors come to equal human brains and it becomes harder to differentiate between either as a result, what is stopping everything from being networked and our singular, bruised, imperfect human identities becoming a thing of the past? This soft, hidden ‘singular self’ is after all what makes us really us, rather than any fabricated personality built to help us hide within the walls of society.

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In June last year, the American blogger David Roberts delivered a TEDx talk, in which he outlined the current state of the planet Earth’s global warming situation in layman’s terms. He illustrated that, at best, we have around 150 more years left to live on this planet. Beyond that, unless the whole world changes its attitude to global warming and we make some severe changes to how we approach our daily consumer lifestyles, our grandchildren will see what some will describe as our judgement day. Not to mention our great grandchildren who, if not dead, will endure summer months consisting of hiding from a Sun that blisters their skin like it would vampires.

This horrifying thought brought my mind back to The Singularity, which Kurzweil’s projected timeline predicts will be upon us just 30 years from now. One thing we know for sure is that this prophesied acceleration of technology will grant us solutions we can’t remotely conceive of at present. However placing one’s hopes in such an unpredictable and potentially disruptive moment seems ludicrous and so we should proceed under the assumption that there will be no deus ex machina to save us. The great irony is that despite everything discussed earlier about the power of our social networks, the fact that we’ve gotten to this fateful moment in history proves that the likelihood of everyone coming to a consensus on the problem swiftly enough to change anything is implausible and likely impossible. Even though we talk to each other every day through one device or another, the fateful paradox is that we are rarely talking about things that could prevent a vast array of inevitable future disasters. Yes, we know from the examples above in Iran and Egypt that we will stop and react when people are dying, but the prevention of such things in the future appears to be impossible due to the inevitability of human greed, and an unfortunate default level of ignorance.

Perhaps this is because the term social-networking is actually a misnomer, when the reality is that it’s self-destruction disguised as self-promotion. The critical word there being ‘self.’ As Sherry Turkle put it, “we slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us feel less alone. But we’re at risk, because actually it’s the opposite that’s true. If we’re not able to be alone, we’re going to be more lonely.”

We have created a tool to share and achieve common goals and it is turning us inward and preventing us from taking the time to see the bigger picture.

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In April of this year the American pop-star Justin Bieber visited holocaust victim Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam and left a message in the guest-book. The message read -

“Truly inspiring to be able to come here. Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a belieber.”

As some well know, Beliebers are what Justin Bieber’s devout fans call themselves. The implication was that as much as a kid in his position could possibly relate to Ms. Frank’s strength, stamina and eventual plight in the face of unthinkably grim adversity, Bieber hoped that had they been acquainted that she might be an obsessive fan of his. Not a friend. Not even a ‘friend’ in the Facebook sense of the word. Just a fan. Someone who ‘likes’ him. Another screaming teenager who buys his records and subsidizes his further detachment from from reality. For even at 19 years old, Justin is aware that the best drugs just take you away from it all as painlessly as possible.

This statement is the perfect metaphor for the vicarious, disproportionately entitled world we live in today. Try as some might, you cannot entirely blame Justin Bieber for his behaviour. Those who have elevated him to the position he’s in by buying his products, those who talk about him in the press just to sell their product, and those who care to even bring his name up at a party: we’re all to blame. Just as we were all to blame for what happened to Michael Jackson. To look in awe at the terrible circumstances these idols of ours get themselves into is to look into a mirror. Justin Bieber was discovered on YouTube because enough of us ‘liked’ his videos more than anyone else’s.

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Whether consciously or not, there are some who are fighting this problem. There are some who are using these social environments that we’re all using to hide from reality, in order to achieve quite the opposite result.

On November 8th of last year, the English technologist and artist James Bridle created a new kind of account on the popular mobile application Instagram. Titling the account Dronestagram, he began to post photographs of locations on Google Maps that have recently been hit by military drone strikes. Below each photograph he posts any public data he can find about the strike in terms of location and the number and nature of the casualties. He continues to post these to this day whenever a new strike is made public.

Dronestagram’s bite-size encapsulations of secretive, multinational government warmongering pull people out of a world of cats, meals, sunsets and pretty girls and deliver a dose of global reality not even seen on the front pages of their newspapers. Furthermore it delivers an experience that perversely echoes that of the operators of these drones. Each one boxed away in Creech Air Force Base, north of Las Vegas in Nevada. Each one sitting in front of what amounts to little more than a shitty looking video game. Each one perhaps aware that there’s a bad ‘one armed bandit’ joke in there somewhere.

It makes you wonder at what point during our path towards The Singularity we will lose touch with Ruti’s singular self, and in the end who will be controlling whom. If the machines are simply an extension of us as McLuhan suggests, is The Singularity our only possible destiny? Could Tyler Durden from Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club be more right than he knew, when he stated that, “self-improvement is masturbation?”

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On Wednesday June 12th of this year, the American author David Guterson delivered a commencement speech to the graduates of Roosevelt High School in Seattle that upset a great deal of the students and parents in attendance. At different points they can be heard jeering and at one point a girl even lets out a fearful shriek. In the 20 or so minutes Guterson allows himself to deliver his message he cuts through the many levels of denial and deceit we face when finishing our schooling. He begs us to more deeply consider the choices we might make when trying to live a healthy and peaceful existence out there in the really real world. Here’s an excerpt -

“Our very sophisticated modern economy [...] knows that you are insecure about your appearance and in advertising it does everything it can to make you feel even worse about it, because if you feel worse about it, you will buy expensive clothing or pay a doctor to change your face. So in our society, not only do you have to be unhappy on that existential level that is just part and parcel of being human, you also have to be unhappy in ways designed for you by others [...] Add to this your natural anxiety about the future—your distress about what it means that we are developing smart drones and melting the polar ice cap—and happiness begins to feel, for a lot of us, impossible. So impossible that the rate of mental illness in America, of depression in particular, is higher than it has ever been. The world might seem full of possibility, and it is that way, but it is also a place where you can very quickly find yourself among the living dead—a being without the means for happiness.

Here is something you can do about it—or something you can do to get started. Take whatever handheld device you own out of your pocket or bag and set the alarm for 2 hours from now. When it makes whatever noise you have selected for it to make, ask yourself how often during the last 2 hours you were actually in charge of your thoughts. How often was your mind just rolling along like a pack of drunken monkeys, doing whatever it wants without you having anything to say about it? How often was it busy being bored, dissatisfied, critical of others, self-absorbed, insecure, self-hating, anxious, and/or afraid? How often were you genuinely happy? And exactly at the moment your alarm makes its noise, where was your mind and what was it doing? Because in the end your mind is the one thing you have going for you when it comes to happiness.”

Guterson is again zeroing in on our pocketed machines but additionally highlighting my earlier concern about commerce’s part in all of this. Weave in everybody’s desire to make a buck and you’ve put another brick in the wall of our desire to remain jacked into this technology every waking minute. Sherry Turkle ended her TED speech optimistically by insisting we find some kind of psychological balance: she suggested we compartmentalize our lives and habitats for machine and non-machine use. Guterson’s suggestion, that you use the machines themselves to pull you out of this proverbial Matrix, seems somewhat more devious in comparison. Either way, it would seem that for now the way out of this is certainly through.

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A few months before Guterson had stood at that podium, I had had an argument with two friends here in New York about the Kathryn Bigelow feature film Zero Dark 30. I was incensed by the nature in which I felt this film presented itself as fact, given the immediacy of the subject matter. Based on all we’d learned from the Wikileaks scandal it seemed incredibly unlikely that a film about a top secret US government military operation could be a factual account. Bigelow should have postponed the making of it until many years had passed and more details could be confirmed as truths, or at least considered an approach similar to Gus Van Sant’s treatment of the 1999 Columbine High School killings in his film Elephant.  The conclusion I therefore drew was that she did it very much as a reflection of her own ego as a female filmmaker (championing a story about a strong female lead in a major contemporary military debacle), and also, for the money. The whole argument reminded me of these remarks from the late filmmaker John Cassavetes -

“The cause of motion pictures should not be a dehumanizing one. Major companies are making pictures that are disgusting. They make anti-war movies but exploit it by making money on those anti-war pictures, by publicizing and selling them. People on screen are stripped naked and left there to die. The thinking is supposedly committed to a revolutionary spirit but lacks the depth of intentions necessary for such discussions. Audiences begin to accept this exploitation as part of their lives. They find themselves laughing at what isn’t funny, angered by what they don’t care about, and influenced and contaminated by hours of heartfelt, unmotivated propaganda.”

These sentiments, particularly those of the exploitative suggestion, tie strongly back to both what Tarkovsky and Guterson are saying and linger like a stench around the actions of those like Justin Bieber. A kid so unaware of the world around him, so fueled by his imagined value of people’s interest in him, that he felt superior to even those figures in history who stood for the level of freedom he enjoys how.

Speaking of exploitation, in May of this year Edward Snowden, infrastructure analyst at the US National Security Agency-contracted firm Booz Allen Hamilton, leaked details of several top-secret United States and British government mass surveillance programs to the press. Whilst the revelation was more ‘undeniable proof’ rather than any kind of surprise, it was still unnerving to have many of our darker suspicions confirmed. As constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead wrote just a week ago on the website for his civil liberties organization, The Rutherford Institute -

“Anything and everything you’ve ever said or done, from the trivial to the damning—phone calls, Facebook posts, Twitter tweets, Google searches, emails, bookstore and grocery purchases, bank statements, commuter toll records, etc.—will be tracked, collected, catalogued and analyzed by the UDC’s supercomputers and teams of government agents.

By sifting through the detritus of your once-private life, the government will come to its own conclusions about who you are, where you fit in, and how best to deal with you should the need arise. Indeed, we are all becoming data collected in government files. Whether or not the surveillance is undertaken for ‘innocent’ reasons, surveillance of all citizens, even the innocent sort, gradually poisons the soul of a nation. Surveillance limits personal options—denies freedom of choice—and increases the powers of those who are in a position to enjoy the fruits of this activity.

Whether he intended it or not, it well may be that Obama, moving into the home stretch and looking to establish a lasting “legacy” to characterize his time in office, is remembered as the president who put the final chains in place to imprison us in an electronic concentration camp from which there is no escape.”

This speaks almost entirely to Cassavetes exploitation fears and stands as a powerful omen in the face of our internet addictions. The imbalanced sense of entitlement that different classes of humanity exhibit will likely precipitate an inevitable fight for control; with this in mind, whatever The Singularity heralds, such a battle will deeply shape any eventual union between humans and their machines.

So what’s next? If learning to be comfortable in one’s own company is how to find a satisfactory level of inner peace, and saving our species requires leaping off a precipice of unimaginable  worldwide collaboration, what is our real goal with this thing we call the internet and why do its pretty flowers give us a false sense of happiness? What needs to happen next for us to be able to turn down the volume and hear our own thoughts as Tarkovsky asks, or is self-confidence no longer a tool we’ll need in this one possible future? Shouldn’t we be more comfortable in our own skins so that we can focus on those next to us falling to their knees in pain? Is The Singularity an answer to this or simply a possible fate that we’ve made for ourselves? The presence of such a concept certainly makes you begin to wonder what the universe is trying to tell us about the direction we are headed in.

Towards the end of the HBO television show Six Feet Under the protagonist Nate Fisher turns to his sister Claire and says “Stop listening to the static. Everything in the world is like this transmission, making its way across the dark. But everything – death, life, everything – it’s all completely suffused with static. You know? But if you listen to the static too much, it fucks you up.”

One thing is for sure, we’re all able to control one single thing more than anything else in this world, and that’s our minds – but we’re surrounded by voices telling us that that’s impossible. Before he died the stand-up comedian Bill Hicks used to end his performances with the following speech -

“The world is like a ride at an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it, you think it’s real because that’s how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round; it has thrills and chills and it’s very brightly colored and it’s very loud and it’s fun… for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time, and they begin to question: “Is this real, or is this just a ride?” And other people have remembered, and they come back to us, and they say, “Hey – don’t worry, don’t be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride.”

And we kill those people – “Shut him up! We have a lot invested in this ride – shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry! Look at my big bank account, and my family! This just has to be real!”

But it’s just a ride. And we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok? Jesus – murdered; Martin Luther King – murdered; Malcolm X – murdered; Gandhi – murdered; John Lennon – murdered; Reagan – wounded …

But it doesn’t matter because: It’s just a ride. And we can change it anytime we want. It’s only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings of money. A choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love, instead, see all of us as one. Here’s what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride: Take all that money that we spend on weapons and defense each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.”

I’ve listened to Mr. Hicks give that speech a hundred times but writing this essay seems to shed new light on its meaning, particularly when you realize what it could take to explore space together. If we only have 150 years left on this planet, it’s important that we start thinking about this, particularly when doing so may involve a truce with technology that we may never recover from – despite all our concerns for our individual state of mind, the loss of self that The Singularity heralds may actually be our only way off this planet.

To quote Cassavetes again -

“These days, everybody is supposed to be so intelligent: ‘Isn’t it terrible about Nixon getting elected?’ ‘Did you hear about the earthquake in Peru?’ And you’re supposed to have all the answers. But when it gets down to the nitty-gritty, like, ‘What is bugging you, mister? Why can’t you make it with your wife? Why do you lie awake all night staring at the ceiling? Why, why, why do you refuse to recognize you have problems and deal with them?’ The answer is that people have forgotten how to relate or respond. In this day of mass communications and instant communications, there is no communication between people. Instead it’s long-winded stories or hostile bits, or laughter. But nobody’s really laughing. It’s more an hysterical, joyless kind of sound. Translation: ‘I am here and I don’t know why.’”

It’s interesting to think that if we do find out why we are here, given the acceleration in our intelligence, scope and understanding that will likely come with The Singularity, it may well not be a concept we’ll enjoy as individuals. In this way you begin to realize not just that god is our answer to the question of why we are here, but that getting closer to god means we all may have to become one. Consequently you realize that we may evolve beyond the questions art seeks to address: representations and musings on the imperfect beauty of being one of many living individuals, not having all the answers and not knowing what is going to happen next. In this respect art may prove to be a fleeting concept in and of itself: a prelude to finding god.

May 15th, 2011. I am given a book by my favourite poet, Bob Hicok. In it there’s a poem about the 2007 Virginia Polytechnic Institute massacre – to date the deadliest shooting of innocent people by a single gunman in US history. This excerpt from the poem …]]>

May 15th, 2011.
I am given a book by my favourite poet, Bob Hicok. In it there’s a poem about the 2007 Virginia Polytechnic Institute massacre – to date the deadliest shooting of innocent people by a single gunman in US history. This excerpt from the poem speaks for itself -

People wrote, called, mostly e-mailed
because they know I teach at Virginia Tech,
to say, there’s nothing to say. Eventually
I answered these messages: there’s nothing
to say back except of course there’s nothing
to say, thank you for your willingness
to say it. Because this was about nothing.
A boy who felt that he was nothing,
who erased and entered that erasure, and guns
that are good for nothing, and talk of guns
that is good for nothing, and spring
that is good for flowers, and Jesus for some,
and scotch for others.

March 23rd, 2012.
Two kids get in a fight on the platform of an L train stop in Brooklyn, New York. Both fall in front of a train coming into the station. One of them leaps from the tracks just in time and flees the scene. The other is dragged down the platform by the train, right in front of my eyes. His body half under the train, his arms grabbing at the side of the train, his torso spinning like a propeller, his blood smearing down the side of the carriages. I turn away in disbelief, my brain numb as people run past me screaming in tears, vomiting as they run. There’s one girl standing still in front of me as everyone rushes past both of us. She’s looking at me, her face all wet, her eyes pleading at me as if somehow I can provide an answer. The best I can do is not look at her.

The kid is still alive. There’s a woman crouched down by him trying to help him in whatever way she can. Unsure about what I can do I turn and leave. Halfway up the steps I curse at myself, and turn back. A few of us gang together try to push the train away from the body, so we can get him out. It’s a hopeless exercise. Soon the Fire Department arrives and we are all ejected onto the streets.

People are opening their front doors and letting those clearly in shock come in and rest a while. I call my friend, whose apartment I’d just left 15 minutes before, and he talks me through it. He invites me back over to his, but it seems to make more sense to walk home alone.

July 17th, 2012.
A friend posts a photograph on the internet that he’s taken of a poster from the new Batman film, The Dark Knight Rises. Below the photograph he’s excitedly left the comment -

THREE. MOTHER. FUCKING. DAYS.

I type my response beneath it. My words expounding on my similarly outrageous levels of enthusiasm. My friend replies, and our proverbial high-five is over just moments after it began. The occasion and the words we used are swiftly forgotten about.

July 20th, 2012.
In Aurora, Colorado, a 24-year-old man opened fire on his fellow cinema-goers during a screening of the new Batman film. Thanks to our phones, everyone everywhere knows about it moments after it happens.

Soon after New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane, a friend of my father’s, publishes a thoughtful and lengthy article swiftly reminding people of art’s inability to drive people to kill -

Having a mind to kill, at least in any systematic fashion, means that your mind is ready-warped; that the warping may well have started long before, perhaps in childhood; and that you may perhaps seek out, or be drawn to, areas of sensation—notably those entailing sex or violence—which can encourage, inflame, or accelerate the warping. Whatever we learn of the Aurora murderer, whatever he may profess, and whatever the weaponry, body armor, and headgear that he may have sported, and however it seems like a creepy match for what is worn, by heroes and villains alike, in the Batman movies—despite all that, he was not driven by those movies to slaughter.

July 21st, 2012.
Some time in the afternoon I receive an email from a filmmaker friend of mine that simply read -

Dark Knight Rises murders is the most bleak metaphor of art and cinema in American cultural history.

This coming from a man with two children of his own, and a deep-set distaste for exploitative artwork. I wrote back saying that I was inclined to agree. I said that it reminded me of when my father read from a newspaper article in 2001. An article that was suggesting that part of what made the World Trade Center attacks so powerful, was what an artistic gesture they were. 911 being the emergency services number in the US, and the two towers being hit by one commercial airplane each, and both completely collapsing in such a seemingly unlikely way as a result. My father also added that film and television are of course also responsible for making violence appear to be something beautiful.

Back in the present, film critic Roger Ebert weighs in on the continuing debate about the connection between violence and art  -

I’m not sure there is an easy link between movies and gun violence. I think the link is between the violence and the publicity. I don’t know if [the Aurora killer] cared deeply about Batman. I suspect he cared deeply about seeing himself on the news.

LA Times reporter Patrick Goldstein blames advertising -

This, of course, has happened before. In 1981, Taxi Driver became embroiled in controversy when John Hinckley Jr. tried to assassinate then-President Ronald Reagan after becoming obsessed with the film, whose character Travis Bickle attempts to kill a presidential candidate. In Hinckley’s case, he was affected by the movie. With the Colorado gunman, the inspiration may well have come from the pull of a mammoth Hollywood Big Event.

In almost any big city today, it’s nearly impossible to avoid being exposed to the wall-to-wall advertising for a global behemoth such as “Dark Knight.” The result is almost Orwellian — nearly everywhere you look, your gaze meets the stern glare of Batman and his nemesis, their eyes full of menace. On TV, the film’s ads are chock full of thunderous collisions and mass brawls.

Talk about life imitating art. Days before the film’s release, the movie review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes had to suspend user comments on reviews of “Dark Knight” after readers made derogatory and threatening remarks about the critics who wrote them. Incensed fans heaped abuse on one critic, Marshal Fine, saying he should “die in a fire.” Rotten Tomatoes’ editor said it was the first time the site had suspended user comments, explaining that “it just got to be too much hate.”

July 22nd, 2012.
A friend and I race back from a New Jersey beach town to catch an afternoon screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Manhattan. 15 minutes into the film we are aware of a group of four men behind us talking loudly and occasionally walking up and down in the isle next to us, using their phones as flashlights. I turn to tell them to shut up, and so does my friend. The looks we are greeted with from these men leave us speechless, and we quickly turn back to the film. I suddenly feel unsafe and start looking around me in the darkness. It dawns on me that this is the first trip to the cinema since the killings the week before. I start imagining how the same thing could happen to all of us in this room. The words of my filmmaker friend the day before start going around and around in my head. Eventually the film rescues me from these thoughts and I lose myself in its story.

As the film ends and I’m left slightly shaky by its moving denouement, a second wave of fear sweeps over me. I have to quickly pull my hands to my face to hide a wash of quite unexpected tears. I feel in a moment like I’ve lost something very dear to me. I realize that it feels like we have lost the sanctity of the cinema. I realize that until this point I’ve used the cinema as a place I can completely escape from the world, no matter what. It feels right there and then like this is now gone.

I try to relate this to my friend afterwards and he tells me I’m talking nonsense. Coming to my senses in the outside air I realize that I probably am.

July 23rd, 2012.
I mention to a friend and co-worker that I’m thinking about writing about my feelings on the Dark Knight Rises murders. He sits down on the couch opposite my desk and we talk it through. Half-way through the conversation he points out that as far as he was aware the last time there was a killing in a theater in US history, it was when President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.

Lincoln’s killer, John Wilkes Booth, as noted elsewhere in the Goldstein piece quoted above, perhaps similarly chose a place to commit his crime that would give him the necessary ‘stage’ for his actions. One similarity between the events that did seem to gel with this, was that Wilkes Booth shouted a line from a killing in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar before shooting Lincoln. This seems to tie to the fact that the Aurora killer later told police he was The Joker, a murderous character from the previous Batman film. Wilkes Booth’s Shakespearean line of course being that famously uttered by Brutus before the murder of Julius – “Sic Semper Tyrannis.” This literally translates as “Thus always to tyrants,” and is also the Virginia state motto. Wilkes Booth was from Virginia.

July 24th, 2012.
The documentary film maker and director of Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore, just posted an article on his website asking America to think deeply about their obsession with killing. He points out that it’s likely not the guns. He states in fact that it’s the American people and their apparent inability to care for each other, hinting of course at the country’s precarious healthcare system -

We are an easily frightened people and it is easy to manipulate us with fear. What are we so afraid of that we need to have 300 million guns in our homes? Who do we think is going to hurt us? Why are most of these guns in white suburban and rural homes? Maybe we should fix our race problem and our poverty problem (again, number 1 in the industrialized world) and then maybe there would be fewer frustrated, frightened, angry people reaching for the gun in the drawer. Maybe we would take better care of each other.

Oliver Gettel, the same day, publishes an article for the LA Times in which he pulls together the responses to the killings from 6 of the western world’s more notable film critics. A comment beneath the article reads -

What’s completely lost in all this chatter is that the hero of The Dark Knight Rises saw his parents murdered by a gunman and DOES NOT CARRY A GUN for that reason.  Also during the movie, he knocked Catwoman’s gun out of her hands saying “no killing”.  John Blake, on using his gun in self defense, found the whole thing distasteful and threw his gun away.  If there’s one hero who would be the symbol this is Batman.

July 25th, 2012.
US President Barack Obama is on national television addressing the issue of gun violence in cities, stating that AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not criminals. He continues to say -

When there’s an extraordinarily heartbreaking tragedy like the one we saw, there’s always an outcry immediately after for action. There’s talk of new reforms. There’s talk of legislation. And too often those efforts are defeated by politics and by lobbying and eventually by the pull of our collective attention elsewhere. But what I said in the wake of Tucson is we’re going to stay on this persistently. I will continue to work with members of both parties and with religious groups and with civic organizations to arrive at a consensus around violence reduction.

Warner Brothers is pulling trailers of its forthcoming film Gangster Squad, which depict assailants with Tommy-guns shooting cinema goers from behind a cinema screen. The film has also been pulled from the studio’s Fall release schedule.

July 26th, 2012.
I sit down to write this article, and just moments after I’ve written a working title I get a message on my phone. The message tells me that someone has replied to the comment I left on the internet on the 13th. They’re replying to the comment I left beneath my friend’s photograph of a Batman poster, just days before the killings. The reply simply reads -

A week later, your comment doesn’t sound like the best wording, does it?

I’m confused. I quickly scroll back up to my original comment, and read it again -

Better be good. Really good. World crushingly good. So good it actually kills me. So good everyone in my theater dies. Like end of the world good, you know?

I look back at the essay I’m writing. I almost vomit. I close the computer. I reply to the person on my phone apologizing profusely, but my comments feel futile. I know it’s extremely unlikely that I’m responsible in any way, but nevertheless my thoughts are racing. I call two friends and ask them to talk me through it. I then go for a long walk. I need to be out among people.

July 29th, 2012.
Michael Moore is on American national television for the first time in 10 years talking with talk show host, Piers Morgan, about American gun laws. He’s remarking upon President Barack Obama’s comments about his awareness that it could have been his own daughters in that screening that night. Michael Moore, undeniably a fan of Obama, doesn’t hesitate to fire back at the President -

If President Obama is watching right now — and I — and I say this with all due respect — what if it were them? What if it were them last Thursday night? Would you stand at the microphone the next day and say I feel your pain and, you know, we just — we — the — the existing gun laws, that’s what he said — the existing laws are enough. Is that really what you’d say, Mr. President? I don’t think so.

August 1st, 2012.
An anonymous comment has appeared at the bottom of Michael Moore’s July 24th article that reads -

American Pop Culture Quiz

Questions:
How many High School kids were shot in Compton this year? How many of them made the news or got their medical bills paid? Why are kids from Colorado so much more important than the ones in L.A.?

Answers:
Dozens. None. They’re White!

August 8th, 2012.
It’s midnight. I’m sitting down to watch a film with my brother that’s been produced by an old friend of mine. The film is called Boy A, and is based loosely on the aftermath of the killing of the 2-year-old James Bulger in England in 1993. The two kids who committed the killing splashed their victim in blue paint, in imitation of the 1991 film Child’s Play 3.

Boy A is good, and my brother and I end up arguing afterwards about how sympathetic the killers friends would have been ‘in reality’, compared to the film.

August 10th, 2012.
I am sitting at my laptop in my brother’s apartment in London, sun streaming in through the windows. It’s an unusually hot day, after what’s been a very rainy English summer. There have been at least two more widely-publicized shootings in the US since the Aurora killings. Unable to escape the feeling that I should write something, I delete everything I’ve written and start over.

Around March last year a friend of mine showed me an article about why the video game Angry Birds is so successful. The author Charles L. Mauro CHFP (Certified Human Factors Engineering Professional), was attempting to provide a cognitive scientific report on why the game has been so …]]>

Around March last year a friend of mine showed me an article about why the video game Angry Birds is so successful. The author Charles L. Mauro CHFP (Certified Human Factors Engineering Professional), was attempting to provide a cognitive scientific report on why the game has been so unbelievably successful (now with physical merchandise doing the rounds, and a feature film in the works). These sort of reports remind me of the guy who used to lease us our old studio space in Manhattan who was always trying to think of what he used to call “the next YouTube.” His desire to get rich through some cool new internet startup idea, rather than just sitting down and working hard on playing to his strengths, used to confound us a little. Similarly an analysis of what makes Angry Birds ‘genius’ with the intention of perhaps helping others reapply these findings on a project that could also be as successful, seems fairly futile. I can guarantee you the makers of Angry Birds didn’t apply this ‘science’ when creating the game. They simply wanted to make a fun game and used their intuition to do so. Mauro’s article talks about the ‘mystery’ behind the game as if it was all so calculated. We all know that when you’re deep in the development of a project like this, these things just come about as part and parcel of making it more fun to play. The objective logic that comes with so many levels of artistic ‘criticism’, is so often just an afterthought in the minds of those actually making something. The simple, prevailing fact remains that the brilliance of these things comes purely from the subconscious when making something good. A subconscious that has been trained hard by years of enjoying other art forms in all their many facets. A subconscious that is firing on all cylinders when you’re stuck into development and are becoming one with the creation of the thing.

The most interesting part of Mauro’s article, and in fact the part that lead me to get into an argument with my friend about it, was his ‘How things look’ subheading in which he states the following -

“This leads to a more interesting question: How does visual design impact success in the marketplace? I routinely get this question from clients who are undertaking large redesign or new development projects. Decades after it first surfaced in automobile design, visual design is still the most contentious aspect of designing compelling user experiences. Designers (mostly of the UX stripe) routinely sell clients on the concept that the visual design (graphic style) of a given interface solution is a critical factor in success. This assumption seems to make good intuitive sense. However, the actual working principle is counter-intuitive. In most user experience design solutions, visual design (how things look) is technically a hygiene factor. You get serious negative points if it is missing, but minimal positive lift beyond first impression, if a user interface has great visual design. When we conduct user engagement studies for clients (not the same as usability testing), we routinely see data that strongly supports this theory.”

Needless to say but I found the implications of this statement pretty unsettling and was reminded starkly of Bill Hick’s Advertising or Marketing comic routine (watch it below). Particularly Mauro’s last sentence which almost entirely echoes Hick’s line, “You know what Bill’s doing now, he’s going for the righteous indignation dollar, that’s a big dollar, a lot of people are feeling that indignation, we’ve done research, huge market. He’s doing a good thing.”

The following is a slightly polished version of what I had to say in reply to my friend, regarding Mauro’s points about visual design. It’s relevance to the IFP, filmmakers in general and the making of art of any kind will I hope be evident.

…

Mauro’s argument perhaps stands given the Angry Birds exact context, but largely speaking he’s dealing with a more more profound and complex issue. His point falls flat when you try to apply it to what I’m going to call the ‘Rags to Riches‘ argument. This argument understands that first impressions are certainly of value and that the actual experience of using something is fundamental, but in the end the psychological impact of the visual is the most important, lasting and hard to measure. The ‘rags’ in this case being of course the perceived immediate impact of good visual design, and the ‘riches’ being the powerful long-term, psychological and sociological effects of said design.

I agree that when Mauro is perhaps simply asking, “Why is this game so successful? Look how much money it made – here’s how to potentially make that money too,” then sure, what he’s saying could be of use. However when you consider how depressing people’s neighborhoods, streets, homes, offices, cubicles and online user experiences can be on a daily basis due to skimping on visual design for the sake of ‘what works’, and you then see this later turning into depression, anger and ill-will towards others, you realize we’re talking about something much, much bigger. Something which arguably could affect financial prospects more subconsciously and seriously, albeit at a slower pace.

Mauro continues later in the article to say -

“Even more important than good or bad visual design is appropriate visual design.”

I think this is the key factor here, and that people confuse this issue way too often. Angry Birds has a very appropriate, high standard of design. Without it it simply would not appeal to the millions who’ve paid for it. Guys think it’s pretty cool, girls think it’s cute, it makes kids laugh, it spaces out adults – all of this is absolutely requisite and in this regard Mauro’s article absolutely nails many of the elements that make it so enjoyable to use.

In the same fashion if you were going to design cheap housing in some backwater town, would you use materials that are going to stain, droop, crack and crumble after a few years? You know full well no one is going to revisit this place for repairs and that those living there can’t afford to repair it either. Why make anything that will rot both physically and psychologically everything around it? If there isn’t enough money to make it well, it should not be made at all. To quote the architect Howard Roark from Ayn Rand’s novel, The Fountainhead -

“Rules? Here are my rules: what can be done with one substance must never be done with another. No two materials are alike. No two sites on earth are alike. No two buildings have the same purpose. The purpose, the site, the material determine the shape. Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless it’s made by one central idea, and the idea sets every detail. A building is alive, like a man. Its integrity is to follow its own truth, its one single theme, and to serve its own single purpose. A man doesn’t borrow pieces of his body. A building doesn’t borrow hunks of its soul. Its maker gives it the soul and every wall, window, and stairway to express it.”

It’s about long-term psychology as much as it is about immediate success, and without discussing these decisions you can’t knock one thing and say it’s simply not as important as the other. As Mauro notes you can’t accurately put monetary value on visual changes, but in the same way that you do things to help the environment (that you also can’t see directly dying as a result of your actions), it’s wrong to imply as Mauro does that it’s simply a ‘hygiene factor.’ That hygiene factor is what I’m calling the long-term psychology of a design, and what Howard Roark calls a building’s soul.

So, to correct Mauro somewhat, I think it would be smarter to state that, “Even more important than good or bad visual design is appropriate visual design, and what is appropriate design is multi-faceted and entirely respective of context.”

Whether you like it or not, your entire world is affected by the look and feel of the things you engage with for long periods each day. It’s a designer’s job to try to overcome employers who make it less attractive and ‘more functional’ simply because they can pay you less to do this job and make more money. These people are idiots who don’t have a long-view of their general, daily, psycho-visual imbalances. I say this of course with the proviso that greater function doesn’t always come with a guaranteed decrease in visual quality – it just seems to so often be the case. The simple fact remains that cutting corners makes people suffer and if you can run away with the money and ignore the consequences, you’re a selfish charlatan. You are a part of the problem and not the solution.

I can appreciate that Mauro is largely appealing to those who want to make a buck, however this is bad advice because it assumes that the only value of good design is related to products and their markets. To reiterate once and for all, it’s our responsibility as human beings to remember there’s a lot of people on the planet who have no control over the look of the world around them and who are ruled by those who want to ‘make a buck’. Those of us that must suffer living beneath billboards towering above, promising soulless dreams, the garishly coloured junk food wrappers sitting in the gutter, the television commercials selling drugs for pains that don’t exist, the dying buildings built with cheap materials slumping under the weight of their own short lives, the angry faces and the lack of respect for anything. These people aren’t idiots. They know better than anyone that the look of the world around them massively affects their subconscious state of mind. They know it when they walk out of their rotting front door, glance at the grey sky, the paint peeling from the walls of their neighbour’s house across the street, scrape the ice from their car’s windshield with the splintering lid of a margarine tub, curse as the car won’t start and their foot goes through the rusted bottom of it as they lash out in anger. They know it when some of them later get drunk and walk around smashing windows, keying car doors, spray-painting church walls, and beating people up – all scenes I’ve witnessed in my years growing up in England in the suburbs of Cambridge, 3 years at University in Manchester and later living in Bedford-Stuyvesant in New York City. It’s a level of rage that I can support and forgive when places like that are your reality. Try getting mugged at 8:30am on your way to work, as I was in 2008, and being told by the cops that there’s no point in reporting it.

Some of these people hate the world around them. They know what the end-game is better than the thoughtless assholes who make the products, create the ads for them and leave those ads gathering mould on some rusted old bus-stop sign, 23 stops out of town in some relentless nightmare of a burnt out suburb. The sorts of places that otherwise only filmmakers dare frequent in order to make their gritty melodramas. We have got to remember that every small gesture toward making things simply functional, that disregards how much ‘greyer’ you are making the user’s day, is a very valid negative point.

There’s a lyric from the Pulp song Glory Days that comes to mind -

“Oh we were brought up on the Space-Race, now they expect you to clean toilets.”

…

Of course these arguments mean nothing until you can tie them back to money. This is the hard cold fact one must accept if you’re going to make any changes to the world these days. There are no gods left to use as any real threat to your actions, and the perceived ties between actual art and big money are mostly hanging by a string. Mauro wrote his article for people who want to make money. I am writing my article for free, with no apparent financial gain for anyone. So let me throw my marketing hat in the ring for a second here and point out how a long-term view of these things can and will actually make you money, as well as making the world a better place.

Think about how things will look retrospectively if you actually put in the time to make something visually beautiful as well as functionally sound. We only ever look back at the things that looked and performed fantastically, and cherish those particular things with heaps of nostalgia and warm hearts. We never look back at the ugly, embarrassing things that made lots of money in the same way. This might seem irrelevant, but listen up – these days heaps of money is made by harnessing that retro-active nostalgia and reaping what you can from that. More than ever we are focusing on remakes, reboots, retro-fashion, older sounding records, aging our photographs, and 80s-looking video game pixelated aesthetics.

There’s no denying that there is money in making things built to last, making things a canonical representation of the visual style of the era you’re living in and making people feel respected by giving them the finest. People want to love their past, they want to look back at previous decades with a smile, they want to relive that in every way they can and they’ll buy it.

It all comes full circle ultimately.

Everything from the look of a video game to the look of a bus-stop is relevant to people’s daily experience of the world. If you give people one moment to think you don’t care about them and that you’re not offering them in some capacity the best of what life has to offer, then you’re responsible for the slow, aching decline of civilization, the inevitable death of your company and, to paraphrase Fight Club, Brad Pitt pissing in your food at the formal business dinner where your boss raised a glass to you and offered you that huge promotion.

In the end, whatever your craft, the moment you’re thinking about the money, skimping on the quality of the design and focusing on your immediate financial gains, the worse you are making life for everyone else, and eventually yourself. So the next time you’re arguing with your designer, give this some thought. Could be they’re just a chump doing lazy work, but it could be that they’re fighting for a larger cause, one they subscribed to at a younger age when they made the connection between beauty and a better life. Rags to riches.

Rule 1. (to kill expectation)

Go into the film without having read or watched anything. Trailers are acceptable, as they are sometimes created by film directors themselves, though even that sometimes is questionable.

Rule 2. (to kill projection)

Assess what the film is trying to say or achieve within the realm of what …]]>

Rule 1. (to kill expectation)

Go into the film without having read or watched anything. Trailers are acceptable, as they are sometimes created by film directors themselves, though even that sometimes is questionable.

Rule 2. (to kill projection)

Assess what the film is trying to say or achieve within the realm of what kind of movie it is trying to be. Do not project your own expectations. Let the film dictate the level of expectation, be that tonally, narratively or conceptually.

Then, assess how well you think the film reaches whatever goals it set out to achieve.

Rule 3. (to kill hype)

Don’t talk about the film with anyone who has not seen it, except if you’re encouraging them to go see it. Only discuss the film with those that have seen it, and discuss it hard. That’s what it’s there for.

…

Consciously or otherwise, everyone has their own series of qualifications when assessing how much they’ve enjoyed a film. There are others for whom these guidelines can be reapplied to how much they appreciate other forms of art as well. There are even those who don’t consider film a true art form, but we spit on those people.

I am the son of two fine artists; my mother a painter, my father a painter. Here is their legend: they met on the steps of the Tate Gallery in early 70s London, and it was love at first sight. The legend failed to mention, of course, that my father was actually with his ex-girlfriend on those steps at the time and my mother, who had yet to win his heart, was simply being introduced to them by a mutual friend. Later they told me when going through some difficulties of my own that, whilst it was love – a great love – it was of course not the matinée movie my brother and I had in our heads as kids.

Bearing this in mind, I want to talk about a way of thinking about film criticism that led to my friend Adam and I crafting the rules above. Adam is my age and makes music. He and I met at university in Manchester, England in 2001 and we have analyzed films together, endlessly and relentlessly, ever since. I don’t see him so often these days as he lives in London, and I in New York, but the arguments are no less heated. To make matters worse, Adam was recently staying with me for a couple of weeks in New York. In the midst of yet another discourse (as we were hopping between trains on our way to some party) I found myself restating my assumptions about how one should critically assess a film’s worth. Adam, nodding his head, jokingly called them The Rules. We laughed then, but at some point later that night I made a mental note to write something about it.

…

Three key elements cloud a person’s judgement about a film. The first is hype. The second, and somewhat a byproduct of hype, is expectation, which for the most part, leads to projection.

I found out the truth about how my parents met during a difficult time. Knowing about it and about events thereafter rescued a large part of my sanity from the jaws of god-knows-what. I could suddenly see how similarly I’d behaved to my father and how my mistakes, somehow subconsciously, were identical to his given all he’d become now. Of course it didn’t excuse what I’d done, but it calmed me hugely. For years I had had no connection to their experience – they’d had this perfect thing, married young, I had not – there was no connection.

People go about their lives telling people how they met their significant other or how they got their great job or how they made their millions, and they’ve refined these stories into what one might call legends. Every detail is exaggerated for the sake of effect. These romantic sagas are indeed legends, but are also what I like to call hype, and we create them all the time to justify and cement in some way the life changing decisions we’ve made. The things we’ve decided we’re never going to take back, and if we do, know it will hurt to do so.

It is because of hype that a lot of people are in some way afraid of art. This is not because they aren’t capable of understanding it, or because they don’t want to understand it, but because they aren’t given the chance to understand it. In fact, we are more and more these days encouraged not to. For example, you walk into some art galleries in New York and you’ll see something akin to a plank of wood leaning against a wall. As you stare at it, confused as to whether a workman left it behind on his way to the toilet or whether it’s actually an exhibit, a young gallery owner will stride over, massaging his sore nostrils, and hand you an essay explaining why this plank is art. Gone is your chance to say to yourself,

“Hey, it’s just a plank.”

It’s now something about which, due to the convoluted wording of the gallery owner’s essay, you’re clearly not equipped to make up your own mind.

If you’d grown up with my brother and I you’d have had to live through years of my parents ranting and raving about the appalling nature of art teaching at the various schools we ended up going to in England. Why is art not taught well any more? Well, my parents have their views, but  I believe it’s largely because no one is trying any more to comprehend the true financial value of an artistic eduction, and therefore assume people will struggle to employ those with that alone. This is sad because it implies that they make no connection between how things look and how people feel. In today’s “money or nothing” world, most stuff pretty much looks like shit, and that plays a part in why people are depressed, break everything around them and want to kill themselves.

So this is where advertising features in our problem. What is the one thing that thinks it’s art, but in fact simply tries to squeeze money out of people by emulating art for financial ends? That’s right, advertising, and nothing comes close to the psychological mess that is advertising actually advertising art. Nothing.

Films are ruined daily by advertising and hype is their big, blood-letting knife. I stopped buying film magazines for over 10 years the day I accidentally saw a film called Fight Club, without knowing anything about it. You might know it. What you might also know is the feeling I had that night when watching it. The feeling of experiencing something incredible for the first time without knowing a single thing about it. The purity of an idea, a story, a climax that is in every way a surprise to you is almost overwhelming. It’s narcotic. Adam and I use it like a drug. You’d think, given that obvious metaphor and the general propensity to track down “good coke,” “straight dope” or “strong-ass weed,” that other people might not choose to cut their art with anything either. You know, to keep it pure. You’d be wrong.

In fact, all joking aside, it’s actually more serious than that.

Hype not only ruins the impact of the art, it undermines the very value of art itself in the first place. Every day our faces are filled with reviews, star ratings, adverts screaming “It’ll make you laugh, it’ll make you cry,” “Critics are saying this is X’s best film in years” and “Empire Magazine calls it ‘Amazing’”. All of this, not to make you enjoy the film any more, but to simply make sure you give them some money for it, and not just money for it, but to better pay back that misused advertising budget. Of course, none of what the advertising is saying is true. None of it can be true. Much like reading a film review, it’s misguided to think that someone you don’t know, possibly wouldn’t even like and particularly someone who’s job it is to write shit like that, could dictate what would make you laugh or cry.

Here-in, hype (by its very nature) takes whatever is remotely good about something and amplifies it beyond all rational levels, thus creating our second problem, expectation.

I once got into an argument with someone at a party about a film, which I was insisting was good and he was arguing wasn’t. In the end it turned out he’d not actually seen the film but was basing his opinion on what he’d read on Rotten Tomatoes, and therefore didn’t want to see it. The fact that people allow the votes and opinions of other people they don’t know to help them decide upon a unique, personal experience such as a film, is somewhat ironic.

Advertising companies are paid to sell things. Hype for a film gets people into the cinema seat and so therefore counts as a sales tool. The main method people use to hype something these days is to give you more and more of it in fragments before you actually see it. This, with reference to my Fight Club experience and the consequent drug metaphor, of course ruins it. We’ve all been there – Trailer 1, Trailer 2, Trailer 3, The Featurette and The First 5 Minutes. Each element bandied about out of context, each leading you to subconsciously make up your own mind about certain lines of dialogue or certain dramatic moments, and thus often ruining what it’s like to experience those moments first-hand, in the context of the film.

Expectation thus also leading to projection - you projecting what you expect to see over what’s actually happening, therefore destabilizing the film’s own chances to say what it’s trying to say.

I sat through a meeting a few days ago with a film director, his producer and his marketing team working on a strategy building up to the screening of their film at a major festival. The marketing team were detailing how they have a series of mailing lists they send a film’s Facebook page to just to guarantee a certain number of ‘Likes’ on a film from the moment it’s released. You wonder for a second during these moments how the director feels about such a gesture. How he can possibly know what people feel about his film when every gauge he has is blurred somehow by all this bullshit.

Just like my parents, the legend of the film is never ever the reality of the film. Just like the New York art gallery experience, you are being told what to see when you see something – for the sake of making you feel better about the money they want you to spend on it.

Alfred Hitchcock famously banned anyone from entering the movie theater after a screening of his film Psycho had begun, back in the 60s. Of course this created what is now a legendary amount of hype around the movie, but at least his approach still kept the details of the art itself a mystery. All you knew is that the director cared about the integrity of his film, which in itself is all you should ever need to know about the film.

…

So how should you yourself approach a film, to avoid these pitfalls? You know, when it’s just you and it, in a room together, no strings. What then?

[Spoilers ahead]

Somewhere at the end of the 90s. I had just finished watching The Matrix with my father. This was a film that had never sat well with me. He’d never seen it before and I’d seen it previously in the cinema. We were watching it with some other friends and of course everyone got in a discussion about it afterwards. I argued against anyone who said they thought it was a good movie as I just couldn’t stomach the ending. I felt it made no dramatic sense. To me there was no chemistry between the lead characters Neo and Trinity, so for the film to just assume he’d come back to life because she loved him, seemed like the most trite, undeserved dramatic climax.

In response my father said something along the lines of -

“No Caspar, you’re not arguing within the context of the film. You’re projecting what you want onto the film. The film clearly stated early on that Neo, if he indeed was ‘the one’, would be able to manipulate The Matrix in some way. Therefore him dying in The Matrix but still living on in reality is entirely fair based on that assumption. Sure it might not connect with you particularly, but you can’t fault them beyond that, as they have established their own internal film logic and carried that through to its logical conclusion. Therefore Trinity’s love for Neo is actually beside the point. She just happens to be saying “I love you” when he wakes up. Coincidence yes, but where do you even start with coincidence in storytelling?”

[End of spoilers]

I really had no come-back for this at the time. What I did however have, forming in my head for future contemplation, was a set of rules for how I’d approach my assessment of art. The very same rules you see at the top of this article. Since myself and Adam’s greatest passion is film, we’ve explicitly crafted them for use in that context and they continue to serve us well. We created them so we know how to understand a film, without having to necessarily read a review, watch a trailer or pay attention to a single ad.

It’s this line of thinking that lead me to understand what the New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane famously called “good trash” in the context of one of his reviews. I also now have absolutely no fear of loving and defending whole-heartedly a b-movie horror like SAW as much as David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. The Rules make absolutely no prejudice, they allow you to love anything you want, but simply ask that you think for yourself. The Rules stop you getting confused over what you should call art and what you should not. They simply make you focus on good versus bad and help you sidestep all the hype and bullshit the advertisers and marketing types out there would have you believe will help you enjoy the experience more.

I would apply them to more examples for you, but I’m already way over my word limit here. So by all means, try them out.

See how you get on.

See you at the cinema.

I saw Gus Vant Sant’s film Elephant in Italy whilst on holiday with my girlfriend of the time. It was  not long after the film had come out and we were lucky enough to find a cinema that hadn’t dubbed it; they had simply put the Italian in sub-titles in …]]>

I saw Gus Vant Sant’s film Elephant in Italy whilst on holiday with my girlfriend of the time. It was  not long after the film had come out and we were lucky enough to find a cinema that hadn’t dubbed it; they had simply put the Italian in sub-titles in instead. It was of course a beautiful, warm evening and the film, despite it’s delicate and dark subject matter, also left me with the most beautiful, warm feeling. Now Elephant certainly had it’s political undercurrents and was more topical than a film like Pavilion, but the sensation it created of simply following, watching and remaining detached from the events portrayed gave me an almost paralyzing feeling of powerlessness. It felt as if for a moment the film might actually miss the action that was so central to its genesis and leave me feeling as if it was one of those dreams you have where you can never quite see someone’s face, no matter what you try. Quite why this felt so good, I couldn’t tell you. It did however leave me wanting more.

Pavilion, from this year’s IFP crop, is one of these types of films. In fact had it not been for seeing Elephant that day, and then later seeing Terrence Malick’s� The New World, then perhaps the hot and sweaty July day when director Tim Sutton screened Pavilion for us in my living room, might have been all the more uncomfortable. It was too late though, I’d already fallen hook line and sinker for films of this kind, and the fact that I knew this director wanted us to help him with this project meant that the trip to the bathroom and back, the moment the film finished, was a very exciting one. All 25 feet of it.

My co-worker Zach referred me once to a film (Portrait of Jason, 1967) where a man is sitting there smoking a cigarette for pretty much the entire film. That’s it. Talking about this on the way to get lunch one day we agreed that in a film like that, where that’s all that happens, the small things turn into huge events. Zach then stopped, scratched his head and thought for a moment, whispering to the air in front of him, “what was it that happened in that one…”. I stopped too, waited, and then finally he said “Ah yes, he ran out of gas on his lighter. Huge deal!” We both laughed and then stepped inside Jimmy’s, our regular lunch joint.

So to reiterate, Pavilion really is one of those exact films. It’s almost fair to say that if you blink or cough, you could miss the entire ‘reveal’ at the end of it. There are tiny fragmented shards of dialogue that tell you what’s happening whilst all the while you’re watching the most detached, beautiful and mesmerizing footage of kids feeling out the moments in those long, long, useless days of our youth. In fact what I said when I came back from the bathroom after Tim had screened his movie for us was ‘congratulations’. Congratulations for capturing that feeling of the abstract, aimless ennui of what it was to be young, with almost no sense of responsibility at all.

Tim then explained that he wanted a website and film posters from us, and we ended up all walking back along a hot Front Street in Brooklyn, talking all sorts of nonsense. Eventually he had to go one way, and we the other, but Pavilion wasn’t going to let us stray too far from each other in the coming months.

The next part, the actual design process, was tough. It’s always tough but this was particularly hard because we really wanted to nail it. Not because this was our ‘big chance’. Chances are people won’t see Pavilion ‘en masse’ until Tim’s next film is out and everyone is freaking out about how good he is. Then they’ll be picking up ‘that risky first movie’, you know, ‘to give it another chance’. No, we really wanted to nail this because the film demanded it. It was begging us to explain to someone who only saw the poster or visited the website for a second, what the film was about without of course explicitly telling them. You know, without a tagline even. It was such an abstract concept and relied so much on a feeling, that we felt it to be an exciting challenge. That said, we also of course didn’t want to oversell it. When very little happens, you can easily make a website or poster that promises too much. That too was a no no.

So the design work began and I sat huddled over my computer for several days in that nervous funk I always get into when I know I can do it and will do it, but it’s just not happening yet. Then, soon, like trying to pee when you’re really drunk, really full of booze, and have been holding it in for too long, things began to trickle out. Then moments later they all just came out together. Pretty soon I had a list of ideas spilled out on the page and sent them to Giles (best friend and Version Industries co-founder) for his thoughts.

He was into it.

For the website we agreed that animated GIFs, living movie stills, or what people are now calling cinemagraphs, were the right direction. There aren’t many truly captivating, art-for-the-sake-of-art websites on the internet, but of the few my favourite is easily if we don’t, remember me. Take a look. If you don’t know the site already (and already love it), you soon will. The only difficulty with Pavilion is that a lot of it is shot with a moving / handheld camera, and IWDRM has the luxury of picking out the movies with all the beautiful static shots in them. Nevertheless, the laid back, audio-less, ethereal quality of these was absolutely spot on for this project and so all we had to do was convince Tim.

Tim was down.

For the posters there were a bunch of things I’d scribbled on paper scraps lying half on and half off my couch in my living room the night before. These I’d typed up and emailed myself and then hated the next morning. However one or two of them triggered new ideas and we realized that effectively taking an idea from the most unlikely of sources – Robert Zemeckis’s 1985 film Back to the Future - was very possibly the solution to this film’s supporting printwork. So we quickly started putting together some demos using a low-quality quicktime of the film Tim had linked us to.

The extent of Tim’s enthusiasm for our ideas in the coming days was enough to get me through the coldest of winters, let alone the balmy week in July that it was. He wrote us back a long email analyzing each concept and explaining why each one worked for him in different ways. We then encouraged him to choose his top 2-3 concepts so that we could start working on the final editions. As I touched on in last month’s article – there’s being paid for doing some work and then there’s meeting the approval of someone who you respect. These two things are completely different, and the energy you get from one far exceeds the other. There was a fantastic feeling in the Version Industries studio the weeks that followed, hard at work as we were hard on the site and a final set of posters.

Some days into the production Tim wrote another excited email stating that he was so in love with the type treatment on the posters that he wanted us to do all the type for the actual film’s credit sequences. The hot pink, italic, capital letters had hit a chord with him (as we’d hoped it might), and had now dethroned the more restrained, plain, black, capitalized Futura he’d been using up until that point.

The only part that still concerns me slightly as we prepare to reveal the work we’ve been doing here is that it all still somehow doesn’t feel involved enough on some cursory level. I think this is because as a company we’re used to coming at a concept from several angles and layering up the visuals where possible. However, in being true to this very unusual film we knew that in every way less was more, and that meaning and impact were to be obtained from the most subtle and imperceptible touches. Furthermore when watching the film you realize the footage is almost untouched out of the camera, and this too informed the very raw and simple feel of all the work we produced in support of it.

So, without further ado, here is the Pavilion website -

And here are two of my favourites from the selection of posters we produced for the film -

We won’t spoil the details of the film by explaining our exact reasoning for the various elements of each design. We do hope however that each speaks for itself and that everything I’ve said gives you some insight into the process from start to finish, as well as leaving you with some unanswered questions of course …

For those who were not at the two talks I did for the IFP, my name is Caspar Newbolt and …]]> First of all, thank you IFP for the invitation to write monthly articles for your blog. It’s a very flattering and exciting opportunity, and I mean to give it my all.

For those who were not at the two talks I did for the IFP, my name is Caspar Newbolt and I co-founded Version Industries. To give you some context in terms of any comments I make towards films throughout this post and any future posts, I am currently in the process of developing four low to medium-budget film-related projects, alongside my more regular design duties at Version Industries. Three of these are music videos and one is a short film. I have shot, directed and edited three music videos and one documentary to date and have provided my company’s design services to three IFP film directors. I am also currently working on a record cover for a film soundtrack – the re-scoring of the 1970s science-fiction film Silent Running by 65daysofstatic.

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I’d like to start my IFP blog series by talking about the underrated commodity that is trust. It is perhaps the most valuable psychological element within the collaborative creative process, and so I believe very much worth talking about within the context of this blog. What’s most interesting about it is how it pervades the various parts of what we all do in different ways. Whether it be trust in the way you can emotionally captivate people with your work, trust in the collaborations you form as part of your work process, or trust in the way your projects aren’t given a chance to perform on their own terms. There are other ways of course, but these I believe are key at least to the way I work and the experiences I’ve had thus far. The following examples, anecdotes and rants I hope will illustrate these points clearly.

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In terms of the work I do for Version Industries, I have a healthy obsession with narrative and pathos, and feel that one should inherently lead to the other if you’re going to win the trust of your audience, whatever the medium. For this very reason I try wherever possible to tell a story with each project, be it a website, a record cover, a poster or a music video. I don’t mean a ‘story’ in the ‘fashion magazine’ sense, I mean a story with characters, scenes, events and climaxes. Now of course it doesn’t have to be a sad story to be a good story, but without a sense of pathos somewhere along the line, you won’t glean any real loyalty for your work. Take the funniest film you’ve ever seen and there’ll be a moment of sadness sitting right at the heart of it, and whether you like it or not it’s that moment that grounds everything else. Why? Because sadness feels more true than happiness. We might only recollect the happy memories and we certainly don’t have much memory of pain, but it’s a fact that it’s the sad moments that help us lower our defenses, bring us together and help us trust each other. Trust being fundamental if you are an artist trying to earn the respect of your peers and garner support from your audience. It’s trust that leads them to follow your progress and consequently support for your next piece of work, be that financially or other.

Two projects of this kind that we’ve just completed are record covers, one for the Nashville, Tennessee electronic musician Makeup and Vanity Set and the other for the Manchester, England electronic musician Polinski. Each project involved setting up a narrative behind the music and then illustrating that as best we could in the artwork. Makeup and Vanity Set only had one image produced by us, Polinski consisted of a series of panels much like a triptych. Both stories contained the element of loss and the drive to search, find and get back that which was gone – pathos and narrative. I’d recently lost someone very dear to me and these on-going projects provided me, to a certain extent, with a cathartic outlet for this. You can see both covers below.

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In terms of collaborations, as mentioned above I do a lot of pro-bono work for projects of my own choosing. These projects are generally for bands, but the bands I’m into are typically of a cinematic or conceptual nature. The projects are more of a collaboration and each have turned into good friendships. If you want to produce the best work you can, you must work with people you can call friends and, furthermore, who are on the same wavelength as you artistically. This way you are always expressing yourself creatively in the most honest and open-hearted way, and they are giving you the platform to do this on. You then get to the point where you’re talking to them every day online or offline and the process is no longer about deadlines. It’s more about a stream of ideas, references and concepts that never ends, and a body of work that evolves as each of you grow, live life and tackle each new obstacle together. Again, it’s all about trust.

All the film makers I look up to and respect have a very singular vision that’s come to be in part as a the result of a very trusting, long-lasting friendship. Whether it be Darren Aronofsky and Clint Mansell, David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti or John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands, we all smile when we think of the powerful pieces they’ve put together.

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Finally, in an ideal world we’d hope the people financing, promoting and pushing our work would believe in us enough to let the work speak for itself. A lack of trust is the reason product placement in film has become more and more aggressive. If the consumers believed anything the advertisers said, they might spend less time avoiding what they had to say. If the film studios believed in the film makers and their script, they might not be so insistent on re-writing the film as a commercial.  Instead ads breed like bacteria, form like a mould on every surface and continue to find new ways to invade our waking moments. David Lynch put it better than any of us really.

The moment you lose trust in someone or something is a very precarious and dangerous occasion and it is sadly not something people fear enough. As the old saying goes – if you haven’t got anything good to say, then don’t say anything – lest you lose their trust and sacrifice your integrity in the process. The author and screenwriter William Goldman took what seemed a very defeatist stance when he stated his great rule of (studio and independent) film making: nobody knows anything. By this he of course meant that despite having a great script, great actors, a great director and every other good thing you can have going for a film – how it turns out and how it’s received can still not be guaranteed. Now he’s a great writer and has a vast amount of experience to back this statement up, but we all know there are more examples than you can count on two hands of cases of directors and writers who’ve put out a pretty consistent body of work throughout their careers. Stanley Kubrick being the first that comes to mind – a case which makes me think that Goldman was perhaps a little to financially minded in his statement. After all no one accurately remembers how well a film did in history, they just remember how much they enjoyed it.

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So a level of trust certainly pervades everything we do artistically and there are touchstones certainly to ensuring a trustworthy relationship or set of particularly creative circumstances.

Managing expectations well is one of these. You need to govern well the scale and cost of the project, but never the ambition or scope. This way no one is paying a lot for a project that is taking a risk, but everyone is making sure that project happens because it’s an exciting risk and therefore a highly motivating endeavor. As we all know, expensive does not equal good. It never has and it never will.

Taste is the other major factor here. Some people have good taste and some don’t. Taste is fundamental to making great art and is what should be the focus of producers, investors paving your way. By this I mean you should be finding producers and investors that have good taste, and they in turn should be looking for good musicians, writers and directors who have the same. Only together will you be able to trust each other to make great art, and only together will everyone be satisfied.

Trust makes good art, earning trust takes management and good taste.