Douglas Van Hollen

There’s “disappointed”, and then there’s “betrayed”.

I worry about my audience’s expectations all the time, whether I’m in Scrivener or in the bedroom.  I worry about it in regards to story because I know what it feels like to be disappointed with where a story goes.  

I also know that sometimes it can go deeper than disappointed.  Sometimes, if the hook is set real deep at the beginning, and you really want to go where you think the author is taking you, and then they pull a fast one, you’re left feeling like a used idiot whore in a prom dress.

In creative work, we are gardeners, pruning and curating a relationship with our audience that we only half control but into which we pump 90% of the energy.  Without that audience (even if it’s just ourselves), our work has no purpose, and it can never be complete, in the tree-falling-in-the-forest sense.  The final ingredient is always the audience, and while it’s not helpful to pander to the audience, it is helpful to cultivate that relationship, and to be aware when choices you make might endanger it.

It’s okay to do things that I, as an audience member, don’t expect.  It’s okay, and even desirable, to play games with my assumptions and to assert your power over the direction of the storytelling.  But you can go too far, and to introduce change and misdirection that breaks the spine of the relationship between me and the work.  Usually, this is because something’s been done that has made me think of You, the Artist, wielding “art” with too heavy a hand.

When this happens, I feel that a trust has been betrayed, that the promise of goods and services to be rendered has been reneged upon, and that my purpose for beginning this journey no longer applies, and that I have been had.

This is often described as “losing the reader”.  But I prefer to think of it as the artist breaking the contract with the audience.  The previous parts of the piece should function as an assemblage of expectations that, while none are completely keystone, together amount to what I as an audience member agree that I want to experience or learn or feel.

A recent example of when an work broke a contract with me: Get Low.  

The film is not a bad film.  It’s structure is valid, the performances are good, and the overall story is somewhat compelling.  But the nature of the mystery and the atmosphere and the clues that are established in the film’s first two acts are (I believe) sharply at odds with what is finally revealed during Robert Duvall’s (poorly photographed) final monologue, wherein all of the answers are artlessly (from a storytelling point of view) flopped out onto the table, in complete disregard for our expectations of how backwoods mystery stories are supposed to be told.

In retrospect, the film could actually be said to simply cultivate confusion until Duvall is ready for his close-up.  And then it tells its answers instead of showing them, and we’re all supposed to go home, like that’s what anyone signed up for.

The contract with the audience is signed while the story is unspooling from the point-of-view of the funeral assistant, who lives in a town with other citizens, and the story seems to be about the intersection between human myth and reality.  But after the hook is set, everyone is forgotten about except for the hermit, with whom we are unprepared to relate BECAUSE HE’S A FUCKING HERMIT.

(And am I the only one who doubts that a wad of forty-year-old bank notes would still be legal tender?  Thus puncturing the motivation of the first act?)

So I was betrayed.  And I beg you all: it is better to disappoint your audience, to wear your shittiness on your sleeve, than to disguise it behind convoluted artifice in the hope that you can emulate great art from the outside in.  

I am not condemning the use of ambiguity and opaqueness for the purposes of storytelling.  I am condemning purposeful misdirection in the pursuit if hiding your story’s Aboutness, upon which your contract with your audience is being signed at every moment.  Be conscious of this, and do not underestimate the power of the contract to make me happy, or to make me mad.

David Warner is a great actor.  His performances are immediately classic and rich with culture and a shared love of the craft.  So great is his impact when in character that we as an audience rarely stop to reflect over the strange and varied life that he has led.  Let’s do that now, shall we?

Humble beginnings

As most serious fans of film know, David Warner came into being in a remote section of the Time of Legends known as the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness.  Back then he was known simply as “Evil Genius”, or “Evil” to his close friends.  Even after only a few millenia of existence, he already showed a keen and restless mind, hungry for knowledge and fascinated by the world around him.

What especially fascinated him was the world of technology, which was blossoming in our dimension only a few time portals away, but to which he had no access due to the complexities of interdimensional crime laws.  He learned all that he could from his serving ogres and dim transmissions from his scrying pool, but he eventually concluded that he would need first-hand experience in order to achieve his dreams.

Warner bravely baited the Supreme Being into directing enough spiritual energy at him to allow him to jump between his world and ours.

Building an empire

His first stop was worldwide computer systems company ENCOM, where he rocketted to the position of CEO after a few strategic technological decisions.  Once at the top and in close collaboration with the Master Control Program, he was finally able to achieve his boyhood dream: to enter the computer system itself (photo above).  Once inside, he was able to leverage his true nature as an evil genius to become a key project manager in ENCOM’s gaming division, where subordinates remember him as being “cruel, but effective”.

If not for the criminal actions of a few anti-establishment radicals that had infiltrated his department, Warner (or “Sark” as he was now known) would have achieved an even greater greatness.  But instead he was forced to severely alter his career trajectory.

Downfall

First, he tried out speculative medicine.

Unsuccessful.

Next came bookmaking.

Also lacking in an indefinable something.  (In this writer’s opinion, the poverty-inspired tranquility of 19th-century London life was no place for an evil genius.)

Eventually, Warner was cast out by our pitiless world into the backwaters of outer space to serve as a low-level bureaucratic functionary.

He made one last ditch attempt at greatness by assuming the office of Chancellor of the Klingon High Council.

But such things cannot last in this world, and he was assassinated.

He is now doomed to walk the decks of the Titanic over and over until James Cameron runs out of dimensions to fuck up.

1. Woody Allen (What’s New Pussycat, 30 years old)
2. Allen Ginsberg (Howl, published at 30)
3. Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose, 48)
4. Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar, 31)
5. Jackson Pollock (Number 5, 36)
6. Richard Feynman (Quantum electrodynamics, 47)
7. Frank Lloyd Wright (Fallingwater, 68)
8. Francis Ford Coppoloa (The Godfather, 32)
9. Larry Wall (Perl, 33)
10. Richard Wright (Native Son, 32)

Everybody wants to be happy.  It’s a goal ubiquitous enough to be worth mentioning in the United States’ Declaration of Independence.

But as a metric for our spiritual progress through life, it lacks the hard edges of reality and depends wholly on squishy and changeable comparisons with ideals that probably only exist in our imaginations.

Also, I submit that happiness is strictly an internal state.  And as such, to evaluate our own happiness requires us to pull back from whatever we’re doing and delve inside ourselves to see how our internal state matches up with our own personal fantasies of what happy people feel like.

Fun, on the other hand, is a ground-level assessment of the nature of our interaction with the world.  It lends itself more naturally to a binary evaluation; “Am I having fun?” takes less time to answer than “Am I happy?”  ”Happy” has so much range and baggage attached to it that it warrants deep spiritual meditation to even be able to talk about it.

We have this feeling in our culture that being unhappy is somehow being unsuccessful as a person, and I would prefer to ditch any personal metric with stakes that high.  I will determine the success of my life on my deathbed.  In the meantime, I just don’t want to be sad.

I happen to believe that I won’t attain true happiness while my consciousness is attached to meat in three-dimensional space, but that’s just me.  But even if you accept the possibility of of achieving happiness within your lifetime, it’s still a bad primary goal to have, because there are no small wins along the way.

The best you could hope for would be to be emotionally advanced enough to be able to measure your happiness relative to some point in the past, and thus to gauge your progress so far.  But can you really remember exactly how happy you were last week? Don’t you have to rely on records of some kind, probably using language to approximate your mental state?

Does anyone ever feel that language ever successfully conveys how happy or sad you are?

The pursuit of fun is so much easier.  It’s not a lifelong quest with constantly changing goals; I don’t think it should take longer than twenty-four hours.  Fun is a race that you can win every day.

If you are pursuing happiness, you have to “have faith” that happiness awaits you at the end of your lifetime-length pursuit.  If you are pursuing fun, you can skip from daily win to daily win without ever having to engage in a philosophical discussion.

Now, you anti-epicureans out there will be tempted to push me down the slippery slope from “fun” to “pleasure”, but I’m not buying it.  I define pleasure to be strictly sensory, whereas fun, although every bit as transient, needn’t involve the body at all.  The morality of my argument rests upon the fact that the best fun is had when it is not at someone else’s expense.  Pleasure has no such restriction.

This post was motivated in part by this post on The Happiness Project about trying to have a “party” every day.  Initially, I laughed that piece off as idealistic hippie nonsense.  But the simple wisdom that enjoying yourself in simple ways is not inherently bad eventually triumphed over my deep-seated white cynicism.  I’m with you, Richard Florida.

So, like Todd Glass says when he introduces his podcast, just relax and have fun.  Trust that fun is good for you and that by accumulating a lifetime of fun you may wind up being a better, more functional person, and, dare I say, maybe a bit happier.

We called our band Honkeyphonic because we were five white kids standing in sharp contrast to the black music that we wanted to make.  We wanted to evoke a time where “honky” was still a relevant term.  The misspelling was just a typo from a promotional flyer that stuck.

Our love of black music from the 70s filtered through our urban liberal arts whiteness to produce what we called “neo-funk fusion”, a mix of The Meters, Jethro Tull, Bootsie Collins, and Radiohead, all coated with the tongue-in-cheek escape clauses of Frank Zappa.

Zack, our fearless leader, had heard some song, on an Air album or on the Royal Tanenbaums soundtrack, some fast indie pop romp in 13/3 time.  He played it for me as we drove to our “studio” in the basement of the Student Union.  He said it had given him an idea for a new song, but something more approachable for hacks like us, a jazz waltz with a harpsichord underneath.

It probably took us three or four hours to write the tune and components of the song that eventually became “Cardshark”, and then another week of rehearsing to agree on the structure.  The lyrics happened outside of my view via secret collaborations between Zack and our singer Aaron, and they came into the fold a few days later and they were great.  It was to be our first semi-serious narrative song with a moving, soaring vocal line over a bouncing bass and a synth harpsichord part that jangled like sleigh bells.

Maybe the problem was that we misplaced it in the setlist, didn’t allow enough space after our funky trance breakdown song for the energy in the room to taper off.  But when we kicked into that waltz the room just stopped.  People went from dancing to politely swaying in place a little bit.  Because how do you dance in place to 3/4 jazz-pop?

Dancing in a crowd of undergraduates necessarily involves some linear combination of up and down movements.  In other words, an even number of beats between downbeats.Now technically, from an algebraic point of view, every two bars of up-and-down does land you on a downbeat.  But in between you feel like an idiot, bouncing on the wrong pulse.

If we were smart, we would have done something like recast the song in 6/4 instead of 3, thus informing the bodies of our audience how to move.  But we had yet to realize that, in college in America, all bands are dance bands, and the music must acknowledge this expecation.

Honkeyphonic never played “Cardshark” again, and none of us ever brought it up.  The song was never recorded and no record of its lyrics or melody survives.

Experiences like this are very common in creative pastimes.  Art does not obey the second law of thermodynamics.  The emotional and creative energies that were consumed in the making of “Cardshark”, and the thousands of other works abandoned forever that day around the world, those energies are lost forever.  Not because it was a bad song or that we were unworthy of it, but because of some undefined and unexpected series of variables that made us not want to feed and clothe it anymore.  So we abandoned it.

This is not a tragedy.  This is the process.