On Aesthetics
I saw Me and You and Everyone We Know tonight at Danielle and Dave's. It's a great film. Beforehand I was debating whether I'd spend the night watching a film or doing something else. I asked Danielle what the movie was like or about. She explained it: "it's like a lighthearted semi-pisstake version of I heart huckabees". The reviews suggested it was nothing like that. After watching the film, I agree with her take (to an extent).
It got me thinking, though, about conveying the aesthetics of a movie or a story by comparison with others. I often reflect these questions back onto Breathe, my novel, not because of ego (well, not intentionally so) but because I want to understand what I'm doing. Understand what I'm creating. There's this conflict of what I intend versus what I write versus what I read. That whole post-structuralist chestnut. If what I write is not what is produced, who am I in the process? Can I understand the process in order to treat this "scrambler" as a black box and get out closer to what I intend? In the case of Breathe, it's a combination of a wide array of influences, none of it really chosen to complement or intertwine with another. It'd be a patchwork quilt of ideas if it wasn't for the fact that I'm aligning all these elements to point to something indescribable. It's something I feel in the music of Crowded House and Ben Folds, in the writing of Douglas Coupland, in the lectures of Alan Watts, in the culture of Zen Buddhism, and in the scripts of Charlie Kaufman. But if I said "Breathe is like this, this and this," it wouldn't make sense. It'd sound like a mishmash when really, I'm trying to tap into something. But people (especially people in charge of money) crave these sorts of analogies and comparisons. What can I say if I can't draw an analogy with anything else? Perhaps I'm too close to it, too overwhelmed by the fine-grained details to see the broader picture.
What if other people tell me what they think? I might flat-out reject it because of my own conceptions. But if I give it credence, what can I do with that? Can I understand this divide between myself and the reader? I can know what they think they are reading. But what then? Would I twist it to suit the outcome I wanted? This is some part of the editing and revision process, of course, but there's something else there. Also, I think that the greatest books stand exactly how they are presented. Regardless of the complexity, the author has hit their mark. How do they do that? Is it skill? Is it the Texas sharpshooter fallacy - shoot at a barn and then paint your targets around your bulletholes? Can you just write something excellent regardless of everything else?
These are all interesting questions to me, but the most intriguing thing is this: the novel I'd like to write after Breathe - I know the exact aesthetics I want to hit. It's the imagination, wonder and sadness from Michel Gondry's films, but replacing the whimsy with the hard-edged, crisp sensibilities of the Wachowski Brothers' Matrix trilogy. Roughly Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind but with less of the complications. In comparison, what does this say about my two projects?
It got me thinking, though, about conveying the aesthetics of a movie or a story by comparison with others. I often reflect these questions back onto Breathe, my novel, not because of ego (well, not intentionally so) but because I want to understand what I'm doing. Understand what I'm creating. There's this conflict of what I intend versus what I write versus what I read. That whole post-structuralist chestnut. If what I write is not what is produced, who am I in the process? Can I understand the process in order to treat this "scrambler" as a black box and get out closer to what I intend? In the case of Breathe, it's a combination of a wide array of influences, none of it really chosen to complement or intertwine with another. It'd be a patchwork quilt of ideas if it wasn't for the fact that I'm aligning all these elements to point to something indescribable. It's something I feel in the music of Crowded House and Ben Folds, in the writing of Douglas Coupland, in the lectures of Alan Watts, in the culture of Zen Buddhism, and in the scripts of Charlie Kaufman. But if I said "Breathe is like this, this and this," it wouldn't make sense. It'd sound like a mishmash when really, I'm trying to tap into something. But people (especially people in charge of money) crave these sorts of analogies and comparisons. What can I say if I can't draw an analogy with anything else? Perhaps I'm too close to it, too overwhelmed by the fine-grained details to see the broader picture.
What if other people tell me what they think? I might flat-out reject it because of my own conceptions. But if I give it credence, what can I do with that? Can I understand this divide between myself and the reader? I can know what they think they are reading. But what then? Would I twist it to suit the outcome I wanted? This is some part of the editing and revision process, of course, but there's something else there. Also, I think that the greatest books stand exactly how they are presented. Regardless of the complexity, the author has hit their mark. How do they do that? Is it skill? Is it the Texas sharpshooter fallacy - shoot at a barn and then paint your targets around your bulletholes? Can you just write something excellent regardless of everything else?
These are all interesting questions to me, but the most intriguing thing is this: the novel I'd like to write after Breathe - I know the exact aesthetics I want to hit. It's the imagination, wonder and sadness from Michel Gondry's films, but replacing the whimsy with the hard-edged, crisp sensibilities of the Wachowski Brothers' Matrix trilogy. Roughly Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind but with less of the complications. In comparison, what does this say about my two projects?