The Unprofessional Boy #27
The Medium is the Message I
Hello everyone,
Welcome back to The Unprofessional Boy; this time around, I’m excited to start releasing a quasi-essay I’ve been working on. It’s quite long, so I’ll be breaking it up over multiple issues, and it’s intended as a rough summation of a portion of my thoughts on how medium affects story. Today: film and some introductory concepts.
The proliferation of the video essay as a YouTube art form, I think, reveals something about our lingering discontent surrounding a lack of artistic legibility: that it exists, but also that it demands to be addressed, concretely, with the same focus and craft that shapes the original medium. For every Marvel movie, there's a slew of analysis — some lazy, some opportunistic, some well-intentioned— which purports to explain why the movie is made the way it is, or why it could have been improved.
There's a particular formula to the best of them: a calm voiceover, breaking into playing short scenes when necessary to illustrate a point, always maintaining a tight edit to avoid automated copyrighted claims. It's arguable that this isn't adequate: that stricter, more codified forms of criticism would better support the genre, or that the artificial restriction of time and style create a glut of similar voices; it's inarguable, however, that these videos wouldn't rack up views in the hundreds of thousands without meeting some need. That's table stakes for a funny, easily distributable ten-second clip on the Internet, but for a forty-five-minute-long discussion of a much more passionate subject, it's representative of a gaping maw of reputable, intelligent discussion surrounding the non-Bible most popular IP in existence.
Part of the reason Marvel movies attract so much attention —and so much demand for astute critical discussion that there remains a dearth despite the vibrant, constant supply— is grift, or socially imposed allocation of priority. The remainder of it, however, is —by process of elimination— genuine, and even if this fraction is small, it's tremendous in absolute quantities. This isn't by chance: there's an opportunity for smart evaluators to proliferate because there's both a bought-in, interested audience and a nuanced product to criticize. The granularity that's possible is due to size, but also deliberate craftsmanship: Marvel movies aren't perfect movies, but they reflect a mastery of the form's constraints. The public recognizes this: they watch these movies, conservatively, in the high tens of millions, and then they reach out to video essays because they can't place what exactly they just saw. A medium is defined by its constraints; to understand the current state of film, then, it's necessary to identify and examine the limitations Marvel continues to exploit at a rate that's running everyone else out of town.
Iron Man, the first film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, was released in 2008; Christopher Nolan’s reimagining of Batman for the big screen hit theaters three years earlier. Batman Begins was the first film in a trilogy, a critically successful —and, more importantly for DC, profitable— one, but it didn’t spawn a useful template in its wake. The critical distinction between the two would seem obvious: Nolan’s movie was comic-book, but inventive in its gritty, down-to-earth quality, while Jon Favreau’s Iron Man was comic-book, with brighter colors and more banter.
That statement, though, is incorrect. The important, causal difference between Marvel’s generally hailed, popular cinematic universe and Warner Brothers’ subsequent, faltering attempts at kludging one out of DC’s parts wasn’t stylistic.
The separation between the two was established because the fundamentally important element of a story is character, and filmmaking is not a goal in and of itself; it’s a means to tell a story. Nolan understands this: his films, though they’re often blockbusters centered around clever conceits, use the power of budget and device to reveal something about the dynamics being explored. As entertaining as Gotham’s grit was in his films, that wasn’t what put butts in seats for three straight movies. What did was the use of that realism to force Batman into choices he wouldn’t have to make in a more fantastical universe, to depict —in the trilogy’s best moments— a struggle for the soul of a desperately lifelike city.
When Batman kills with disdain, as he does in Zack Snyder’s attempt at stripping Nolan’s tone without regard for its core, its driving force, the material refined in that crucible, the story loses what’s compelling.
Iron Man was a box office hit because it took its titular character seriously, motivating his progression through practical effects and quippy dialogue. Marvel served their characters maximally; that’s why they’ve earned a stranglehold on the box office. They’ve begun to forget that principle recently, with rushed production and a strict adherence to a formula for construction that some time ago ceased to be legitimately constructive. Fans, even if the word’s short for “fanatic,” can tell the difference— why, then, do they continue to show up at theaters? It is not my contention that they won’t, if the filmmaking remains mediocre; of course they will: there’s tremendous lock-in in the name recognition alone.
Nevertheless, they will struggle, comparatively, as they lean into reliance on characters which are less well-established through artfully created narrative. When stories lose their characters, they lose their audience. It could be said that Iron Man, Spiderman, Captain America, Batman, Superman, or Wonder Woman are popular because they’re products of a vast expenditure of resources behind a consistent segment of intellectual property; it’d also be a cop-out. That reasoning, while accurate, ignores the tremendous variety in ability to exploit the medium; in other words, to tell a story.
The character, in any story, is the most important thing, but the element which ultimately brings a story into existence —which, rather, allows for its birth— is the medium and its associated constraints.
A movie lasts —recent Marvel films, from now on, excepted— about two hours. In that time, at a roughly standard page of script per minute of screentime, a screenwriter has one hundred and twenty pages. A scene typically lasts two to three pages, which means that a typical movie contains forty to sixty scenes in which to tell a full and complete story.
The uniquely small portion of possibility space which can be placed into the final product is what motivates the complexity of films’ production processes. In doing so, a filmmaker must draw the attention of the audience from these decisions, allowing them to focus on the story. A good film is a masterclass in allowing the viewer to fill in the details which the director chooses to exclude: the domain-governing decision is the information which lies within and without the frame.
Two adjacent media which are defined by similar, yet different trade-offs:
A play or musical, though certain elements can be highlighted, is fundamentally a tableau: the frame is guided by the audience, eliminating the need to decide what’s included. Instead, the difficulty is the lack of options afforded: the tough part is the live performance, from which cascade a comparative paucity of technical abilities.
A television show —bar the most episodic— is granted a much longer timeframe to work with, so doesn’t have to be as economical. Moreover, advertisers are paying for the show to exist, not viewers, so experience is disincentivized in favor of watchtime (though it does matter.) I’ll elaborate on T.V. next week.
Therefore, stories suited to film are characterized by the knock-on effects of the medium’s unique combination: extreme spatial and temporal limitation contrasted with those problems’ myriad solutions. Several spitballed qualities:
1. They contain narrative equivalents of hero props: detailed moments of character or plot which benefit from tricky technique and allow for inference into the wider story. Think of an opera: everyone pulls out their special glasses to see the actors’ faces only when they’re introduced. This manifests occasionally as focus on the mundane: a getting-ready-for-work sequence that’d be incredibly dry in a novel, for example.
2. Scenes where characters are expressing themselves in different ways, e.g. one through action, one through dialogue: here’s a shot of the kind I’m referencing. This tends to increase the frequency of character pairings with different methods of thinking: less like-mindedness, which works to solve “how do we show both at the same time” and “how do we have conflict with every interaction.” It’s the story version, maybe, of a straight man and a funny man, though less explicit.
3. Elements that can be expanded or contracted to fit a given directorial vision: one large subset of these are those commonly deemed “cinematic.” Changing the scope of description or flavor text serves this purpose; action and dialogue are compressed similarly, but are more difficult to alter. Instead, action or dialogue will not be present: the total amount, generally, will be predetermined in units of scenes rather than in more fungible quantities.
More on this idea next time; until then, I’ve collected some other things to watch and read below.
Work
I’ve written a short story in the past week, which —although certainly imperfect— I quite like; it’s called Post-Changing the Filter, regarding the consequences of weapons and weaponized bureaucracy alike.
I also answered a number of questions about the process for these types of things, which can be considered a partial addendum to TUB #21: How I Write.
Links
Related, and great, but didn’t didn’t quite fit in earlier: The Nerdwriter’s analysis of the Aaron Sorkin/David Fincher film The Social Network (2010;) it demonstrates the power of collaboration, revision, and thoughtful decision-making beautifully. [13:23]
The story of dumb-luck-epitome and very weird man Timothy Dexter is humorously animated here; it’s a fascinating tale of business gone wrong and then right again throughout the early United States. [9:06]
Zach Sherwin’s song SWITCHITUP is typical of his work in that it suffers from being a little bit English-teacher but benefits from a clever conceit: in this case, spoonerisms, with a few lines that make up for any deficiencies in tone. [2:07]
I re-watched this discussion of musical genre-hopping, with mandolinist Chris Thile, today; I found it a poignant illustration of the power of context and experimentation (h/t David Laing) [4:35]
Secrets of the Magus, a 1993 New Yorker profile of the magician Ricky Jay, is not perfect, but I did read in ninth grade, and bits of it have stuck themselves deep enough in my brain to resurface periodically, which is a higher compliment than I could attribute by describing it further.
A 2012 Esquire article about the mononymous magician Teller (crossword clue, pair with Penn Jillette) is similarly excellent, using the lens of trick-theft to ultimately capture the wonder at the intersection of vicious practice, irrefutable talent, and, well, magic.
Lastly, this Twitter thread —”100 opinions on magic”— from natural_hazard is fantastic, supplying a selection of great acts, practicalities, and context.
All the best and au revoir,