I had a thought today that I wanted to share with you. The thought occurred to me while driving in the car listening to the most recent
Battlestar Galactica podcast, where Ronald D. Moore provides a "writer/creator's commentary" on each broadcast episode, released right after the show airs on Friday nights. He talks in depth (over a glass or two of single-malt scotch), about precisely what each beat in the episode means story-wise, provides a bunch of director's commentary-style technical tid-bits, and discusses in detail how the story development process got he and the other writers to the specific point - or version - that the episode freezes for all time. He talks freely about what he feels works, what he feels doesn't work so well, describes story possibilities that were left out or removed just before final locked edit. The podcast is really insightful as well as entertaining, and I recommend it highly to fans of the show. As a writer, he's talking about all the implication and meaning and symbolism and intention and creativity and craft behind all of the things that end up in the final episodes in terms of scenes and dialogue.
I was driving along enjoying Moore's detailed diatribe, when it dawned on me that it used to be the
fans of a show who speculated about all this stuff. Up until the widespread practice of director's commentary on DVD's (which I love incidentally), it was incredibly rare to hear a director or writer talk about the episode of a show in such great detail just mere hours after it initially aired - unless you actually worked on the show, or knew the writer or director. Now, as with BSG, you can watch the episode, and then right there in your iTunes podcast source list, almost as though intended to be part of the viewing of the show is this complete exposure of the inner thematic workings, dramatic and emotional plot machinations, efficiently and lucidly laid out for you by the writers and creators of the show that you love. It was right after it had occurred to me that Ron Moore and others like him are doing our interpretation jobs for us, and felt that twinge a little... I asked myself, "what does that leave the fanboy and fangirl geeks to talk about??"
Then, revelation. like a bolt, it occurred to me that it allows us to skip directly over discussing and debating the soap opera details of the show, and clears a space for us to ponder the actual themes and the meanings within the show as focal points or seeds for discussion - instead of debating what type of whisky brand so and so drinks, or whether or not the characters know this or that about each other. While that's extremely fun - and I say that from experience of 30 years of being a movie and TV fan and discussing the most finite details about Indiana Jones, Dale Cooper or Dana Scully with my friends and family - it's ultimately unfulfilling and unsatisfying on anything more than the most superficial level. The discussion can be about our own lives and about life on Earth as human beings. It can be about our own personal intellectual, emotional and spiritual development and and our physical honing and working on our crafts and, you know those skills that we develop in life, those things you end up doing in life that are so much more important than the lives of some characters in a drama. Yes so often it seems flip-flopped. Using the characters and stories to fulfill something, rather than to fuel something ultimately so much more fulfilling.
Don't get me wrong, it's not like it just occurred to me this week to start pondering the themes and deeper meanings of stories and characters - that has always gone hand in hand with geeking out over details for me - but what occurred to me is more about what society as a whole talks about and thinks about. I might be judging other people, and I don't mean to be casting dispersions, I'm just saying that in general, it seems to me, that the average fan of a show or movie or book or album, doesn't go to this deeper level. I think I'm right about that. Don't write me off as a snob, everyone has their own experience, and I completely honor that and really have an open heart toward others who think differently than I do - but in a discussion of the things that our society does with it's entertainment, I feel this observation is more than true - it's rampant. At risk of over apologizing, let me just say that I can appreciate mind/eye candy and brain down time as much as anyone believe me... but I am sometimes left wondering, what are we doing all of this for?
Like for me: the fact that I'm sitting here writing about this right now,
this is something that I'm passionate about, something I love doing. I love looking deeply into the stories of others, and the mythology of people - almost in a Joseph Campbell way. I love looking to see how the themes of our culture's stories - those stories that we call entertainments now - are seedbeds for conversation about life itself. Deeper conversations about our own lives and our individual ways of experiencing the world... in a dialogue with one other with the TV off.
The shows, and the writers of those shows who allow us to skip past the mundane nitty-gritty by just giving us the facts and explaining the motivations can be seeds for conversation about life - for contemplations about life. It's what I spend most of my waking life doing. Actually trying to confront each moment with some semblance of a state of awareness that means I am always wondering within, I'm always asking the questions, I'm having a kind of dialogue of growth and development with myself all the time. As soon as I sit down with a friend or a colleague over lunch and we start talking about the mundane details of things, I get so bored I just want to go home. Where has the art of dialogue and conversation gone in the past few decades? Looks to me like it's gone way downhill. I'd like to try to do something about that. If just for myself and those people that I know, but I encourage you to think about it too - is what I'm saying on the mark, or a load of horse shit?
I'm breaking this post up into two parts since it ended up getting kind of long. Please look for "
Of Storytelling Seeds And The Critics We Have Become - Part 2."
