I know something you don't know

If you're like me (and you are) you've had this experience: you find out about something, and then you see it everywhere. This is basically how I ended up learning a lot about web writing this week. I kind of oscillate between thinking of it as having learned something about the craft of web writing, and having learned something about why the internet is awful.

There's a certain style of headline writing that's been taking over the internet. I won't hesitate to compare it to a virus or a fungal blight, because even if the underlying idea is solid, the majority of the execution is terrible. You probably already know what I'm talking about: a hyperbolic, emotion-based claim that doesn't so much indicate an article's content as dare you to prove the headline writer a liar by reading the article in it's entirety. "You Won't Believe..." "Inconceivably Awesome..." "...Will Blow Your Mind." If the internet were truly as rich with such content we would all be quivering husks by now, our every assumption about the world shattered and our relentlessly blown minds a thin paste around the interior edges of our skulls.

Someone has taken it on themselves to make a browser plugin, Downworthy (warning: some language in the link), that changes these stock hyperboles into something more believable. "Literally" thus becomes "Figuratively" and "Will Blow Your Mind" becomes "Might Perhaps Mildly Entertain You For a Moment." I don't think I want to install it myself, because if anyone starts writing headlines like that in earnest I want to give them credit, and not mistake them for the work of my cynical plugin. Besides, Downworthy would only externalize what I already do in my head as I read these things. The point is that stumbling on this plugin was among my first steps down the rabbit hole.

Soon after this (or before, I don't remember--reality is confusing) I found the same style lampooned again, on Cracked.com, of all places. The irony here is that for years I had been thinking of this as "Cracked style," and if they didn't pioneer it they were the first place I saw it. Not to be too judgmental--I could forgive this sort of thing from a humor site. It was only when it caught on elsewhere that it actually became objectionable.

The last piece of the puzzle--I didn't think of it as a puzzle until I saw this--fell into place shortly after I found, through wandering internet happenstance, the following tweet:

Dear CNN https://t.co/B0edardjf3 The curiosity gap is not for every news story. Especially about murder.
— Adam Mordecai (@advodude) January 23, 2014

In reference to this tweet:

14-year-old girl stabbed her little sister 40 times, police say. The reason why will shock you. http://t.co/5ZFqHFrviw
— CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) January 23, 2014

I took a moment to be suitable appalled about it all. But to the point of this post, I hadn't realized we (and by "we" I mean you, CNN) had sunk so low. And more to the point, I had finally given a name to my pain, and it is "curiosity gap."

A name enabled research. Whose bright idea was this? Well, I'm not being scientific about this, but some Googling indicates that the concept originated in behavioral economics courtesy of George Loewenstein in the mid 90s, and entered the marketing vocabulary (which is to say, metastasized) around 2006. The concept itself is innocent enough: people are curious about what you are going to say when you tell them you know something they don't know, and which they thought was unlikely.

Of course the difference between "informing" and "lying" rests mainly on externalities, what's good for telling the truth is good for lying, too. Conversely, the technique isn't evil in and of itself. Manipulative? Maybe, but not necessarily--surprising information exists. Tired, though? Hells yes. At least the way they're driving it right now.

I do believe that knowing the name of something is a sort of power. Now I (and you, too) can recognize this thing. I can conceptualize it. With the proper precautions I may even summon it someday and make it do my bidding. For good, of course.

A momentary digression of Disney-rage

While I am busily butchering The Little Mermaid for the amusement of my friends, I discover that Disney has, of course, outdone me. People. People. Have you seen this? Put in your mouthguards and stretch out your teeth-gritting muscles.

 
For those who don't want to watch, lemme sum up: Disney is bringing The Little Mermaid back to a few theaters for a limited run. The twist is that they are inviting children to bring iPads to play with a special app that will give them games to play (and sing-alongs to sing along with) synced to the movie--that is, while the movie is on.

As an aside, here, again, are words I've seen or heard too many times: "Experience the Disney classic... like never before." Is that what people want? If the trailer said, "Experience the Disney classic... exactly like you did in 1989," I don't know who wouldn't shell out.

(A parable, perhaps, for our time: I became aware of animated movies, more or less, in 1989. The "Disney Renaissance" was not a thing that was happening; it was simply a law of the universe that Disney made an excellent animated movie every year. Thus it had always been, for as long as I could remember anyway, and thus it would surely continue until the end of time. Thus it continued, anyway, until I was about ten, and I learned about the transience of things.)

I don't begrudge Disney the drive to innovate, in the abstract, but I think that this is one of those things, like cloning velociraptors, that science has made possible but human wisdom ought to prevent. I don't imagine that there is any shortage of rage about this. The idea of watching a good children's movie in a darkened theater filled with children who are distracted from the movie by glowing tablets is a horrific one to me.

Part of what frightens me is the thought that the folks at Disney didn't think The Little Mermaid could hold today's children's attention on its own. What frightens me more, though, is the thought that this is a test case and might catch on. The real potential of this gimmick isn't to enhance children's movies that don't need enhancement, but to pacify children during movies that couldn't otherwise hold their attention. There's a whole subset of the movie industry that serves no purpose but to temporarily hypnotize antsy kids during the summer, but don't think movie makers would pass something up that might let them get away with making even less interesting movies.

Today a children's movie has the relatively simple goal of holding a child's attention for about 90 minutes. But it still takes some work to do that. Even children demand a certain degree of novelty, coherency, and even intelligence (of a sort) from their entertainment. But what if the movie only had to play in the background while the child played a reskinned version of Bejeweled?

The app would be provided at the usual movie theater markup, of course.

That got grim. But don't mind me. All roads lead to the zombie apocalypse in my imagination lately.

Aspirations of outlying

I've found a new thing to aspire to in my work. Or maybe it's an old thing. Or maybe it's what I've always wanted.

So much art happens because that sort of art is happening now. That isn't to say that it's necessarily bad--the last decade's wave of superhero movies produced a few with actual artistic merit; some of the young adult fantasy literature flooding the market right now is actually worth reading; there are even some Dutch oil paintings of historically insignificant aristocrats that are enriching to look at, in their own way--and I'm certainly not saying that I hope never to cash in on a convenient industry trend.

What I mean to say is that a lot of art that is produced seems inevitable. Ideas floating around the culture collide randomly like molecules and react in ways that are random and original, but predictable. (This happens in more practical spheres like science and politics as well.) When zombies became a "thing" they spread, zombie-like, across the culture and combined with everything. It produced some interesting combinations such as zombie romantic comedies, zombie adaptations of classic literature, and zombie Shakespeare kung fu musical theater*, but that says more about the zombie image's penetration than anything else. The question isn't whether or not something will happen, but who will do it.

On Friday night I took the time out to go see The World's End with Girlfriend, and when the credits rolled I said to her that it was nice to see a movie that, if these specific people hadn't decided to do exactly what they did, would not have happened. I don't think the stars were aligned to produce a movie about a bittersweet, nostalgic midlife pub crawl in a town that's been taken over by robots. Edgar Wright and company made that happen.

That's what I'd like to do. Maybe not exclusively, but I would like to add at least one thing to the culture that wasn't just going to happen anyway. I don't think I'm just talking about "creativity" either. Or "originality" for that matter. There is plenty of both at work in the main stream of culture. And tasting the zeitgeist and knowing what art will speak perfectly to the moment is another ability I would like to have. But it's a special thing to find a combination of ideas that works that lies outside of the main currents. Something like that may not be imitated--and perhaps shouldn't--and may only be remembered as an intriguing footnote at most.

If God had delegated the creation of life, and I had been involved, I would be proud to have created the platypus, perhaps as much as the redwood or the tyrannosaurus.

* My thesis aside, I admit that if Qui Nguyen didn't write Living Dead in Denmark it probably wouldn't have happened.

My Shakespeare is shrinking!

Well, shame on me, first off, for delaying last weekend's post until the middle of this week. I should know better.

I've kept busy, if perhaps not on the things I should be busy with. Girlfriend (a while ago, actually) got it into her head to produce Romeo and Juliet with her middle school, and I consequently got it into my head to go through the script and cut it down into a middle-school-manageable size. It turned out to be a lot more fun than I expected, and I've spent a good bit of the last few days reading, cutting, and splicing the first three acts. Not rewriting--she was vehemently opposed, and it is probably for the best. Just presuming to cut the play in half is intoxicating enough in its boldness.

It's been a while since I had read Romeo and Juliet (I won't say how long) and it is better than I had remembered--not that I remembered it badly. It seems fashionable to knock R&J, perhaps precisely because it is the preeminently popular Shakespeare play of this generation, but I think it deserves its laurels. Re-reading it, and needing to really get a sense of the scenes and the lines, is forcing me to appreciate it.

On one hand, we have those who take R&J as a great love story. On the other hand we have the scoffers (not scoffing at the text, but at the people on the first hand) who take it as a deconstruction, pointing out that Romeo and Juliet are stupid teenagers who get entirely carried away and die in a hormonal conflagration that takes four other people with them.

I think the beauty of the play is that it's all of those things. I have insisted and will continue to insist that Romeo and Juliet's romance is a good and beautiful thing--or at least that it would be if the context for the romance weren't a murderous powder keg. The play also deconstructs romance, but without denying its potential beauty. Romeo and Juliet's love is simultaneously poetic and chemical, profound and superficial, innocent and lustful, redemptive and annihilative. The play is both a cautionary tale and a celebration.

It's actually misleading to say that Romeo and Juliet get carried away by their emotions. They do--oh, they definitely do--but so does everyone else. To dismiss Romeo and Juliet (or Juliet and Romeo, for the sake of variety) as overemotional teenagers misses the point. The play seems to say that they get carried away, not because they are adolescents, but because they are humans. That is the tragedy of humanity, and the tragedy of the play only comes about because so many major players act on their emotions at exactly the wrong time.

Juliet and Romeo's emotional vices are love, which has the potential to be a good thing, and despair, which--given their ultimate situation--is understandable. The emotions that rule their elders--spite, rage, and cowardice--are less forgivable.

Let's take a moment to consider how almost everyone who should be helping Juliet and Romeo screws the play up by being emotional.

First and most obviously, the anger driving the Capulet-Montague feud seems to touch everyone except Benvolio. Tybalt is supposed to be Juliet's friend, but he's a ball of hate from curtain-up to curtain-down. Mercutio is not much better. His anger on Romeo's behalf provokes him to escalate Tybalt's insults into violence, and where Mercutio draws a sword in Romeo's cause is where things actually start going downhill.

The next unforced error by a grownup goes to Lord Capulet. The problem isn't that he is so tone-deaf as to arrange Juliet's marriage on the afternoon of her cousin's death. The problem is that when Juliet objects he becomes enraged. His anger takes everyone else in the scene aback. His plan to lift his daughter's spirits becomes an ultimatum: obey utterly or be disowned. For fear of his anger, Lady Capulet will not even discuss delaying the wedding. Thus Juliet has to replace her original plan with haste.

And Friar Laurence--oh, Friar Laurence. Here's a man who knows what he's about, for the most part. In the safety of his cell he can lay a pretty good plan--heck, his plan for Juliet works just fine in Much Ado About Nothing. Maybe there's nothing he could have done to save Romeo's life, but he is there in the crypt when Juliet wakes up. He should be protecting her--she could survive. In fact, Laurence previously stopped Romeo from stabbing himself--maybe he could do the same service for poor Juliet?* But no--in Juliet's moment of extreme need he hears people coming and flees. His betrayal is so sudden and banal it must come from sheer terror. We never saw this weakness in him before because we never saw him in immediate personal danger. In the end he can give good advice, but the pressure of a do-or-die moment breaks him, and the flight reflex overwhelms all his well-intentioned schemes.

With these people around them, it really would have taken more than a cold shower to save Romeo or Juliet. A bucket of cold water in the face of Mercutio, Lord Capulet, or Friar Laurence at a critical moment could have saved their lives.

* He does exactly this in Act 4--which I had forgotten, having only gotten through the first three acts as of writing yesterday... I don't think Friar Laurence's official policy on this is "Everybody gets one."