“We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!”
– Douglas Adams
This is a short post today, but next week I will be reviewing David Dark’s latest book, The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, as some of its incisive thought forms relate to all those moments in which the cinema becomes a storied means of self-critique or unexpectedly shifts the brackets of our cherished assumptions. We tend to shorthand these experiences as transcendental, or expressionist, or a range of stylistic terms whose Venn diagram intersection is the constructive experience of doubt, fear, and ideological shell-shock. But the book surfs the waves of an historic inquisitive piety and a cathartic cultural immersion that will annotate any rss feeder with question marks. Kind of like this Wired entry that popped up in my “Tech” label and made these thoughts jog loose a week too early.
The latest issue of Wired has an article by JJ Abrams of interest to anyone interested in the connections between existential wonder and sci-fi geekery. It is filled with the kinds of Web 2.0/Ipod reflection that will have most of us nodding along. So I don’t discover the music I used to by catching the glimmer of some minor album in my peripheral vision from a few bins over. I-Tunes does it for us. We live in an age dominated by the rampant possibility of spoilers, 9/11 perhaps being the ultimate spoiler (which is not snark at all, but a handy description of the invariable result of trauma – the exposure of our plotlines). All of our ironies are immediate and transparent.
These proleptic invasions of our experience of art and culture have dulled our perception of the good kind of suspense. Not the merely procedural sort of therapy that makes Law and Order continually viable, but the kind of suspense that parallels our larger processes of faith, doubt, and wonder. The good kind of suspense is mystery in a much richer sense of the term, one upon which Abrams has tried to build his brand of symbolic image in action – and apparently dovetails well with damsels in distress, lantern-jawed G men, and wild sci-fi conclusions to extended plots.
We cheat ourselves out of the grand experience of mystery by avoiding its sometimes demanding process. As he says at the end of the piece:
Perhaps that’s why mystery, now more than ever, has special meaning. Because it’s the anomaly, the glaring affirmation that the Age of Immediacy has a meaningful downside. Mystery demands that you stop and consider—or, at the very least, slow down and discover. It’s a challenge to get there yourself, on its terms, not yours.
It turns out the 7-year-old was right. His tip finally worked, and Greg and I finished the game that day. But I’d traded any true satisfaction for a cheat. I can’t even remember seeing that end screen.
The point is, we should never underestimate process. The experience of the doing really is everything. The ending should be the end of that experience, not the experience itself.
But which process should we never underestimate? The process of producing mysterious materials? Making texts and artifacts laden with provocatively demanding plotlines and devices? Or the experience of trusting that the disconnected bits of ideas scattered throughout a show like Lost will actually add up to something? Either way, I can’t help but think at the end of this essay that what Abrams offers doesn’t actually meet his own standards. Or maybe it does, and his standards are too low.
The anti-spoiler Cloverfield plan was a marketing device. Any potential cultural criticism embedded in its secrecy evaporates quickly when it begins to actually work. Alias teetered under its own weight. Lost quite blantantly lost its way, viewing expectations crumbling under the announcement that there wasn’t actually any long term narrative plan in place for all these mysterious elements on the island. I have been a big fan of its resurgence even though I now know that it is planned, that the mystery has been plotted and graphed for my existential amusement. Lost is the essence of television, which hasn’t really traded in authentic mystery since Twin Peaks.
The definition of mystery inherent to Abrams’ Wired article is small, manageable, and easy to brand across multiple television and film productions. Mystery, abiding mystery as a transcendental or cultural impulse, can be traced in Stalker and Code Unknown and Werckmeister Harmonies. It lurks on the lower dials of the radio, where one still can discover great music. There is a lot of it in the inaugural Filmwell post. Real mystery is Moviegoer territory, in which we learn from Binx Bolling that: “The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.” These are all occasions of what Rudolf Otto referred to as mysterium tremendum et fascinans, one of the great theological descriptions of modern religious experience. Abrams is right that mystery is demanding, but I think it may be even more demanding than the television he produces.
In all these references in the essay to process, Abrams is talking about mystery for mystery’s sake, which doesn’t parallel art for art’s sake as much as it bisects it at an inopportune angle. And here is where it gets tough, because it is difficult to predict precisely what forms mystery, the tremendous and fascinating kind of mystery, takes in culture. It is a moving target. It shows up with all the regularity of Ubik. But real mystery always has the same effect: personal questions, imaginative doubts, unexpected reconfigurations. I am not so sure that it is even possible to actually cheat authentic mystery. More on this next week with some examples from the cinema that fit David Dark’s similar line of thought.