Art Imitates Life, But Maybe Not Enough?

It kinda feels like filmmakers are more amenable to featuring flip phones in their movies than smartphones. But I guess that makes sense. There’s more to be done with them from a blocking standpoint: you can flip them open aggressively, smack them shut aggressively, throw them out the car window aggressively (try that with a glassy smartphone and the audience will all wince). They can’t browse the web or take good pictures, but that’s good because those are not very interesting things to watch somebody do on screen. Perhaps most importantly, the very presence of a smartphone seems to constrain the number of believable plots rather than expanding it.

Modern smartphones have so many safety and communication features (e.g. Find My Friends) that if you want to endanger or disappear someone in a generic action thriller you would often have to spend precious screen time showing how their phone is being separated from their person. Even the ol’ reliable “no service” escape hatch doesn’t work quite as well with increasing satellite connectivity. Audience members won’t generally jump to thinking about these as plot holes, so I’d guess many filmmakers choose to completely ignore the existence of smartphones so as to avoid prompting a line of thought about how they could have been used to solve the conflict. I’m currently watching Pluribus where they’ve conspicuously written the protagonist with no smartphone, without explanation. Maybe she’s doing a social media detox?

I think this is a fine pattern for legacy media like film, though I think if you were to plot a graph of which eras are represented in film as we move forward into the future we’re going to see a sharp decline of conspicuously 2010s or 2020s movies. Part of this may be that pop culture and aesthetics have grown increasingly diffuse due to algorithmic siloing so there aren’t as many visual cues you can point to and go “wow that’s so 10s!” like you could low rise jeans for the 00s. But I also think it’s because so much more of our life now occurs online and on screens. How to film that sort of stuff is an unsolved problem. I’m interested to see how The Savant tackles it, given it’s all about trawling chats and forums.

But film is far from the only medium out there. If you’re working within one of the postmodern interactive formats we discussed in the last installment, incorporating digital happenings is trivial since you’re likely already presenting it as a digital package. The typical example I’ve seen thrown around to illustrate this is Homestuck.

It’s nominally a webcomic, but quickly reveals itself to be a lot more than merely a comic that happens to be hosted on a website. It has looping animations, it has videos, it has music, it has games, it uses the very structure and styling of the website itself to break expectations. The comic itself is cheekily framed as an adventure game that you the reader are controlling via commands. Quite appropriately, a large portion of the story’s interactions between characters take place over a digital chat, and you just get to read the chat logs. It’s actually a jarring stylistic shift later on when characters begin speaking with one another in person.

Homestuck and other digital age narratives connect with the modern mind in a very special way. They touch upon aspects of day-to-day life that are underserved by our current mainstream entertainment offerings. One selling point of entertainment is escapism and fantasy, yes. But another is connection, introspection, immersion, seeing yourself within the narrative. It can be seen in art produced throughout all of human history, like how Greek mythology mirrored the concerns and interests of the Greek populace.

You’ll see this distilled to the aphorism “art imitates life” and then wryly inverted to “life imitates art” when some work like 1984 appears to predict trends and occurrences in the real world. I’m still interested in how art imitates life, and how it seems to increasingly fail to imitate life as the weirdness of modernity strays more and more from the tropes that have defined human stories up to now.

Where is the Internet?

If you read my blog, you’ve probably noticed that I think the internet is a big deal. It’s hard to disagree, it’s kind of an annoyingly obvious statement. It’s likely that your work and your leisure somehow touch the distribution, recommendation, and communication mechanisms of the internet in some way throughout most of the day.

In narrative fiction, the internet is not represented proportional to how all-consuming it is. In many cases, it’s not represented at all, just like smartphones. It’s funny to look back on something digitally-native like the Mission Impossible franchise and watch over time how it regresses from a rather grounded depiction of the web in the first movie (forums, websites, mailing lists) to sci-fi magic in the final movie (a mesh network of sensors and satellites primarily concerned with physical actuation, like camera feeds or unlocking doors).

I’m not saying fiction needs to portray the internet. Especially not in cases where it would be distracting and nonsensical—I don’t want Faramir to have a Snapchat. But I believe very strongly in the ability of narratives to influence us, and the internet seems like, I dunno, a pretty notable mechanism of influence and power that you would expect creatives to have more to say about! Even something thoroughly modern and popular with youngsters like Diary of a Wimpy Kid generally forgets about the existence of the internet. Which is sort of ironic, given that the creator Jeff Kinney is also the mind behind the hit web game Poptropica.

There is no conspiracy here, I think it’s basically the same story as smartphones: conventional plots often get less interesting with instantaneous communication and information. You essentially need to build your story around the web if you’re going to include it (like Eddington did), which necessarily makes it less dynamic and diverse. So if you are a digital native author feeling like every story has already been told, I must heartily disagree. There is no Requiem for a Dream about internet addiction, there are precious few romantic novels featuring a Tinder meet-cute, and we don’t get to see the citizens of Gotham reacting to the crazy happenings in their city on TikTok.

But that’s exactly what some Batman fans did during the Gotham TikTok trend, and it… kinda rules? It can feel claustrophobic to have enormous events filtered through the perspectives of a tiny number of POV characters when we’re used to the cacophony of online discourse informing us about such things. The opportunity to scroll a feed of reactions in a fictional world is a potent show-don’t-tell moment that doesn’t need to confuse the viewer with a bunch of names and relationships. They’re just anonymous netizens doing what anonymous netizens do: reacting, joking, commenting.

The GTA VI trailers seem to suggest a fictional social media feed will be a feature of the game, bringing Vice City into vivid color. I am highly interested in how this will play out. If it’s done with care and populated with a believable amount of content, it would be nothing short of groundbreaking. And hopefully vindicate everything I’ve said here.

There better be memes. And they better not be painfully unfunny. Maybe the only way you can accomplish that is allowing user-generated content.

Where are the Ads?

Out of the goodness of their hearts and for no other reason, advertisers have decided to fund all of the internet services and content platforms we get to enjoy for little to no cost. If the internet were like a body, then ad spend would be its blood, saturating and nourishing every function and extent. This can lead to some unfortunate incentives and bad vibes since all services are now relentlessly optimizing for wasting the maximum amount of your time looking at ads. Believe you me, if they could chain you to a chair and glue your eyelids open Clockwork Orange style, they would.

Advertising is, like it or not, a fundamental and inescapable part of human experience. It has been so for almost a century now. If you want to begin to build an alternative, bizarre, difficult world, you need to connect with your audience on a deeper than verbal level. You can’t just say “this is the way things are”, you need to appeal to the mind’s underlying substructure to generate true sympathetic understanding. In my estimation that’s really what art is: making people feel something instead of know something.

In ancient mythology, this is often a matter of appealing to the concerns of the average joe: weather patterns, natural disasters, strange aspects of human nature like love and war. We’ve managed to insulate and distance ourselves from a lot of these rough-and-tumble realities in the West, so we’re left with a new substructure: the consumer. Homo economicus. In our time of plenty, society has pivoted from questions of survival and power to an all-consuming fixation on consumer preference, and power over consumer preference via advertising. This singularly pursued goal keeps spawning new genres of advertising never before imagined, like the social media influencer. It seems like it’s only a matter of time before it infests the AI chatbots as well.

Your audience gets advertising, on subconscious, animalistic level. They understand the incentives it runs by, the cultural values it communicates, and the tricks it employs. Game franchises that strive for total immersion in a far-flung world like Fallout and BioShock utilize the storytelling powers of advertising to great effect. To such great effect that the fake advertising becomes part of their brand and thus their real advertising for the game!

Imagined advertisement is also a great vehicle for satire and general goofiness. A lighthearted, jokey simulated consumer culture suffuses internet experiences like Neopets and Homestar Runner, the latter constantly producing full TV commercials for their fake in-universe products.

A lot of good storytelling is about economy of information, not spending too much of your audience’s brainpower to move pieces into place. The best stories accomplish this through all sorts of compression techniques: the subconsciously suggestive angles and rhythms of cinematography, the short-circuit capabilities of trope and genre (and the exciting subversion of them!), and in something like advertising’s case: drawing upon preexisting audience knowledge and experience. This compression enables subversion for both comedic and dramatic effect as well as saved audience RAM you can use to pack more compelling storytelling in. I think this theory of compression explains why a 2.5 hour movie, with its inescapable stream of subconscious information via cinematography, lighting, music, etc, can be just as exciting and deep as a 60 hour book that has to solely rely on verbal substrate. And it explains why I think multimedia web experiences like Homestuck, Homestar Runner, and Neopets are a sort of new frontier in art that compresses even more narrative juice into a digestible package.

Before I depart from this subject I must stress that I’m not specifically referring to diegetic advertising that steals the spotlight and makes some pointed commentary on the act of advertising itself, like the Ad Buddy in Maniac or the fantastical consumer products of Omega Mart. There’s nothing wrong with this approach—in fact these works still effectively utilize the compressive properties of advertising to further your immersion. But I am not insisting creators specifically make a point about advertising. I think the best kind of diegetic advertisement doesn’t call too much attention to itself, it just feels… right? Cozy?

You may react with horror to the idea that infesting your art with the scourge of advertisement—imagined or real—could possibly make it comfycore, but that’s the world we live in. Advertising is the norm, and the lack thereof could maybe even be in the tiniest way… alienating.

Roger Scruton does not agree (at least I think Roger Scruton said this, that was what I wrote down next to the quote years ago when I first heard it. Now the only citation I can find on the entire web is a Twitter account called “Roger Scruton Quotes” so take that as you will. Scruton also consulted for tobacco companies and schemed to write articles to advance their talking points sooooo):

I really like this quote because it gives me a firm criterion to draw a line between art and advertising in a world that increasingly wants to mingle the two: does it arouse or still my appetite? I don’t think this is really contradictory with my thoughts about diegetic advertising, because as a narrative device it is not designed to make the real-life audience buy or do anything. And thus it can still be part of a work of beauty, QED (:

Where is the Routine?

Most modern humans live very repetitive lives, defined by the rhythms of work and school (most ancient humans also lived very repetitive lives defined by the rhythms of agriculture). Narratives are about excitement and novelty and they want to keep you engaged, so while they may gesture at routine like the schoolwork in Harry Potter they’re generally more interested in how it falls apart.

On the other hand, some works make routine the point. A lot of online and mobile games have the concept of daily tasks to get you to log on every day. The real purpose of this is to keep you engaged so they can either beam more ads into your eyeballs or extract more microtransaction/subscription revenue, but in my experience many users often appreciate how the daily routine lends much needed structure to their life. There are also games like Animal Crossing that seem to utilize a daily routine for its immersive aspects with no ulterior motive.

While subversion is a great way to farm drama and comedy, it is only ultimately enabled by predictability. I think one of the best examples of this is Phineas and Ferb, which is possibly the most formulaic show ever created. An extremely high proportion of plot beats and lines uttered are some form or other of a running gag, but the fun comes from seeing how they’re gonna do it this time. People also just like the cozy predictability of the show, no matter how much you mourn for their media illiteracy. I’m told there are a lot of anime shows in this genre, neverending repetitive unchallenging comfycore to turn your brain off to. This sort of art is not usually my style, but I can see the value it provides for the people who like it.

Another media franchise that I think makes a good attempt at representing the drudgery and routine intrinsic to modern life is Diary of a Wimpy Kid (following the Wikipedia style guide, I will not be linking it as I already linked it earlier in this essay). Greg is eternally trapped somewhere between 7th grade and freshman year of high school, staring down an endless parade of school years made up of school days and holidays and the occasional summer. I think it has stuck with kids for two decades now (!) at least partly because it faithfully renders the everyday slog of school. Though his adventures are not exactly lifelike, the anecdotes come at a pace that is sort of believable. It is both cozy and clever.

There is an arrangement of power that leads us to take up these routines. You may notice—for instance—that the very wealthy get to enjoy a higher degree of novelty and freedom in their day to day. This leads to a sort of weird alliance between narrative art (that demands novelty) and whatever aristocracy exists in the setting. So Tolstoy and Austen and even humble Dickens seem to write disproportionately about the concerns and happenings amongst the rich, because it would really be hard to wring an interesting narrative out of the day-to-day of a Russian peasant. It leads to a sort of mass artistic dehumanization of commoners. This issue may simply be intractable, I’m not sure how to make peasantry interesting.

But if your setting is modern, you have options. The modern world has a level of dynamism and prosperity that has lifted up the lower classes from an eternal state of scratching their livelihood from the earth to all sorts of strange and interesting places. Modern poverty can be just as interesting as modern affluence. So give the routine-havers a shot at the limelight!

It may not surprise you to learn that I think the most interesting attempts wedding together these three inescapable facets of modern life—the internet, the advertisements, the routines—are online experiences I’ve already mentioned like Neopets. By creating something recognizably consumerist and playing into some very basic facts of human psychology, they manage to create a believable and immersive parallel universe where you can roleplay a version of yourself where everything is going just slightly smoother. It is frequently said that these near-life experiences can be extremely detrimental to your real life. During the heyday of the social MMO Second Life there were countless articles describing how it was overtaking every waking minute for some users, ruining their in-person relationships in favor of virtual ones. That issue is certainly worth discussing, but I don’t think it’s a totally closed case. I would say there is a way for these properties to profitably offer an immersive and moving experience while maintaining healthy boundaries and backstops to addiction or problematic use. We’re certainly not there yet, but I believe any creator with a good head on their shoulders and a heart of gold can make it happen.

As a final example of a work that I think perfectly meets the absurdities of modernity in the way I’ve been discussing via a recognizable (if exaggerated) portrayal of social media, advertising, and routine, I offer this amazingly surreal animation about insomnia.