Sigh.
I absolutely wish that I could tell you something positive about my attempts to fix my own car. Ooh, ooh, wait. I successfully replaced a broken steering linkage. I also removed my wheel successfully three or four times.
Ok, so in the No Black Boxes mode, spending a considerable amount of time under my car (only a tiny fraction of which questioned the wisdom of jack stands and attempting to exert 150 ft-lbs of torque), helped me understand what was going under there. I know what the CV axle and does. I know why it is important to replace it. I know how the rack and pinion works and what tire rod ends are. That's the easy part. Separating a rusted tie rod from a steering linkage? That has proven to be beyond my limited means. Turns out, 6 gallon air compressors can't get you the torque needed to torture the tie rod out of its home, especially when it's rusted. And we haven't even talked about the wheel axle nut. That's because I might cry if we do.
The silver lining of this is that my uncle found a garage that will rent out bays and tools. I expect more success from my work there. I also bought a propane torch. Apparently, according to a completely different uncle, who happens to be a mechanic, to unstick rusted auto parts, what you really need is heat. And a garage full of tools. You know, like a . . . what's the word? I'll have to look that up.
Monday, October 15, 2012
Tuesday, October 2, 2012
Speaking of Cars
My car parts will be delivered tomorrow and by Monday, I will be elbow deep in the steering parts of my car, getting down to the business of saving myself the trouble of buying a new car (seriously, the quote for a steering rack replacement was more than the car is currently worth, except as a necessary mode of transportation). I will keep everyone up to speed on that project as it happens. Thanks to the magic of Instagram, it will even look like all the cool kids are doing it.
But for now, I found this great look at modern engines from the good folks at Wired's nerdier cousin/subsidiary Ars Technica. Enjoy
But for now, I found this great look at modern engines from the good folks at Wired's nerdier cousin/subsidiary Ars Technica. Enjoy
Thursday, September 27, 2012
A Change in Direction
When I began blogging, it only occurred in fits and starts. I had the impulse to write, but I didn't really have a topic, an animating idea, a pulsing purpose, a lodestar, or an editor (and it shows). But as I was walking back from the garage contemplating what modern mechanics expect us to believe about what they do, I had an epiphany.
I am in the process of moving from Pennsylvania to Maryland, with the intent of remaining there for a while. In order to get my car registered in Maryland, it needs a one time inspection (yes, it is ridiculous, but whatever). I took my car to one of the many authorized inspection stations and received some bad news. The man told me that I needed to replace a steering linkage, a CV axle, and the entire rack and pinion. He thought that the rack replacement might cost about $900 and he would have to see what the other parts would cost and when did I want them to get started. This simply boggled my mind. This mechanic would never put it in these terms, but his actions demonstrated that he believed that he was a member of a secret brotherhood who kept the mysteries of CARS (spooky music!) and that, as he was a shaman/priest of a dark art, utterly inaccessible to myself, I should simply agree to submit myself to his ministrations and his requests for payment so he could wave his hands over my car to make it conform to what he said it should be.
Once upon I time, I would simply have sucked it up. I would have had my suspicions, but in the end, I would have just dropped the cash and let it be. But I have worked in theatre production for six years. I have replaced starter motor on the car: with my own two hands (and a borrowed jack, and borrowed tools, and another person, but my two hands were definitely involved). I have not only seen sausage being made, I have actually made the sausage. Most mechanics (and plumbers and contractors, et al) have an essentially Manichean understanding of the world: there are those who can and those who pay, those who make magic and those who pay to have magic made. I reject that world view and I refuse to countenance being presented with what is essentially an ultimatum.
Bear in my mind, that I can't exactly blame the mechanic for the hand waving act. Quite a lot of people do not understand mechanical things in the slightest and many of them have neither the time nor the inclination to crack open the black box of their daily driver, or any other piece of the world they use every day and simply take for granted. As a businessman, and not just an artisan, I fully expect mechanics to charge as much as the market will bear and in this world, the market for throwing money at a problem somebody else can solve is probably endless. It's certainly large enough that this mechanic will not be going out of business anytime soon (even if he doesn't run a particularly good business).
But I don't have to buy into that worldview either. I looked the part up: an entire steering rack for my Subaru costs around $270 net (more, if I decide to keep my old rack, you know, for my collection). That's a re-manufactured part. A brand new one costs $350. Assuming the job takes about six hours (way more than the internet estimates it will take - it is a unit that is very easy to take off and replace) and he is installing a new part, then he is charging me $100 an hour for labor. That is absolutely staggering. I realize that unit labor costs for a garage include the cost of labor and tools, so most of that doesn't actually go into the mechanics pocket, but that number is still ridiculous. Mechanics are not special; they have special access to private information (you try getting a service manual for a car - it ain't easy for a private citizen) and a collection of special tools. Theatre production isn't all that different, especially for lighting. I get paid $15.50 with benefits. As a freelancer, I would charge $25 an hour for labor, $40 an hour for more specialized services, so I get it. I'm in even a little bit jealous. I definitely run into people who have no understanding of how easy theatrical lighting really is and for whom it is simply magic and who might even been convinced to pay me $100 an hour.
I took the scenic route, something I am known to do whenever I get the chance, but that is the essential point: as an electrician, someone on the inside of a specialized artisanal product, I don't believe in magic. I do NOT believe in magic. I don't believe in black boxes. You should never allow something into your life that you don't understand on at least some basic level. You may not be able to design a computer chip, but you should get the gist of how a computer basically works. This world involves constant trade-offs between knowledge, time, and money. It is possible not to take the time to know something, if you are willing to fork over money to those who make it their business to know everything about the innards of such black boxes. I get that a lot of people let black boxes into their lives because it is easier not to think about it. But I think this attitude infects people's entire lives. If you aren't interested in making yourself aware of how a radio works, or aren't at least aware that it is possible to inform yourself on the subject, then you are not going to inform yourself about public policy either, or about finance, or about any number of other things in life. Cars and computers are the prototypical mechanical/electronic black boxes, but finance is another black box. The particular activity of government is a huge black box. So that's what this blog is about: exploding, prying open, and otherwise banishing black boxes from our lives. If I find something that I don't understand, then I will inform myself about it and pass it on - the knowledge and the process. Because there is no such thing as magic.
I am in the process of moving from Pennsylvania to Maryland, with the intent of remaining there for a while. In order to get my car registered in Maryland, it needs a one time inspection (yes, it is ridiculous, but whatever). I took my car to one of the many authorized inspection stations and received some bad news. The man told me that I needed to replace a steering linkage, a CV axle, and the entire rack and pinion. He thought that the rack replacement might cost about $900 and he would have to see what the other parts would cost and when did I want them to get started. This simply boggled my mind. This mechanic would never put it in these terms, but his actions demonstrated that he believed that he was a member of a secret brotherhood who kept the mysteries of CARS (spooky music!) and that, as he was a shaman/priest of a dark art, utterly inaccessible to myself, I should simply agree to submit myself to his ministrations and his requests for payment so he could wave his hands over my car to make it conform to what he said it should be.
Once upon I time, I would simply have sucked it up. I would have had my suspicions, but in the end, I would have just dropped the cash and let it be. But I have worked in theatre production for six years. I have replaced starter motor on the car: with my own two hands (and a borrowed jack, and borrowed tools, and another person, but my two hands were definitely involved). I have not only seen sausage being made, I have actually made the sausage. Most mechanics (and plumbers and contractors, et al) have an essentially Manichean understanding of the world: there are those who can and those who pay, those who make magic and those who pay to have magic made. I reject that world view and I refuse to countenance being presented with what is essentially an ultimatum.
Bear in my mind, that I can't exactly blame the mechanic for the hand waving act. Quite a lot of people do not understand mechanical things in the slightest and many of them have neither the time nor the inclination to crack open the black box of their daily driver, or any other piece of the world they use every day and simply take for granted. As a businessman, and not just an artisan, I fully expect mechanics to charge as much as the market will bear and in this world, the market for throwing money at a problem somebody else can solve is probably endless. It's certainly large enough that this mechanic will not be going out of business anytime soon (even if he doesn't run a particularly good business).
But I don't have to buy into that worldview either. I looked the part up: an entire steering rack for my Subaru costs around $270 net (more, if I decide to keep my old rack, you know, for my collection). That's a re-manufactured part. A brand new one costs $350. Assuming the job takes about six hours (way more than the internet estimates it will take - it is a unit that is very easy to take off and replace) and he is installing a new part, then he is charging me $100 an hour for labor. That is absolutely staggering. I realize that unit labor costs for a garage include the cost of labor and tools, so most of that doesn't actually go into the mechanics pocket, but that number is still ridiculous. Mechanics are not special; they have special access to private information (you try getting a service manual for a car - it ain't easy for a private citizen) and a collection of special tools. Theatre production isn't all that different, especially for lighting. I get paid $15.50 with benefits. As a freelancer, I would charge $25 an hour for labor, $40 an hour for more specialized services, so I get it. I'm in even a little bit jealous. I definitely run into people who have no understanding of how easy theatrical lighting really is and for whom it is simply magic and who might even been convinced to pay me $100 an hour.
I took the scenic route, something I am known to do whenever I get the chance, but that is the essential point: as an electrician, someone on the inside of a specialized artisanal product, I don't believe in magic. I do NOT believe in magic. I don't believe in black boxes. You should never allow something into your life that you don't understand on at least some basic level. You may not be able to design a computer chip, but you should get the gist of how a computer basically works. This world involves constant trade-offs between knowledge, time, and money. It is possible not to take the time to know something, if you are willing to fork over money to those who make it their business to know everything about the innards of such black boxes. I get that a lot of people let black boxes into their lives because it is easier not to think about it. But I think this attitude infects people's entire lives. If you aren't interested in making yourself aware of how a radio works, or aren't at least aware that it is possible to inform yourself on the subject, then you are not going to inform yourself about public policy either, or about finance, or about any number of other things in life. Cars and computers are the prototypical mechanical/electronic black boxes, but finance is another black box. The particular activity of government is a huge black box. So that's what this blog is about: exploding, prying open, and otherwise banishing black boxes from our lives. If I find something that I don't understand, then I will inform myself about it and pass it on - the knowledge and the process. Because there is no such thing as magic.
Thursday, July 5, 2012
What is Theatre Anyway?
Nothing gets my blood more riled up than thinking about the state of theatre, or rather the state of the discussion of the state/future of theatre. In the grand scheme of things, I generally see three sources of discussion on this topic. It comes from marketing/PR/Audience development, artistic directors and institutional thinkers (TCG, American Theatre Wing, etc), and writer/directors. The marketing people are the least connected to the practice of theatre and their thinking is usually geared toward facile analysis of audience trends and metrics for measuring the success of theatre. While I believe that it is important to consider the stated desires of audiences and to track how they spend money, it is important to remember that most audience members have no idea what they want until you give it to them (call it the Steve Jobs corollary), so it makes for less than useful diagnostic and programmatic thinking. Institutional types are fascinating because they take for granted the infrastructure of not-for-profit existence, such as governance boards, development costs, grant writing, etc. It's hard to take their thinking seriously since it is constrained so thoroughly by existing conditions. Given the circumstances, it's like being asked to create a brand new totally revolutionary budget car - you can't do it. You still end up with at least two doors, a steering wheel, an engine, four wheels at the corners, etc. You can still do amazing things within the constraints and it can still be productive to re-visit what you can do (there is a world of difference between a Kia Rio and a Tata Nano after all). Unfortunately, non-profits have much less room for experimentation because experimentation requires failure. A distressing fact about the future of anything is that it involves quite a lot of failure to get there, which commercial producers know and institutional producers experience, but only at a cognitive distance, because failure as an institution is much more painful than failure as a company, for a multitude of reasons. And, if you ask a writer/director about theatre, the odds are very good that you are going to get a spiel about words, bodies in space, and/or stories, which is all very well in theory.
What I rarely see are production professionals, whether production managers or TDs or other production supervisors, talking about the future. In lighting, there are companies looking to sell new products, for example, but no one is attempting to sell a different business model. This is distressing because, while theatre at its barest essence is bodies in space (and words are optional), major not for profit regional theatres are not theatre at its barest essence and that is where people make a living in theatre (albeit a meager one most of the time). So how can we talk about the future of theatre, if we consistently leave out of the discussion (either in content or as participants) the people who actually make theatre happen.
This is baffling considering that well over 80% of my job as an electrician directly relates to the product my theaters put on stage. How is that not relevant? Forever left out of the discussions of the state of theatre is the fact that artisans such as myself are absolutely necessary to the proper functioning of theatre. It is incredibly sad that playwrights and other creatives don't get their financial due. Hell, as an electrician, I am better off, purely as a theatre worker because I don't need another job, outside of theatre, to sustain myself. I even get some benefits (which cause my wages to stagnate, but hey, that's true for everyone). I think the truest fact about the state of not-for-profit theatre today is that too much of the entire structure of not-for-profit theatre is not dedicated to the act of theatrical production. Too many theatres in this country are arts advocacy groups with theatres attached.
TCG does outstanding work as an organization dedicated to understanding the state of not-for-profit theatre in practical terms. Their most recent Theatre Facts broke down the overall budget for all reporting theatres and it is a very interesting chart.
The first thing that strikes me is that it does not break down easily into accounting for the cost of a show (which tells you that the people reading this document didn't need to know what part of the budget goes to production, which is fascinating). A couple things stand out as well. First, theatres spent more on marketing than on physical production (11.8 to 7.9). It costs more to advertise shows than to build sets. Second, and this will surprise precisely no one who has had wrangle a stage into becoming a set, facilities (and insurance, etc) themselves cost more than all physical productions. In many ways, New York's commercial model makes the most sense: be a producing company or be a theater owning company. You can only do both well if you work at enormous economies of scale. Owning your own space, especially if that space needs constant work, is a huge burden. Third, a bare majority (54%) of expenses are related to personnel (theatre is and always has been labor intensive) It is the breakdown of the expenses that is scary. 18.5% of that 54% went to artistic, 13.9% to production, and a whopping 20% of personnel expenses go to the administrative side. Some of those artistic payments must be to designers and directors. If you were to fold those expenditures into a budget for "shows" and include only those relating to actually mounting productions, what does that amount to? A back of the envelope calculation leads to something like 33-39% of expenses actually making it to the stage. It's not surprising then that it feels like production is left out of all these discussions. This is reflected all too often in the physical situation of the theatre. How many of the theatre's employees actually work on the stage, or even near it? How many times have you been in a full staff meeting where it was obvious that you have no contact with over half of the theatre's employees? Is it any wonder that theaters lose their way?
There is a sense in the non-profit world that being like a business is a bad thing, or at least, an irrelevant thing to an arts group, but this is wrong. Arts groups need to be like more like businesses in at least one way: they must learn to focus relentlessly on the product. Marketing will not save you, if you have a bad product. Innovative audience engagement will not work, if you have a bad product on stage. I would argue that the subscription model is deeply flawed because it keeps theatres thinking about the season as the product, rather than each individual show. It is no longer tenable to think this way and every piece of news about single ticket sales proves this point over and over again. The season is not the product, but a product line and each product in the line has to be at a certain level of quality. And yet, production is consistently undervalued and underserved at the macro level. If you want to start thinking about the future of theatre, I would start with the show itself. Like the man said. "The play's the thing."
What I rarely see are production professionals, whether production managers or TDs or other production supervisors, talking about the future. In lighting, there are companies looking to sell new products, for example, but no one is attempting to sell a different business model. This is distressing because, while theatre at its barest essence is bodies in space (and words are optional), major not for profit regional theatres are not theatre at its barest essence and that is where people make a living in theatre (albeit a meager one most of the time). So how can we talk about the future of theatre, if we consistently leave out of the discussion (either in content or as participants) the people who actually make theatre happen.
This is baffling considering that well over 80% of my job as an electrician directly relates to the product my theaters put on stage. How is that not relevant? Forever left out of the discussions of the state of theatre is the fact that artisans such as myself are absolutely necessary to the proper functioning of theatre. It is incredibly sad that playwrights and other creatives don't get their financial due. Hell, as an electrician, I am better off, purely as a theatre worker because I don't need another job, outside of theatre, to sustain myself. I even get some benefits (which cause my wages to stagnate, but hey, that's true for everyone). I think the truest fact about the state of not-for-profit theatre today is that too much of the entire structure of not-for-profit theatre is not dedicated to the act of theatrical production. Too many theatres in this country are arts advocacy groups with theatres attached.
TCG does outstanding work as an organization dedicated to understanding the state of not-for-profit theatre in practical terms. Their most recent Theatre Facts broke down the overall budget for all reporting theatres and it is a very interesting chart.
The first thing that strikes me is that it does not break down easily into accounting for the cost of a show (which tells you that the people reading this document didn't need to know what part of the budget goes to production, which is fascinating). A couple things stand out as well. First, theatres spent more on marketing than on physical production (11.8 to 7.9). It costs more to advertise shows than to build sets. Second, and this will surprise precisely no one who has had wrangle a stage into becoming a set, facilities (and insurance, etc) themselves cost more than all physical productions. In many ways, New York's commercial model makes the most sense: be a producing company or be a theater owning company. You can only do both well if you work at enormous economies of scale. Owning your own space, especially if that space needs constant work, is a huge burden. Third, a bare majority (54%) of expenses are related to personnel (theatre is and always has been labor intensive) It is the breakdown of the expenses that is scary. 18.5% of that 54% went to artistic, 13.9% to production, and a whopping 20% of personnel expenses go to the administrative side. Some of those artistic payments must be to designers and directors. If you were to fold those expenditures into a budget for "shows" and include only those relating to actually mounting productions, what does that amount to? A back of the envelope calculation leads to something like 33-39% of expenses actually making it to the stage. It's not surprising then that it feels like production is left out of all these discussions. This is reflected all too often in the physical situation of the theatre. How many of the theatre's employees actually work on the stage, or even near it? How many times have you been in a full staff meeting where it was obvious that you have no contact with over half of the theatre's employees? Is it any wonder that theaters lose their way?
There is a sense in the non-profit world that being like a business is a bad thing, or at least, an irrelevant thing to an arts group, but this is wrong. Arts groups need to be like more like businesses in at least one way: they must learn to focus relentlessly on the product. Marketing will not save you, if you have a bad product. Innovative audience engagement will not work, if you have a bad product on stage. I would argue that the subscription model is deeply flawed because it keeps theatres thinking about the season as the product, rather than each individual show. It is no longer tenable to think this way and every piece of news about single ticket sales proves this point over and over again. The season is not the product, but a product line and each product in the line has to be at a certain level of quality. And yet, production is consistently undervalued and underserved at the macro level. If you want to start thinking about the future of theatre, I would start with the show itself. Like the man said. "The play's the thing."
Sunday, July 1, 2012
What's a Plot Hole Anyway?
Let's just get the spoiler alerts out of the way. I am going to frankly discuss major plot elements of Prometheus and Mass Effect 3. I hope the title of the post has already suggested that I would do this, but you never know with people.
So, why write about plot holes? The occasion for these thoughts comes in the context of BioWare's June 26th release of the extended cut of Mass Effect 3, a move prompted by waves of fan unrest about the original ending. I don't think you can emphasize enough how crazy this is. The average budget for games like Mass Effect starts at $18 million. Mass Effect 2 seems to have cost in excess of $40 million. Forbes reported that BioWare's other big game, a Star Wars MMO called, wait for it, Star Wars: The Old Republic, cost over $200 million. We are talking insane money. It would be like fans forcing George Lucas to reshoot the ending to Revenge of the Sith (you know, if George Lucas gave a crap about what fans think). That is the scale of the revolt over Mass Effect 3's ending. The original ending was so unpopular that many people turned to Indoctrination Theory (that's just one of so very many links, Bing it or Google or whatever neologistic search term works for you) as a way of "making sense" of the ending.
I know that many of you do not give two craps about Mass Effect 3 and its millions of fanatics, but I think this brings up fascinating conundrums with the psychology of narratives. I'll come back to Indoctrination Theory (that's a different link to BioWare's own forums) in a bit, but before I lose all of my audience, let's talk a bit about plot.
The most basic metaphor for plot is that of a continuous line that connects event A with event B. A plot hole can, but does not have to, occur when there is a discontinuity in the line, either a small gap along the line, or the absence of a line altogether. Emotionally and intellectually satisfying plots invoke known sets of rules for cause and effect that are consistently applied over the course of a text (movie, book, game, whatever). That all sounds great in theory, but in practice, two problems occur. The first is that if the line you paint between A and B is too glowing, the plot becomes exceptionally dull. Sure everything is cohesive, coherent, and all that, but it's also too obvious. Games do this all the time (as do movies, of course), but games are enjoyable despite the narrative hand holding because you actually have to do something yourself to move the story along. The immersiveness of the narrative experience makes even the most banal plot interesting (at least, for a time). The second is that, in the most interesting stories, as in real life, the only truly consistent set of rules are those of the physical world, and we don't understand those very well. That means that people behave randomly, or irrationally, that expected and/or probable events don't occur and improbable ones do. This shouldn't really be a surprise because satisfying conclusions to plots involve the overcoming of obstacles and the resolution of conflicts. In writing circles, you will often hear things like "plot is conflict" and "a story where everyone gets exactly what they want is totally and utterly boring." In other words, there will always be discontinuities in good stories. It's a bit like Gödel's incompleteness theorem: in a mathematical system of sufficient power, there will always be a statement that says, in effect, this statement cannot be made in this system (a great book on the subject, if you want to follow up).
So, discontinuities in story are nearly omnipresent because most texts worth talking about avoid the glowing plot line problem and complex plots inevitably leave something out (even in video games that take 35 hours to complete). I'm sure that I haven't said anything that you don't already know. What I find fascinating, is the response to these gaps and discontinuities. When does a gap become a plot hole? I think this is almost entirely bound up in the viewer/reader/player's eyes. Not entirely, because a gap becomes a plot hole when event A and event B aren't related by the same narrative rules at all. Even surrealists like Dali find an underlying set of rules to go along with the regular rules of cause and effect they seem to be breaking. But when you break your own rules (like having a vampire frolic about in daytime even though that should kill them), you have certainly created a plot hole, which is a short hand way of calling something a mistake. It's like a plot typo. This is clearly an error, a mistake, a sign of a lack of quality.
But then there are movies like, I don't know, Prometheus (see what I did there?). There are a lot of things in Prometheus that are simply not explained, but that is not sufficient to call it a plot hole. Is it a plot hole that Weyland and David seem to have already contacted the Engineers, but still somehow utterly failed to understand the message? Is it a plot hole that David still needs to dope one of the scientists with the black stuff to see what happens, even though he knows how to open the canisters and what to expect in them? Does he expect Elizabeth Shaw to have sex and get pregnant with the alien thing? Why exactly does he do it? To me, this is all a bit of a Rorschach test. The gaps are deliberate and explanation is totally lacking. It isn't a plot hole then, nor is it a sign of poor quality, but rather, it's an actual attempt to mess with your mind as you struggle to assemble the pieces. It's more of a carefully drawn dotted line with precisely placed gaps than poor penmanship.
A more glaring example of something like a tradition plot hole happens at the end of Prometheus. An Engineer is taking off with a ship full of biological weapons, and the captain and crew of the science vessel crash into the Engineer to prevent him from escaping. You see the necessity of it, you understand why it is happening, but Sir Ridley didn't spend a whole lot of time developing the idea that the captain would take such action. It feels abrupt as a result. It's a discontinuity again and that raises the possibility of a contradiction in the rules. But since we don't actually get all the information, it is impossible to say whether the rules were contradicted or not, because we don't know the rules and we don't know all the events. It's entirely possible that this is just lazy and sloppy writing, as some believe (Ed. who knew Forbes had all this gaming and movie content, right?), but if you like Sir Ridley and Damon Lindelof (whose work on Lost could fill several more posts about plot holes and rules), then given their track record, it was probably done on purpose and not lazy at all. The difference is essentially one of perspective and it says so much about the nature of plot and perception. And that's why I find the response to Mass Effect 3 so very very interesting.
To be sure, Indoctrination Theory (no need to bother with a link this time) is infuriating as well as fascinating. Without getting too much into the Mass Effect (hereafter, ME because I am lazy) universe, the essence of it is this. The main character of the ME series is Commander Shepard. You have spent the past approximately 100 hours (if you played all three games) working to save the galaxy. You have overcome incredible odds and you stand in this giant spaceship face to face with epic decisions that all end with you dying, but also help you save the rest of the galaxy. You make your choice. You watch the results unfold (including a neat little tag with a character called the Stargazer voiced by none other than Buzz Aldrin) and you feel gipped. Gypped? Cheated, whatever. The choices are crappy. You, I mean, Shepard always ends up dying, and you don't even get to see what happens to the rest of the crew. You spend some time thinking about it and you decide, it's too improbable, large parts of this last conversation don't quite fit. It makes more sense, to you, that offending conversations never actually happened, not about the galaxy anyway; they are a metaphor. Shepard doesn't really make those choices for the whole galaxy, but for him/herself, as they lay dying on the battlefield (in the ME argot, Shepard doesn't just die, but gets harvested by sentient machines in a process called, and I hope you can see this coming, indoctrination).
In short, ME3's ending was so dissatisfying to a large number of people, that they dreamed up a theory that preserved the rules of a science fiction universe as they understood them, that allowed them to ignore the parts of the ending that contained too many discontinuities for them, but in the process sacrificed the entire emotional and narrative of arc of the rest of the series (remember at least 100 hours of gameplay) all in the name of "making sense." (at no point in the series is it every suggested that what you are doing, isn't actually happening, this isn't Silent Hill). That's like re-imagining Return of the Jedi as an hallucination in Luke's mind after Vader hurls him down the shaft into the second Death Star as the Rebellion dies with him just to avoid the chubchub song and Hayden Christensen's ghost. It is absolutely fascinating that in a game where you have seven to ten different races of aliens, faster than light travel, space ships of all shapes and sizes, energy weapons, psychic powers, and fully self-aware AIs, threatened by a race of sentient machines whose sole purpose is to harvest organic life and the part you don't buy into is the explanation of those sentient machines motivations by some kid of energy avatar. To me, this totally brings into question the nature of the phrase "to make sense of." But the power of narrative is such that, thanks to its inherent discontinuities, it is possible to create a completely different set of stories from the voids in the original story thanks to some fundamental urge and subconscious need to order a story into something actually satisfying, at least to you. It's stuff like this that brings me back to literary criticism over and over and over again: it isn't just the content of a work that is an endless source of interest, but the form of it, and the form of the response within ourselves. Hell, at some point, I must have done it as well, told myself an alternate story rather than accept the one I was given. (Hmm. I wonder if I am doing that with Prometheus. Nah, I'm definitely right about that one.) It's all a part of how we take control of stories. Once they're out there, they doesn't belong to its creators anymore. And we do some crazy stuff with them, don't we?
So, why write about plot holes? The occasion for these thoughts comes in the context of BioWare's June 26th release of the extended cut of Mass Effect 3, a move prompted by waves of fan unrest about the original ending. I don't think you can emphasize enough how crazy this is. The average budget for games like Mass Effect starts at $18 million. Mass Effect 2 seems to have cost in excess of $40 million. Forbes reported that BioWare's other big game, a Star Wars MMO called, wait for it, Star Wars: The Old Republic, cost over $200 million. We are talking insane money. It would be like fans forcing George Lucas to reshoot the ending to Revenge of the Sith (you know, if George Lucas gave a crap about what fans think). That is the scale of the revolt over Mass Effect 3's ending. The original ending was so unpopular that many people turned to Indoctrination Theory (that's just one of so very many links, Bing it or Google or whatever neologistic search term works for you) as a way of "making sense" of the ending.
I know that many of you do not give two craps about Mass Effect 3 and its millions of fanatics, but I think this brings up fascinating conundrums with the psychology of narratives. I'll come back to Indoctrination Theory (that's a different link to BioWare's own forums) in a bit, but before I lose all of my audience, let's talk a bit about plot.
The most basic metaphor for plot is that of a continuous line that connects event A with event B. A plot hole can, but does not have to, occur when there is a discontinuity in the line, either a small gap along the line, or the absence of a line altogether. Emotionally and intellectually satisfying plots invoke known sets of rules for cause and effect that are consistently applied over the course of a text (movie, book, game, whatever). That all sounds great in theory, but in practice, two problems occur. The first is that if the line you paint between A and B is too glowing, the plot becomes exceptionally dull. Sure everything is cohesive, coherent, and all that, but it's also too obvious. Games do this all the time (as do movies, of course), but games are enjoyable despite the narrative hand holding because you actually have to do something yourself to move the story along. The immersiveness of the narrative experience makes even the most banal plot interesting (at least, for a time). The second is that, in the most interesting stories, as in real life, the only truly consistent set of rules are those of the physical world, and we don't understand those very well. That means that people behave randomly, or irrationally, that expected and/or probable events don't occur and improbable ones do. This shouldn't really be a surprise because satisfying conclusions to plots involve the overcoming of obstacles and the resolution of conflicts. In writing circles, you will often hear things like "plot is conflict" and "a story where everyone gets exactly what they want is totally and utterly boring." In other words, there will always be discontinuities in good stories. It's a bit like Gödel's incompleteness theorem: in a mathematical system of sufficient power, there will always be a statement that says, in effect, this statement cannot be made in this system (a great book on the subject, if you want to follow up).
So, discontinuities in story are nearly omnipresent because most texts worth talking about avoid the glowing plot line problem and complex plots inevitably leave something out (even in video games that take 35 hours to complete). I'm sure that I haven't said anything that you don't already know. What I find fascinating, is the response to these gaps and discontinuities. When does a gap become a plot hole? I think this is almost entirely bound up in the viewer/reader/player's eyes. Not entirely, because a gap becomes a plot hole when event A and event B aren't related by the same narrative rules at all. Even surrealists like Dali find an underlying set of rules to go along with the regular rules of cause and effect they seem to be breaking. But when you break your own rules (like having a vampire frolic about in daytime even though that should kill them), you have certainly created a plot hole, which is a short hand way of calling something a mistake. It's like a plot typo. This is clearly an error, a mistake, a sign of a lack of quality.
But then there are movies like, I don't know, Prometheus (see what I did there?). There are a lot of things in Prometheus that are simply not explained, but that is not sufficient to call it a plot hole. Is it a plot hole that Weyland and David seem to have already contacted the Engineers, but still somehow utterly failed to understand the message? Is it a plot hole that David still needs to dope one of the scientists with the black stuff to see what happens, even though he knows how to open the canisters and what to expect in them? Does he expect Elizabeth Shaw to have sex and get pregnant with the alien thing? Why exactly does he do it? To me, this is all a bit of a Rorschach test. The gaps are deliberate and explanation is totally lacking. It isn't a plot hole then, nor is it a sign of poor quality, but rather, it's an actual attempt to mess with your mind as you struggle to assemble the pieces. It's more of a carefully drawn dotted line with precisely placed gaps than poor penmanship.
A more glaring example of something like a tradition plot hole happens at the end of Prometheus. An Engineer is taking off with a ship full of biological weapons, and the captain and crew of the science vessel crash into the Engineer to prevent him from escaping. You see the necessity of it, you understand why it is happening, but Sir Ridley didn't spend a whole lot of time developing the idea that the captain would take such action. It feels abrupt as a result. It's a discontinuity again and that raises the possibility of a contradiction in the rules. But since we don't actually get all the information, it is impossible to say whether the rules were contradicted or not, because we don't know the rules and we don't know all the events. It's entirely possible that this is just lazy and sloppy writing, as some believe (Ed. who knew Forbes had all this gaming and movie content, right?), but if you like Sir Ridley and Damon Lindelof (whose work on Lost could fill several more posts about plot holes and rules), then given their track record, it was probably done on purpose and not lazy at all. The difference is essentially one of perspective and it says so much about the nature of plot and perception. And that's why I find the response to Mass Effect 3 so very very interesting.
To be sure, Indoctrination Theory (no need to bother with a link this time) is infuriating as well as fascinating. Without getting too much into the Mass Effect (hereafter, ME because I am lazy) universe, the essence of it is this. The main character of the ME series is Commander Shepard. You have spent the past approximately 100 hours (if you played all three games) working to save the galaxy. You have overcome incredible odds and you stand in this giant spaceship face to face with epic decisions that all end with you dying, but also help you save the rest of the galaxy. You make your choice. You watch the results unfold (including a neat little tag with a character called the Stargazer voiced by none other than Buzz Aldrin) and you feel gipped. Gypped? Cheated, whatever. The choices are crappy. You, I mean, Shepard always ends up dying, and you don't even get to see what happens to the rest of the crew. You spend some time thinking about it and you decide, it's too improbable, large parts of this last conversation don't quite fit. It makes more sense, to you, that offending conversations never actually happened, not about the galaxy anyway; they are a metaphor. Shepard doesn't really make those choices for the whole galaxy, but for him/herself, as they lay dying on the battlefield (in the ME argot, Shepard doesn't just die, but gets harvested by sentient machines in a process called, and I hope you can see this coming, indoctrination).
In short, ME3's ending was so dissatisfying to a large number of people, that they dreamed up a theory that preserved the rules of a science fiction universe as they understood them, that allowed them to ignore the parts of the ending that contained too many discontinuities for them, but in the process sacrificed the entire emotional and narrative of arc of the rest of the series (remember at least 100 hours of gameplay) all in the name of "making sense." (at no point in the series is it every suggested that what you are doing, isn't actually happening, this isn't Silent Hill). That's like re-imagining Return of the Jedi as an hallucination in Luke's mind after Vader hurls him down the shaft into the second Death Star as the Rebellion dies with him just to avoid the chubchub song and Hayden Christensen's ghost. It is absolutely fascinating that in a game where you have seven to ten different races of aliens, faster than light travel, space ships of all shapes and sizes, energy weapons, psychic powers, and fully self-aware AIs, threatened by a race of sentient machines whose sole purpose is to harvest organic life and the part you don't buy into is the explanation of those sentient machines motivations by some kid of energy avatar. To me, this totally brings into question the nature of the phrase "to make sense of." But the power of narrative is such that, thanks to its inherent discontinuities, it is possible to create a completely different set of stories from the voids in the original story thanks to some fundamental urge and subconscious need to order a story into something actually satisfying, at least to you. It's stuff like this that brings me back to literary criticism over and over and over again: it isn't just the content of a work that is an endless source of interest, but the form of it, and the form of the response within ourselves. Hell, at some point, I must have done it as well, told myself an alternate story rather than accept the one I was given. (Hmm. I wonder if I am doing that with Prometheus. Nah, I'm definitely right about that one.) It's all a part of how we take control of stories. Once they're out there, they doesn't belong to its creators anymore. And we do some crazy stuff with them, don't we?
Monday, June 11, 2012
Prometheus: A 2001 Moment in 2012
I'm going to go whole hog here and say that Ridley Scott's Prometheus has given us the most divisive and possibly brilliant (but then again maybe not . . .) science fiction film in recent memory. The only movie that comes close, off the top of my head, is the brilliant District 9, but that one probably won't get mentioned in anyone's film classes ten years from now. I think Prometheus will.
A quick scan of the existing reviews of the film produces a surprise for me. Nearly all of them are firmly planted in the meh zone: lots of disappointment with character choices, admiration for the heft of the subject matter (hint: it's not xenomorphs), and awe at the technical mastery of the photography. On that subject, hopefully, Sir Ridley's gorgeous and wildly understated 3D will become a standard bearer for the technology. 3D at the movies is a good thing when the goal of the 3D is to generate the presence of the material and it doesn't go out of its way to throw an axe at you or swing you from rooftop to rooftop. 3D is better than 2D for the same reason that analog audio is better than digital: it's how we see. There will always be a place for 2D photography because of the compositional possibilities and the sheer amount of style you can wring out a world that looks 3D, but it isn't. Wes Anderson has made a career out of it in just the last 15 years. The great lesson from Sir Ridley and (No One Will Ever Call Me Sir) James Cameron is that 3D works best when it is shot that way from the get go. Conversions are evil and awful. Too bad Prometheus lost to Madagascar 3D at the box office. I think the lesson of that will not be lost on the studios, to our great misfortune as moviegoers.
The admiration that critics express for the ideas that Prometheus grapples with reminds me of Chris Rock's bit about Colin Powell from way back when. "He speaks so well, he speaks so well." They used to say. "That's what you say about retarded people, who can talk." When a movie critic writs: "Well at least he is dealing with some heavy ideas" that critic means, "I don't think he dealth with those ideas very well, but he's so famous, successful, and important that my publisher won't let me write that." The overwhelming voice I am hearing about Prometheus is disappointment, mostly because of the characters. And make no mistake, it's understandable. The scene at the dig site in Scotland where Noomi Rapace and whatever that guy's name is discover the glyphs that lead them to Weyland lasts all of 5 minutes and most of that is staring at aerial shots of the pretty Scottish mountains, not listening to either them explain what the scratchings on the cave wall mean. The movie jumps immediately to space without any explanation or elaboration of how this cave painting leads a mega-corporation to drop a trillion dollars on a space mission to an unknown and possibly non-existent planet with no guarantee of success. Why didn't Ridley just drop us in space to start with? Good question. This kind of shorthand (the less generous might call it laziness) is ever present. Characters jump moods with little or no explanation or process. The choices and moods aren't random, it's just that we aren't treated to the entire chain of events between those choices. Normally, a film will walk us through all the points in between the geologist being calm and surveying and stuff to flipping out over a room full of dead aliens. This film does not. But wouldn't you just start flipping out? I kind of liked it because I think it is of a piece with really big idea that lies at the center of the movie: "What the hell is happening and why?"
When you are dealing with the possibility that life on Earth was the result of biological warfare (or not), maybe understanding the behavior of the geologist and his redshirt biologist pal, who are going to do what redshirts do, isn't that necessary. They don't understand what's happening or why life exists, when they bother to think about it, so why should we understand them? I think that bafflement with fundamental existential questions is what the movie is all about. The main gist of the mission of Rapace's Ellen Shaw is to discover how and why humanity exists and the movie is a process of discovering that she isn't even asking the right questions and that she is not equipped to deal with the answers she is given to questions she didn't ask (also, she gets implanted with an alien, sort of). I left the movie certain that the openness and the open endedness of the film would engender anger among the wider population. Ridley Scott just gave us a movie that sort of settled an open question from a thirty year old movie by asking a much bigger set of questions without bothering to answer any of them. What the hell?! I left the movie knowing much less than when I entered it. I haven't seen the anger that I expected, more of a collective "Meh, it's got pretty pictures though." Still, I can't help but think that Prometheus is a movie that creates an itch that can't be scratched, that leaves you wondering about what it meant long after you have left the theater and the pretty pictures behind. That's why I think it might just be as good as 2001. It's a perfect demonstration of how to ask big questions and to not settle for cheap easy answers because it's entirely possible that there might not be any answers at all.
I think maybe I need to see it again . . .
A quick scan of the existing reviews of the film produces a surprise for me. Nearly all of them are firmly planted in the meh zone: lots of disappointment with character choices, admiration for the heft of the subject matter (hint: it's not xenomorphs), and awe at the technical mastery of the photography. On that subject, hopefully, Sir Ridley's gorgeous and wildly understated 3D will become a standard bearer for the technology. 3D at the movies is a good thing when the goal of the 3D is to generate the presence of the material and it doesn't go out of its way to throw an axe at you or swing you from rooftop to rooftop. 3D is better than 2D for the same reason that analog audio is better than digital: it's how we see. There will always be a place for 2D photography because of the compositional possibilities and the sheer amount of style you can wring out a world that looks 3D, but it isn't. Wes Anderson has made a career out of it in just the last 15 years. The great lesson from Sir Ridley and (No One Will Ever Call Me Sir) James Cameron is that 3D works best when it is shot that way from the get go. Conversions are evil and awful. Too bad Prometheus lost to Madagascar 3D at the box office. I think the lesson of that will not be lost on the studios, to our great misfortune as moviegoers.
The admiration that critics express for the ideas that Prometheus grapples with reminds me of Chris Rock's bit about Colin Powell from way back when. "He speaks so well, he speaks so well." They used to say. "That's what you say about retarded people, who can talk." When a movie critic writs: "Well at least he is dealing with some heavy ideas" that critic means, "I don't think he dealth with those ideas very well, but he's so famous, successful, and important that my publisher won't let me write that." The overwhelming voice I am hearing about Prometheus is disappointment, mostly because of the characters. And make no mistake, it's understandable. The scene at the dig site in Scotland where Noomi Rapace and whatever that guy's name is discover the glyphs that lead them to Weyland lasts all of 5 minutes and most of that is staring at aerial shots of the pretty Scottish mountains, not listening to either them explain what the scratchings on the cave wall mean. The movie jumps immediately to space without any explanation or elaboration of how this cave painting leads a mega-corporation to drop a trillion dollars on a space mission to an unknown and possibly non-existent planet with no guarantee of success. Why didn't Ridley just drop us in space to start with? Good question. This kind of shorthand (the less generous might call it laziness) is ever present. Characters jump moods with little or no explanation or process. The choices and moods aren't random, it's just that we aren't treated to the entire chain of events between those choices. Normally, a film will walk us through all the points in between the geologist being calm and surveying and stuff to flipping out over a room full of dead aliens. This film does not. But wouldn't you just start flipping out? I kind of liked it because I think it is of a piece with really big idea that lies at the center of the movie: "What the hell is happening and why?"
When you are dealing with the possibility that life on Earth was the result of biological warfare (or not), maybe understanding the behavior of the geologist and his redshirt biologist pal, who are going to do what redshirts do, isn't that necessary. They don't understand what's happening or why life exists, when they bother to think about it, so why should we understand them? I think that bafflement with fundamental existential questions is what the movie is all about. The main gist of the mission of Rapace's Ellen Shaw is to discover how and why humanity exists and the movie is a process of discovering that she isn't even asking the right questions and that she is not equipped to deal with the answers she is given to questions she didn't ask (also, she gets implanted with an alien, sort of). I left the movie certain that the openness and the open endedness of the film would engender anger among the wider population. Ridley Scott just gave us a movie that sort of settled an open question from a thirty year old movie by asking a much bigger set of questions without bothering to answer any of them. What the hell?! I left the movie knowing much less than when I entered it. I haven't seen the anger that I expected, more of a collective "Meh, it's got pretty pictures though." Still, I can't help but think that Prometheus is a movie that creates an itch that can't be scratched, that leaves you wondering about what it meant long after you have left the theater and the pretty pictures behind. That's why I think it might just be as good as 2001. It's a perfect demonstration of how to ask big questions and to not settle for cheap easy answers because it's entirely possible that there might not be any answers at all.
I think maybe I need to see it again . . .
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
The Parable of the Bricklayer
Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.
Once there was a man with a garden. He looked out on his garden and loved it. The sun rose and the sun set on this garden and the man could not help but love it. One day, while considering his garden, he realized that something disturbed him: he could see land that was not his garden, which could not compare with the wondrous beauty he had created in his own. The man thought to himself "I am a man of wealth and taste. I know another who will understand this problem and help to solve it." So the next day, he spoke to an architect. "I love my garden," he said. "I love to consider its beauty. But I wish to shut out that which is not my garden for it is not beautiful. Can you help me?"
The architect had eyes to see and agreed that the garden was indeed very beautiful. He was wise and understood what had to be done. He agreed to the task and went away for some days. When he returned, he had a drawing of the man's garden. The man was not pleased. “I already know what my garden looks like!” he said. The architect was patient and instructed the man to look again. The man looked and he saw that it was only his garden and done so cleverly that instead of a wall, he saw the completion of his garden. The man saw the architect's wisdom and took pride in hiring him. "Let it be so," he told the architect.
The architect was troubled for he knew that no one had ever done anything like the wall he had drawn. He was downcast at the thought that it could not be done so he sought the counsel of others, never disclosing his doubts to the man of wealth. His wise friends solved told of a fabulous bricklayer, the finest they had ever seen. He could make this wall happen. If he is so wonderful, wondered the architect, why isn't he a mason? That is not for us to say, his friends said. See him. He can help you. So the architect went to see the bricklayer.
The bricklayer was a man in love with beauty. He did not want to build just any walls. He built what he must to keep his family fed, but his heart was not in love with walls, but with great walls, challenging walls. His family did not suffer, but he would not become a mason. When the architect arrived and showed him the beautiful drawing of the beautiful garden, the bricklayer knew at once that this would be the greatest thing he had ever done and that it could not be done the way this man had drawn it. But he held his tongue, so great was his desire to build this wall. He loved the idea of this wall, so the bricklayer kept quiet. He had not worked in some time and he wanted this wall from this strange man. So he agreed that he would build the perfect wall for the man of wealth and taste's exquisite garden.
Work began, much to the delight of the man of wealth. He stared at the picture the architect had drawn him and considered the work in his garden. Things were going well, even the bricklayer agreed. He could see the problems that would soon come, that the stone and the brick would not look or be as the architect had drawn them. But work was going well, so he kept quiet. Eventually, it was too much, the work had gone too far and the bricklayer could not keep silent any longer. He chose his words carefully. "This part of the wall cannot be like this," he said to the architect. "Why not?" asked the architect. The bricklayer could talk of stone and how it wanted to be and strength and how to make the wall great, but he could not find the words for the architect. He remained silent. "Think about it." said the architect.
The bricklayer did not like it. He did not sleep. He thought about it. The next day, he said. "It cannot be done." "But--" "--something very much like it can be done." And he spoke in the architect's language, haltingly and not as well, for he could not draw in words or on paper as the architect had done. But even the architect could see what the bricklayer meant. "Agreed," he said "Let it be so." And the worked continued this way for some time. Problems arose and the bricklayer and the architect would cajole and argue and wheedle and plead and dance and work would continue.
But the bricklayer was troubled for he had never said what he wanted to say, never spoke of the entrance to the wall, the arch of the wall, for this part truly was impossible. The bricklayer thought if he could consider it for as long as possible, he could make it work. He thought “Perhaps if I do my best and it fails, they will see that it cannot be done. We understand each other now.” For the bricklayer had spent a great deal of time with the man of wealth and they seemed like friends. The man had even sent gifts to his family.
So the time came to complete the wall and the beautiful arch that would make it whole and it went exactly as the bricklayer had expected. They built it as best they could, but it would not hold. The architect and the man of wealth were furious. "I thought you were the best!" said the architect. "It cannot be done," replied the bricklayer. "I thought you loved beauty!" raged the architect. “It cannot be done," said the bricklayer in shame and agony. He was unhappy to find that the architect and the man of wealth were not hist friends and they would not listen as he hoped they would. "It will be done." they insisted. "It cannot be done." "You cannot do it," they said. "If you wish to hire someone else to finish this, you can. It cannot be done," said the bricklayer. "If I hire someone else, then I will take your pay and give it all to whoever finishes my wall," said the man of wealth. There was silence. The bricklayer said "I will see it done." He trudged home.
The bricklayer knew that his plan had failed. What they asked was impossible and that he could no longer ask their permission to change it or make it seem like it was their idea. He stayed up late into the night and finally came upon a solution, a devious solution. It could be done and it would look like they wanted it to, but it would be unlike anything he had ever built. He forbad them the use of the garden during his time so that he could finish it. And when it was done and everything held up and it was beautiful, the friendly looks returned. The man of wealth handed the bricklayer his payment and it was more than the bricklayer had ever known. It would feed his family, it would raise his children. It was his proudest moment. And then the man of wealth paid the architect ten times what he had paid the bricklayer. The bricklayer swallowed his tongue. And then the man of wealth heaped praise and honor on the man who had done the impossible: the architect. Then they left the bricklayer with his pay and joined a party the man of wealth called in the architect's honor.
The bricklayer went home and considered the meaning of these events, of what he had done and what had been done to him, since he had done the impossible thing. What the architect done? He had put pen to paper! I laid the bricks, I made it happen, thought the bricklayer. His eyes were darkened and his days were bleak and bitter, though his family did not suffer, indeed his family was happy. He returned to his old walls because he was a practical man and a man of habit. But these walls filled him with revulsion. He had known beauty and he had known greatness and these walls could never make him happy. He knew that he would not be happy again. The bricklayer spent his days avoiding the thought of the architect and the beautiful garden. On the most painful days, when he could not forget, he dreamed of what foul imprecations he would hurl on the man who had stolen his shining moment, who had received all of the honor and glory for the greatest work any bricklayer had ever done. He wondered why he should not be an architect. But in his heart, the bricklayer knew this was folly and he would return to laying his brick.
And one day, the architect returned. "Great news!" He said, "This will be the greatest wall you've ever built." The bricklayer was silent. "What's wrong?" asked the architect "This is an even greater wall than your last. Look at this beautiful drawing!" And the bricklayer did. And he was silent. "Tell me, will you do it?" cried the architect. "You are the only one who can build this wall. Will you do it?" The bricklayer thought about all that he wanted to say, all the terrible, impossible things he wanted to scream at the architect thief. He was shaking with the rage he felt at this man and his pen and paper. And when he opened his mouth to speak, the bricklayer, said only "Yes."
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