Mainstream vs. Indies

Towards the end of my high school years, I spent a lot of time waffling between which major I wanted to devote myself to for the foreseeable next four years, even as I was in the midst of searching for colleges and universities to submit my applications to.  Illustration? Creative writing? Film?

Once I had settled on filmmaking as my primary passion, it was fairly easy to narrow down which colleges I wanted to attend: there were only two places I could go, at that point, or so I believed.

L.A. or NYC.

New York, to me, seemed the obvious choice. I had grown up in Upstate New York. Living in the city would put me a train ride away from family in case of dire emergency, put also far enough away, and in diverse enough an environment that I was guaranteed to get a full and rich experience of what it is like to live out among the world.  I no longer wanted to live in a bubble.

At the time, New York also seemed to me the more attainable choice, especially in terms of career. I knew that New York was becoming known as the mecca for the independent film industry, an industry that I felt like would probably be much easier to break into than Hollywood.

I had chosen New York has my hub for this reason, and yet I still found myself taken back, at first, when I first came into contact with the negative attitude some of my fellow classmates and professors harbored towards "the mainstream industry".

I'm not entirely unsympathetic to their views.  If I, too, didn't think Hollywood was flawed and somewhat dysfunctional, I wouldn't have come to New York.  But I did not come to New York out of animosity for Hollywood, and after almost three years attending school here, my taste in film still has not changed.  If you asked me what some of my favorite films are, I would still answer Inception, The Lego Movie, or maybe even Sherlock Holmes.  The only difference is, I now would never announce this preference in a class setting.

I am not trying to discount the indie film industry.  But there seems to be a bias among amateur/student filmmakers - in my own personal experience - that Hollywood is no longer producing good, authentic narrative.  If it ever was at all.

I can see where this perspective is coming from. As much as I love book-to-film adaptations, and some of those big movie franchises like Marvel, originality in Hollywood is on the drop, and its heartily disappointing. The top-grossing films are all adaptations or reboots at this point, with a few exceptions.  With such a drought of originality, it's understandable that people would begin to covet nontraditional narrative, or even put aside narrative altogether.

There is a lot of merit in nontraditional narrative, and experimental film, and I've thoroughly enjoyed such films I've come across.  I've also thoroughly disliked some of the more "independent" content I've come across.  And therein lies the problem.  This new wave of bias for film, though seemingly stemming from a thirst for fresh and original content, often completely discounts an entire category of film.  By dismissing traditional narrative as hackneyed and stale, we close ourselves off to a selection of content which is rich in story and still capable of sparking new ideas and internal movements.

I have no illusions that Captain America: The Winter Soldier or any of the other superhero blockbusters to come out this past decade are, in any way, new or original.  They're reboots of a reboot.  The Conjuring or You're Next aren't films that have revolutionized the horror genre.  But they're still films that I have enjoyed, and films that millions others have enjoyed, and, like me, could probably discuss with you for hours.  Why?

The mistake of Hollywood isn't with its method of storytelling.  Its error is the same as the film students who praise indie, while simultaneously dismissing the legitimacy of mainstream cinema.  The fault lies in disclaiming the potential that mainstream media has to convey complex, and sometimes even disturbing concepts, that we have been wrestling with for centuries.

Hollywood's mechanism for telling stories may not be subtle, nor as artful as some of the fantastic filmmakers who have broken out into the independent film industry.  But Hollywood's stories can be just as cathartic, and just as profound.  And even more importantly: they're accessible.  Not just in the physical sense - having millions to spend on production and distribution puts Hollywood rather unjustly ahead of the curb, in that sense - but a general audience is more like to engage with a story they feel is approachable.  Sometimes that means being more familiar; more mundane.

There is a lot to respect and enjoy about intellectual cinema, but the common misconception is that complex ideas must be communicated through art in a complex way in order to be fully understood.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  As artists, by engaging with intricate and complicated ideas, and expressing them through modes of storytelling that use tropes and themes that are familiar to all, we do not dumb these ideas down: rather, we put them into layman's terms.  We make them available; reachable to a much larger audience.

Intellect does not belong to the intellectual.  Anyone is capable of engaging with complex concepts, because everyone in themselves feels things complexly.  Watching Captain America may not inspire the casual viewer to write epithets on the complexity of screenwriting or explore such themes of modern conspiracy and mistrust in their own work.  But a casual viewer may experience the same powerful catharsis and subtlety of emotion watching a blockbuster as does an avid consumer of Wes Anderson or Spike Jonze.  What is mundane, is also intimate.  And what is intimate, is also effective.

Intimacy in storytelling, and especially in film, is something to aspire to.  As filmmakers, as storytellers, we can aspire to intimacy without closing ourselves off to traditional modes of storytelling.  Shakespeare understood that.  A lot of the "greats" did.

Originality in thought is to be applauded, but it should not be the standard we hold storytelling to.  Whether content has effect on its consumer is the principle that is most essential to story.

And so, in the war of mainstream versus indies, nobody wins.  No matter what industry you belong to, there will always be content creators who move audiences, and inspire in them new concepts and emotion.  If we are to motivate further generations of creatives, we must not invalidate or discourage effective narrative - however it comes to us, and from wherever it may arrive.

Butterfly Effect

As a science fiction, fantasy, and horror author, I spend a lot of my time creating and consuming content that hovers just outside our scope of "reality".  As much as I cannot precisely relate to space expeditions, zombie apocalypses, or the danger of dragon's gold, there is something intrinsically attractive about the features of these genres.

But after this week, I've been thinking that a lot of that attraction might be sublime.

You've probably heard of "the butterfly effect".  One butterfly, flapping it's wings, can cause a hurricane in another part of the world, and all that malarkey.  I don't disapprove of the theory; I think it has a lot of merit.  However, I've become a little neutral to it because, like Einstein's theory of relativity, or "chaos theory", "butterfly effect" is one of those semi-scientific terms that will get thrown around in every cliched horror, sci-fi, or general fiction known to man - usually by writers or directors who haven't actually deeply studied these theories for themselves.

I'm guilty of this as well.

The truth is, there's an entire valley between considering a phenomenon, and experiencing it.

A couple of days ago, I was sitting in a lecture hall, stressing about the day's to do's.  In my mind, I was debating whether I should visit the Student Accounts office first, or go and get my morning coffee, before hurrying along to work, afraid I wouldn't have enough time.  By a gracious miracle, after his film screening was done, our professor let us out nearly a whole hour early.  I hurried along to go get my accounts sorted out, then made my way swiftly down 23rd to grab me some Dunkin.

I was nearly to my dormitory.  As I paced down the sidewalk, before me there was a massive crash; everyone around jumped up, and a din of concerned shouts arose.  Ten feet in front of me, the flattened remains of a mildewed air conditioner lay pancaked on the ground, just a couple inches away from where one of the loafers had been sitting in his usual chair.

Everyone around me stopped in their tracks, reeling.  I don't think much of a sound escaped from me at that moment, not much more than a breathed, "Jesus Christ."  We all looked up at the building before us, unable to see where things had gone wrong, as people became to exclaim that the AC had almost hit that man.  After a few baited moments, I walked out onto the street and made my way around that stretch of sidewalk, continuing on to Dunkin as though this was common occurrence.  For the rest of the day, my hands shook with the excess of caffeine or adrenaline - I'll never know which.

I didn't feel as though I'd been in any real danger of anything but watching a man get brutally killed, but somehow that was quite enough to unnerve me for the rest of the day.  I thought about how easily my plans had changed that morning, in order to get me to that place in time, with a full view of someone's near death experience.  Ordinarily, I think we all regard our decisions as somewhat concrete.  Our desires don't often change, and so we tend to think of our path as somewhat preordained - by us.

For the past couple of weeks, Sony's Until Dawn horror survival video game has been sweeping the Internet, and I've been steadily watching its progress as many content creators on Youtube began uploading their playthroughs of the game.  It's one of those few games that has been a rare treat to the gaming community; it falls into the genre of games which are entirely choice-based, so that no one playthrough is exactly the same as any other.  The player is constantly presented with choices for the characters that may be seemingly arbitrary, but may have a massive effect on the story later down the line - especially since it's a horror survival.  It's the kind of game that has many alternate endings, instead of just one or two.  Until Dawn isn't the first game to rely on a choice mechanic and QTEs, but it is one of the first games I've been privy to which makes direct and frequent references to "the butterfly effect" in regards to it's choice mechanic.  The insinuation is never accidental, or just in subtext.  "Butterfly effect" is constantly referred to in Until Dawn's game dialogue and game features.

I'd always sort of regarded Until Dawn's butterfly effect spiel as somewhat hackneyed, for reasons I've previously mentioned.  As a study, it's common applications to everyday life had seemed to me fairly obvious.  Yes, clearly it is possible that something insignificant I do today could wind up effecting myself or someone else significantly years down the line - most of us acknowledge that life is unpredictable in that way.  But after this experience, I think I've been using this line of thought as a sort of comfort.  We all know that it is much easier to dismiss unsettling thoughts when their effect lies on a distant horizon, a date undetermined; it's easier to blame these effects on forces outside of our control that way.

But, though this line of thought isn't revolutionary, it turns out that the decisions we make in the now can have startling effects to our present.  Most of us acknowledge that time is fluid; the future is not set.  It's intriguing to consider.  But terrifying in context.

That is the attraction of chaos theory in fiction.  Even as creatures which create and consume meaning, we have trouble visualizing the sublime force that is "time and space".  These rare occurrences - near death experiences, tragedies, catastrophic events - which many of us witness primarily in fiction bring us a little bit closer to that understanding.

But what I've come to understand, is that visualizing a concept of time is not merely fascinating; it is horrifying.  Nothing is more sublime, nor more petrifying, than standing before an uncontrollable, unmovable force.  And unlike a hurricane, a zombie apocalypse, or a great sea monster, time is not something that can be made into just a fiction.  It is our reality.

And there's no escaping it.