From journeys to journalism
what the hell is going on here -- Think of the kinds of awful discussions cursed by the phrase, "well, in the original..."
Think of the kinds of awful discussions cursed by the phrase, "well, in the original..."
Somehow, every single adapted piece of fiction is now a slave to a metric of fidelity which is laundered as valuable without even bothering to ask if the source material was worth honoring in full. This problem now goes well beyond adaptations, and appears to be presently infesting every form of media.
Suspension of disbelief must currently be the most dire sin in fiction. Presently, it feels like any given piece of fiction is trapped in a dance between remaining fantastical while also explaining the pillars it stands on in order to remain "grounded" to some hard background. Think about the last time you engaged a piece of media that did not have, god help me for saying this loathsome word, lore.1
Now, it seems that any given fiction is treated as if it were a view into another physical reality, complete with an entire chronology and set of physics. There are no longer simply stories—what we have now are brief accountings within entire universes.
Human beings have a deep-seated etiological reflex: if you see a banana peel in a trash can, you will immediately guess a banana was eaten, and then start working the details out as far back as you care to guess. If someone you trust hands you a glass of clear, cool water, you can properly assume this is clean and good water safe for drinking from a potable source. At no point in these circumstances are you thrown into despair or confusion regarding the event you encounter. Even though both of these circumstances point to real, tangible happenings which still have occurred even if you stop believing in them, there is no need for further exploration once they have passed.
Think about grimdark, an aesthetic mode presupposing a reality so hopeless and brutal that the world itself is muted or reduced to a palate of mud and blood. In a grimdark world, you understand that existence is a torturous process and cannot be restrained within its bookends. It is presented in this way to appear more "real," by virtue of being analogous to a depressive perspective of the world we live in. When you encounter grimdark, it does not present the adventures of characters: when you boot that game, open that book, or start that movie, you are not enjoying a story, you are instead watching the unfolding of events of a history2.
Even the hyper-violent action movies of the 80's and 90's operated in worlds of full color, confident in their spectacle, never needing to explain or justify themselves. The most lurid fantasy would merely suggest the great Goings On of its fictional past without the pathological need to illustrate. Now, we have entire standing armies of exegetes, ready to interpret and corroborate the events of a story with its lore.
This move isn't limited to fiction, as we can observe by doing any mediated activity between people. We are constantly impressed upon to operate in a view I'm going to call "authenticationist materialism." By materialism, I mean a view that reality is made of hard facts based only in observable tangibles. By authenticationalist, I mean this inexhaustible process by which truth of a matter is only established by subjecting the relation of one thing to another to a process that verifies the relationship in some hard fact.3
This metrified, quantified worldview completely obliterates a variety of natural intuitions and habits. One does not "trust but verify" in this view—one now "trusts in verification." This order of relations is pervasive and reorders every relationship within its purview according to its rules. Proximally, we can observe how it has reordered our relationship with fiction (and maybe art in general)—there is no trust left by which to suspend disbelief. Now, instead of threads of story, entire worlds must be cohered out of the same bullshit of life: history, dirt, and the filler-muck of so many days where nothing notable happens.
To illustrate without a clear explanation, now, is to set something upon empty air and claim it supported by a skyhook. Any waters treaded are in the shallows, well mapped and alien to profundity. But think of what an earthbound imagination is missing. Think of what it is like to imagine impossibilities without need for explanation. Can you imagine walking off a scarp and suddenly plunging into the depths? Are you strong enough to keep going forward on your own without the clear comfort of a sprawling bank? Do you think you would prefer things to be that way?
Can you imagine a radical mystery anymore?
This piece originated as a digression in a piece I was writing over the lore in Destiny The Game Two, ironically enough.
“…history is just journalism, and you know how reliable that is.”
The etiologist in you will begin to work out why this view developed and became the standard operating assumption in so much of our lives. I don't care to go into it at this moment, but by all means, have a sit with the idea.