Back from the Brink

Oh yeah, I have a blog. I guess I should update it.

I've been incredibly drained lately, and I can't seem to figure out why. I'm worried that it might be the wearying hangover of indulging too much in my bloated and unwieldy mythology. Perhaps my brain has become so saturated with the desperate impossibility of turning my inner world into a full-time proposition that the remaining gorged pink mess is slowly suffocating my will to live. Faced with no escape from perpetual escapism, I'm now drowning somehow in the epic failure of my obsessive and unforgiving imagination. Or, more likely, I was bitten by a tick and have Lyme disease. I really hope that's what it is. I'm kind of obsessed with insects, and having such an intimate relationship with one would be pretty satisfying.

Anyway, before I die (or fall asleep forever), I'd like some opinions on whether fiction is a good idea or not. I go back and forth between the two camps - that good fiction can transport you to another world of ideas, perspectives and adventure, or that fiction is fun for little kids but otherwise pretty self-indulgent and irrelevant to the concerns of money and life and stuff adults are meant to think about all the time if they hope to retire / buy a house. This isn't an especially original debate, and I could fill my gullet with it by perusing Yahoo! user-groups if I so chose, but I'm actually not really interested in that question. At all. In fact, I don't know if I really buy that that debate even exists. Sorry I brought it up. Let me start over.

Obviously there is fiction out there that's meant for kids and undiscerning escapists, and this can take the form of genre novels or TV shows or movies or whatever. People don't really read anymore, so let's lump video games in there too. I think people used to be interested in "serious" fiction as an extended thought experiment, or applied poetry - the works of the Greats are all studies in language, classical philosophy and morality. But those topics are pretty much covered now, and so modern literature, or post-modern literature, or post-literature...whatever...books written in the past twenty years that do have swear words but don't have vampires, those books are left with a pretty uncertain place in our culture. I've tried getting into them, and they tend to be about nothing, except for maybe the wisp of an experience. They're fun sometimes, but they're not very relevant to my life.

I would bet that most people read a lot more non-fiction than fiction these days because it's okay to care about it, because it actually exists. Documentaries are quickly catching up with traditional narratives in the box office, real-life blogs dominate the Internet, and Reality TV is so big and obvious that even mentioning it seems like a waste of everyone's time. But there's a catch to all of this, the fine line between fiction and non-fiction, and that's what I'm trying to get at. Real life isn't really inherently interesting; it only becomes interesting once you can put it into a story, contextualize it and impose on it all of the themes and arcs and plot of fiction, cut it down and carefully edit it so that the pacing is more palatable and identifiable. Non-fiction is only enjoyable once it has all the characteristics of fiction, at which point the difference between those two concepts is somewhat moot; a small quibbling difference in scripting and authorship and little else.

The reason I bring all of this up is just to encapsulate a major frustration in thinking about this mythology all the time: creating a world is pointless, because it's never going to be as good as re-editing the real world.

But here's another thing: I'm obviously not the first person to be frustrated by this, and we're now starting to see the classic process of fictionalizing non-fiction working in reverse. Follow me here, that would entail the non-fictionalizing of fiction. There are some basic examples - the whole fake documentary thing, This is Spinal Tap and The Blair Withch Project. But the process is also sublimating itself into regular narratives. The British version of The Office was meant to be a fake documentary, but when it came over here, the American producers ditched the premise but kept its trappings. The camera shakes and goes in and out of focus, it catches awkward angles and occasionally spies on people unawares between the blinds of a window. Arrested Development uses all the same techniques. Movies, too, have been doing this a lot - filming in real locations rather than back lot sets, permitting bad or awkward lighting and shaky angles. Adding YouTubey content, trying to emulate the runaway success of YouTube, itself yet another supposed nail in the coffin of purist fiction. I think glossy filming is the visual equivalent to careful prose; in both cases people instantly know that they're being sold something, that they're not just observing some version of real life. Take away the gloss and you've got something. Reality TV, if nothing else, exists at the perfect crossroads between these two approaches; at any point in time you can't tell if what you're watching is more real than it is fake - is it real people forced into unrealistic scenarios, or actors playing parodies of themselves in real life? The Real Housewives of Orange County truly is the transcendent medium of our culture. I'm glad we've got that settled.

So then, that's got fiction and non fiction squared neatly away. Now the real question: how does one de-mythologize a mythology?