Form from first principles

Puzzling over form:

• I saw a play recently and didn’t understand why it had to be a play and not a film.
• Similarly, I quite liked Stalker but thought it was maybe a novel wearing the skin of a film. (Unsure.)

So why make your thing a (play, film, book, whatever)?

• Plays:
  • People had to carve out time to attend. We’re all together, in the same room, at the same time. Something about the ritual of this sharpens the mind.
    • And: collective fear, fixation, laughter, etc. (Though the cinema does this better, I think.)
  • Also: the kind of person who will go see a play. (Middle class+, educated, a little more money than sense; or, a dreamer. Tourists, too. People who read The Observer.)
  • The norms of the form:
    • Exaggerated, larger-than-life acting
    • Monologues, often to convey a Big Idea, or rebut it
    • Compression, geographic and temporal. Plays usually happen in a small set of places, and (though to a lesser extent) over a short span of time.
    • (maybe? i know little about plays) some sense of: there’s a few “core” plays/plots/structures that you riff on, similar to jazz standards. If you like one of these core stories, the audience will expect riffs on it in a play.
    • You can’t pause a play. (In general, plays are good, intense, containers for experiences.)
  • Some ideas I think the form lends itself to:
    • Repetition and variation. To state the obvious, plays have runs, they’re repeated over and over. Perhaps your story is undermined, or underscored, by repetition? Maybe the slightness of the variation is interesting? Is each restaging the same play? Maybe you’re interested in time, and echoes, and (re)discovery. (Arcadia.)
    • Personas, fungibility, performances, doubling, substitution, the actor/character divide.
    • Being watched, being an audience. In particular, being an audience with a narrowly constrained set of expectations and rules: you won’t speak, move around, etc; when the house lights are on we’re Not In The Play, and when they’re off, we are.
    • Public and private knowledge/witnessing.
  • Plays risk something: the actors might screw up, the lights might malfunction.
  • The audience directs their attention. Plays control the frame less than a director does.
  • Plays leave behind a set of instructions to be interpreted, a recipe for an experience. Riff on that.
  • A shared commitment to make-believe.
• Books:
  • You spend some time marinating in the author’s worldview (vs a blog).
  • Declamatory, ideas-driven. If you want to stand up and talk about something, write a book.
  • But they can also do this pointing at something/non-propositional knowledge move. (Vs an essay.)
    • If you believe Keats, this stuff matters.
  • You carry books with you, pick them up and put them down, read other things alongside them. They absorb some texture of your life, the things you did when you were reading them, the books you read alongside them. It’s easier for a book to be in conversation with a reader, and with other books, than films. (I think.)
  • Interiority by default.
  • The reader controls the pace.
  • Reading (at least now) is usually private, solitary: a book and a reader.
  • Slippage between perspective: writer, character, reader. (Free indirect <3).
  • Some ideas I think the form lends itself to:
    • Vagueness, indeterminacy, secrecy.
    • Patterns; shifts between scales.
    • Narrativising, retrospection, self-delusion, performance. (Who is writing this book? And who is it for?)
    • Selfhood, personal identity, the inner monologue.
• Films:
  • Sheer audiovisual spectacle.
    • Have you ever wanted to be supersaturated in the inside of someone’s mind? Watch a film by them.
  • Mass market (as in the kind of person you’ll reach, and how many you’ll reach).
  • Montage by default. This, that, the other thing. Films are much better at suggestive, associative, trains of thought than other mediums.
  • Scale and volume. (Especially the cinema.) A face 10ft high.
  • It’s the form closest to dreams.
  • Somewhere between a novel and a play: you can pause a film (at home), but you can’t control the length of a shot. Bela Tarr will make you walk through the village for nine minutes.
  • The film controls your attention.
  • The camera is quite different from a book’s perspective, though at first glance they seem similar: attending outwards, sensory, and most importantly, a point of view that isn’t character or director. The closest thing we have to fly-on-the-wall disinterest. Presumed trustworthy.
• Games:
  • Obsessed with agency, complicity, counterfactuals.
  • Surrendering control to the player.
  • Rules, etc, convey propositional content and vibes.
  • Lowbrow, mass media.
  • Grabby.
  • Competence, skill acquisition, optimisation.
  • Some norms:
    • I can stop whenever I want.
    • There is a consistent system of rules I can learn and exploit.
    • There’s something to be optimized for.
    • I, the player, am not the same as the player character.
    • This gameworld is strictly smaller than my world; my world casually influences the gameworld and not vice versa.
    • I can repeat, replay, retry this experience.