Colin Marshall

One thing today

Gabe Audick asks:

If you could do one thing today — anything in the world — what would it be?

Ah, the classics — this one sits right up there with "What would you do if you were invisible?" That's easier to answer, though, since it's more limited: the specific condition of invisibility versus, uh, total omnipotence. Or does this question grant total omnipotence? It seems to me there are several ways to interpret the set "anything in the world" from which I can choose what to do. While I could break it down into infinitely many differently nuanced versions, I'll go with four today, for brevity's sake:

I have my current skills and resources, but no restrictions. This is the most conservative interpretation, but, in its way, also the most interesting. As Momus once wrote, "The most evocative fantasy is one with only the thinnest membrane between itself and reality; it gets its power from being eminently possible. From being a plan." Unfortunately, I don't know how well-equipped I am to make the most of this scenario. My current resources? Few. My current skills? Practically none. (Besides being a self-facilitating media node, I mean.)

So the question's premise comes down to a grand blow-off of every obligation, deadline and schedule item hovering over me. The obvious substitute for all that junk would be a day-long orgy — wait for the rest of the sentence, now — of making and experiencing interesting things. To prime the pump, I'd watch the most interesting film at hand, which I guess would be Hsiao-hsien Hou's Three Times. I've long wanted to see it but, absent a convincing reason to bump something else from my to-do list in its favor, haven't done so. Plus, I could call it right up on Netflix Instant. Then, a Kobo Abe novel. Probably Secret Rendezvous. Maybe I'd write an essay comparing those two highly uncomparable pieces of culture.

While I'd need to be home for a few hours were I to work on music stuff, it's out in the world for me to do anything else. (By which I mean "out in Santa Barbara," since I can't really go to another city except Carpinteria without violating the "today"-only element of the question.) I imagine that the most efficient strategy to maximize both interesting-thing-making and interesting-thing-experiencing would be to start a project that is the former but which requires the latter. I'd traipse forth with my camera and field recorder, collecting material for a series of experimental psychogeographical semi-documentaries I've been mentally formulating.

Except that Madelaine is out of town today and has my camera with her. DAMNABLE

I have unlimited skills, within the range of human ability. Oh, easy; I'd lay down some tracks. While I likely only have about three-quarters of the gear needed to produce a truly solid sound, I'm sure unlimited musical and technological skill could more or less compensate. And with that unlimited technological skill, I could craft a Myspace Music page that almost isn't hideous. (Okay, that's cheating; to create a non-hideous Myspace profile is to reach beyond mortal ken.) Hell, I could probably crank out an EP and have it on the web by the day's end. As I am, I'd be lucky to have a pre-pre-preliminary version of a song done in 24 hours. And I'd hate it.

I have unlimited (currently extant) resources. So, after I put the finishing touches on my kick-@$$ all-purpose home recording studio and stocked my armory of music and filmmaking gear, you mean? There can be no answer but to travel, as spontaneously and randomness-receptively as possible, in order to fire up my mind's awareness centers that lay dormant way too much of the time.

The question, alas, is where to go, now that the old spin-the-globe-and-put-down a-finger maneuver is cliché and therefore unacceptable. Though I would refuse passage to no country — and with unlimited resources, I'd get to 'em all sooner or later — I do maintain a preferential shortlist. Certainly buying my way onto the next flight to Seoul, for example, would help me get a handle on the language, and fast.

But at this moment, I'd probably take one bound for Reykjavík instead. The sort of music, art, film — culture of all sorts, really — coming out of Iceland these days tells me it's a place I need to check out post haste. Collaboration with some Icelander on something seems like the "right" thing to do. Naturally, while there, I would immediately begin work on an experimental psychogeographical semi-documentary there. And I'd write an essay or ten about it. Think of the material!

Total omnipotence. If underground comic books and avant-garde literature have taught me anything, it's that people who gain omnipotence always use it to do weird sex stuff, at least at first. When they burn out on that, the problems really begin. I have to believe that total omnipotence is like a dream: you can will whatever you want into reality, but none of it matters. Precisely because you're free to instantiate whatever you want, all of it's stripped of meaning.

Remember discovering the god-mode code for your favorite first-person shooter, and how awesome it seemed at first? Now remember how long you continued to play afterward. Running right up to those cacodemons and punching them out with impunity seemed really cool the first dozen times, but thereafter... what was the point? So much of life's interestingness comes, I'll posit, from finding clever ways around rules, conditions and obstacles; when you lift them, nothing feels interesting anymore.

This could be why pounding my skull against musical projects is interesting, or why trying to find a fresh approach to someone who's been interviewed a thousand times before is interesting, or why shooting experimental psychogeographical semi-documentaries with no planned outcome is interesting. It's all about working against limitations. I guess it's why, whenever I punched in the god-mode code, it wouldn't be long before I'd just start exploring to see if I could walk through any walls and find secret rooms. I'd simply look for another boundary to push against — literally, in this case.

If I recall correctly, Adam Cadre implemented a feature in I-0, his debut work of interactive fiction, which allowed the player to win simply by typing "WIN". This victory came in nothing more than a line of text declaring that the player had won, but still, a victory's a victory. The message is clear: what's the result of success without the process of succeeding? By the same token, I have little interest in pushing a button labeled "YOU CAN BECOME THE GREATEST INTERVIEWER WHO HAS EVER LIVED BY PRESSING THIS BUTTON". Where's the challenge? Where's the fun? Unless, of course, I can figure out a way to use my no doubt high platform as the greatest interviewer who has ever lived to pull ridiculous public stunts...

So my answer is that, granted total omnipotence today, I'd spend the day desperately seeking the boundaries of that omnipotence. But that doesn't make much sense, does it? No wonder Dr. Manhattan looks so bored. Maybe he should try shooting some experimental psychogeographical documentaries.

So what doesn't suck, then?

M.J. Walters, who looks to have an interesting making-of-a-life blog, asks,

As you know, cinema is stubbornly sticking to narrative-driven films because people are programmed to love stories and it's a money-making business. Video games is another business where stories are becoming more key, and non-linear stories have a chance there...

But if you see cinema as closer to the visual arts than literature/theatre, perhaps it needs to become more elitist - or for there to be at least a genre of film is are more like the video installations you see in contemporary art.

Educating people to enjoy cinema on levels above story is going to be a helluva challenge :-) how many people actually attempt to really understand paintings? As opposed to consuming them in galleries because they know it's a cultured thing to do? And half the pleasure is seeing a one-of-a-kind object...

But I agree that plot has little to do with a film's more complex pleasures. It is, though, I think, a basic strand that very successfully holds the other complex strands together.

As you can tell I'm a writer, so of course I'm totally biased ;-) what films do you admire (that I have a shot of getting hold of!) that pulls off what you are saying successfully?

Since this came in response to a post even heavier on the Peter Greenaway talk than usual, I suppose it's somehow both a cop-out and the perfect answer to say that, well, Greenaway's films pull it off successfully. Though I haven't seen all of them, he's easily the most intellectually inspiring filmmaker I know. I would recommend The Draughtsman's Contract, A Zed & Two Noughts and 8½ Women from his library, thought that last one is a somewhat controversial entry. Certain fans think it a lesser work, and it's more a Fellini homage than anything, but boy, do I love it.



He's done other movies that I suspect break that devil plot addiction and win decisive artistic victories in so doing, such as The Pillow Book. I understand that the French media reacted to it my crying, "This isn't a film! This is a CD-ROM!" (It was 1996, mind.) By all accounts, this objection delighted Greenaway himself. Nevertheless, it won Un Certain Regard, so maybe the French like their CD-ROMs after all.



If Greenaway takes my personal throne for intellectual inspiration, Werner Herzog sits in the one labeled "visceral inspiration." He, too, accomplishes greater cinema than most without unnecessary suckling of the plot bottle, especially in the case of his projects that fall into the crack between documentary and feature. Check out Fata Morgana, The Wild Blue Yonder (a sci-fi picture constructed with old NASA footage, underwater video and a wild-eyed Brad Dourif performance) and The White Diamond for examples.



Europeans aside, I think it's Asian directors who have really grasped the power of cinema's no-plot elements in the past decade. I can think of two who squeeze in and share the most-aesthetically-inspiring throne. Hirokazu Kore-eda, the maker of my favorite film, Maborosi (my 3Quarksdaily writeup of which is here), was something of an early adopter in this sense. Thailand's Apichatpong Weerasethakul does even better at the specific game of crafting experiences that don't even really need a storyline to produce infinite rewatchability, like Syndromes and a Century (my 3Quarksdaily writeup of which is here).



But the absolute master of not needing plot, at least in terms of those producing primarily standard feature-length films, is Taiwan's Ming-liang Tsai. This dude just busts out masterpieces like he doesn't even care, rarely if ever feeling the need to jerk his characters around on the marionette strings. Goodbye Dragon Inn, one of my ten favorites of the 2000s, expresses so much about the life of the film-lover without needing any narrative prodding beyond getting a handful of characters into a decrepit movie theater on a rainy night to watch one final screening of an early-60s martial arts costume drama. But everything I've seen from him is good; I wrote up What Time is it There?, Goodbye Dragon Inn's predecessor, on 3QD.

Thinking about it now, I realize that all my favorite directors do this, to a substantial extent. The list goes on and on from here: Abbas Kiarostami (Close-Up 3QD writeup), Chris Marker (Sans Soleil 3QD writeup), the better Jim Jarmusch like Dead Man and The Limits of Control... no surprise, I suppose.