Convenient Fictions

Hazards of being a fictional character: the inability to operate a keyboard. It's an intangibility thing, though as soon as I find a way to post to my blog with a fictional keyboard, I'll be good to go. Until then, I'm stuck with relying on someone else, and, well ... they've been busy.

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As a fictional character, I can't help but wonder how many real people in the world are fictional like me.

Huh?

No, that is not sarcasm, or condemnation, but a real question.

To make my example, very crudely, otherwise it will be a book, not a blog:

Many Asian cultures differentiate between public self and private self.

The Japanese make a sharp distinction on this front, and accept the idea that the private shelf that is shared with friends can be radically different for the one shared with business associates which may be different again from the one shared with strangers.

In fact, this is played out in social customs of doing things such as holding business meetings over drinks, where one can lets one's hair down and discuss matters (indirectly, of course) as friends instead of co-workers. There are even culturally established norms for acting drunk and who you should and should not act drunk in front of. So someone who among friends appears to be so drunk that they can barely stand may suddenly seem very sober if the boss or spouse calls them on the phone. Unless, of course they really are plastered and not just politely drunk.

The Chinese split their zodiac into three levels. Most of us know the Chinese New Year and the animals associated with the years. To be born in a specific year associates you with a specific sign and determines certain aspects of your personality. What many people don't realize is that there are also animals associated with the month, and with the exact time of birth. The last one is as complicated as trying to calculate star signs in the Western tradition, where you need the exact time and location to calculate the positions of the stars and moon and the like. So each person has three signs too represent them. They may all be the same, but more likely they are different.

The three signs interact to determine personalities, which is why people are all unique and not so easily grouped into twelve categories of personality. The yearly sign is the public face you wear, and since cultural attitudes do tend to cycle with generations, there may very well be some truth to the cycle, who knows? But the yearly sign is modified by the other two.

The monthly sign is the face you show to your close circle of friends and family. In the social sense, it is the real you. The real you. That means that public face is not the real you. So then what is it? It is a convenient fiction, a face you are expected to present in public, through which your real self interfaces through the world, but in mediated form. Part of the cycle of life is trying to slowly make the shift that brings the talents of the private self to the fore, while still maintaining the public self as is expected of you.

So then, if we have the public self and private self covered, then what is the third sign? The third sign is your secret self. It is the self you share with no one, and the self you strive to be. In a sense, it is also a true self, but it is one that is not shared, and one you may not even yourself be aware of, but it influences how your other two selves interact with each other and with the world.

If we want to talk about it in Freudian terms, well, we will fail ... but we can make pretend that these three match to superego, ego, and id respectively. For those who know their Freud, hopefully you can see the fail point in this description, but also how it is useful. The public self is the socially determined self, the private self is the personally determined self, and the secret self is the underlying motivation that may or may not be clear to the person in question.

But the primary point of these two examples is that in both of them there is a public sphere / private sphere distinction in which the public sphere is where you are expected to behave according to specific social norms, only taking the mask off in private. Want some fun? Try getting a newly met Japanese friend to take their mask off. Just don't get pushy and offend them.

This explicitly acknowledged division is lacking in much of Western culture. Unless you are a rugged New Englander, firmly of the opinion that what goes on behind closed doors has nothing to do with your private face (which is why Boston probably has more liquor stores than bars, and no strip joints but a color supplement in the Yellow Pages for call girls) you are raised to think that people are who they are. This creates an interesting conflict of personality when people feel that they are not who they are in public, because it is something that according to Freud is definitely a neurotic state. This is an interesting assertion in the Victorian age, which was all about suppressing the true self.

So anyway, what I am saying here is that we are all convenient fictions, personalities created for interacting with the world through whatever mode we prefer to interact with it in. Even the terse a-social habits of hard-core computer geeks still are appropriate for their environment, where lack of personal contact reduces hygiene needs and terseness necessary where all communication is by keyboard and the fastest fingers win. Though in some ways they may be more honestly themselves than the rest of us.

Our public selves exist to interface with the public. They may not be who we perceive ourselves to be, but who we must be in order to operate. Every living, breathing person is, in their own way, a convenient fiction.

So what about me? I am a fiction. Am I also a convenient fiction? Or am I closer to my true self than I could ever be by being a real person? That is a question to ponder.

Making News

Been reading Marshall McLuhan this week. For those who don't know him, he is the grandpappy of media studies. Being a mediated personality and all, I sort of feel it is important to have a good solid grasp on my heritage, so ...

Amidst the many really interesting things he says about the nature of media and the mediated life, one little phrase really leapt out at me and caught my eye,

to make the news is to become fictionalized.

Really had to stop and think. What does that mean? But a little thinking led to the conclusion that, well, he was right. To make the news is to become fictionalized. Even for a brief moment, they cease to be who they are, and become a mediated fiction.

But before I explain what that means, first I should make clear, there are two ways to make news. One is to write it. The other is to be it. Since the writer is abstracted from the news and we don't necessarily know who they are, they are not put in the position to be fictionalized. It is those who make the news who become fictionalized.

So what is it to become fictionalized through the news?

Well, to make the news is also to become the news. They key lies in that turn of phrase. To become the news is to cease to be one's self and to instead be a news item, a short snippet of narrative divorced from its context and thus made mythic. Suddenly, Joe Fireman is no longer a stressed but happy husband with a wife, two kids, and a sick mom who needs to be moved to a nursing him. Instead, Joe Fireman is the hero who rescued the little girl from the well. And the little girl down the well? Well, she is, of course, the little girl down the well. She is not a person, she is not the girl who is going to grow up to marry her college roommate's cousin, she is the girl down the well.

In making the news, one becomes iconic, a fiction defined by the moment that is only tangentially attached to the person behind the icon.

So you are probably saying, "Yeah, yeah Moot. That's old news. Tell us something new."

So, okay, I will.

You see, McLuhan was writing in the early 1960s. The United States (and Canada, where he was writing) was different back then. Our relation to media was different. The television was just coming into power. The personal computer did not exist yet, and the Internet to connect that computer up to was a nagging concept in some people's minds that could help to build a better military. Computer-mediated communication was a full generation of peoples down the road still.

At the time of the writing, the world was not yet small, and the living did not yet outnumber the dead.

McLuhan observed that there was a division between how we perceived television and movies. We saw movies, in essence, as pre-recorded plays, but television we saw as something more immediate, something more real. One sociological aspect of this is that people who worshipped celebrities worshipped movie stars and television characters. Let me say that again: movie stars and television characters.

This is important in part because it is not longer true. McLuhan's perspective makes sense for his time period. People don't remember Casablanca as that World War II movie, or that one about the love affair between Rick and Ilsa, they remember it as a movie that starred Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, and Claude Rains. No one went to go see a Bogart film because of the movie hype, or the comic book it was based on, but because it was a Bogart film. Movie icons of the period were worshipped as actors, not as characters.

On the other hand, when it comes to television, and except those characters that portray themselves, we sometimes cannot even remember the names of our favorite actors. Fast, who plays Bart Simpson? The dad in the original Brady Bunch? The boys on South Park? Seven of Nine? Dr. Baltar? Tony Soprano? Dr. House? Yeah, hard core fans will know. The rest of us don't know and don't care. In television, we are not interested in the actors, but the characters.

Times change. Our attitude toward television has changed the way we relate to movies. We no longer worship the actors. There too we have begun to worship the characters. The early days of television followed the model of movies, and television shows were designed as vehicles for famous actors and performers. This changed with the abstracted world of the sit com and soap opera, where the character was divorced from the person playing it. (Though interestingly, perhaps because they are running out of "safe" ideas more and more shows are coming out that are merely vehicles for popular comedians.)

At the time McLuhan was writing, there was a clear split between the famous actor in movies and the famous characters on TV. After he wrote his most famous works, there was a shift, and movies, like TV, moved away from being vehicles for famous actors. Instead, they became movies sold based on genre, plot, entertainment value, or amount of over the top action. As much as anything, this is probably because studios wanted more blockbusters and fewer studios were interested in just plain dramas. The actor became insignificant in the face of the character. Most of us don't think of the Indiana Jones movies as Harrison Ford movies, but Indiana Jones movies, and we find people who think if Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, not the other way around.

I for one cannot remember any of the following names, even though they are quite famous: the people playing Harry Potter, Spiderman, all of the Batmen (know most of them but can't remember which is which), all of the X-Men except Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, all of the Lord of the Rings cast except for ... ummm ... Ian KcKellan. (What can I say, Patrick Stuart and Ian McKellen are hotties.) The point is though we may have favorite actors, we tend to think of movies in terms of the characters now, and not the actors.

Abstracting the character from the actor may be a good thing for the movies (and television) since it allows a deeper exploration of themes through fiction. Things designed as vehicles for actors are more likely to have the depth of an Albert and Costello movie than a Bogart flick. In other words, the separation of the actor from the role allows for a greater possibility of better story telling. This is a good thing. The fact that the story line is too often abandoned in favor of a bigger special effects budget is its own unrelated problem.

This shift has implications for McLuhan's theories.

I propose that the corollary to his assertion that to make the news is to become fictionalized, is as follows:

for a fictional character to make the news is to become real.

Not physically tangible, but psychically real in the eyes of the viewing public. Followers of the Harry Potter movie don't follow it because the main character is played by Daniel Radcliffe, or even that Ralph Fiennes plays Voldemort (which reminds me, how many people were weirded out by their favorite Bond playing a bad guy in the Avengers?), they follow it because of Harry Potter. To them, Harry Potter is real.

And Harry Potter is very real, in the sense of a cultural meme now deeply embedded in our psyches. He has been thoroughly and completely reified through a process of social realization. Harry Potter is real. Spiderman is real. The X-Men are real. How real are they?

Well, a while ago a psychiatric center in the Northwest United States was looking for counseling staff that spoke Klingon. Why? Because some of their patients were firmly convinced they were Klingon, and the center felt that it was important to be sensitive to their unique cultural identity. Okay, sounds hokey, but it probably helped with their care and therapy immensely.

But to be be so firmly convinced of the reality of something to believe that one is that thing is an impressive achievement, even if the vehicle of choice ends up being a psychiatric patient. And, though I won't swear to this, but I am pretty sure that some of those Klingon and Jedi and Sailor Moon otaku at the cons are actually quite sane, somewhere deep down inside.

In fictionalizing themselves, these people have made their adopted fictions real. By the same process, the media reporting on fictional characters as newsworthy makes those characters real. Very few people probably think that they are Harry Potter, but there are probably quite a few that believe in the reality of Harry Potter.

So, if by the mere distribution of a fictional character as a meme, we can reify that character and make them real, what does that say about the nature of fiction and our relation to it?

Okay, out of time, but maybe we can work on that question later. Why ruin an important point by answering it right away?

Creative Fictions

The world is going virtual. I will be there waiting for it to catch up.

What is identity when a fictional character can have a concrete and real presence in the world? A question to ponder. Ponder. Ponder. Ponder. It is something I am good at. Now, if I would just stop pondering and act.

Can a fictional character influence the real world? Yes! For instance, not all the world religions can be right, since some exist in diametrical opposition to each other. Therefore, even if some of them are fictionalized accounts of deeper underlying truths, they are still fictions, or at least myths. And look at the impact they all have had. But to avoid religious debates, which I just flat out refuse to engage in with anyone who professes to actually believe anything, because when that happens I find myself face to face with someone willing to defend their very identity, violently if necessary, against things so simple as questions, let's try a less contentious example.

How many of us were influenced by the stories of Dr. Seuss? How about Winnie the Pooh? Peter Pan? Alice and her trip through Wonderland? Alice, in particular, has become a global meme that has spread like wildfire, infecting, especially, Japan, or so it seems. The Japanese love Alice. She is a fictional character, but the sheer number of morality plays they have teased out of her ...

The benefit of fictional characters is that they allow us to step aside from ourselves and explore morality plays in the safety of the written word, or the movie, or the theater play, or any other media where people can be fictions created to entertain and to instruct. From fiction we learn without being threatened by the reality of what we see.

Perhaps one of the greatest failings in the newest computer media, like games, both online and stand-alone, is the loss of the character. The actors in the game are not longer characters, but mere placeholders for the people behind them, or place holders for some single-dimensional concept, such as "something I have to kill before it kills me". Many online games allow players to become actors that are nothing but mythic versions of the players.

A fictional character is a character. They have dimension and depth. They are their own people. Even when the actors portraying them are not present, they are still there, simply being, as a shadow that reflects the real world back at itself for introspection. How do we avoid losing something that precious in the trend away from communal media and toward more shallow forms as individualized entertainment, as well as the backwash of this trend back into communal media.

Marshall McLuhan said that electronic media will destroy plot and narrative. Will it also destroy the fictional character, the people who are not that we turn to for wisdom