Since everyone is stuck inside and spending way too much time online these days, it’s only natural that Facebook chain posts are spawning at an unprecedented rate. And, since I’m stuck inside and spending way too much time online these days, I’ve seen a lot of them. One that caught my attention the other day was “10 Things Everyone Else Likes But I Don’t.” I don’t think I’ll do that one, it just seems too contrarian, but I can definitely relate to the sentiment it picks up on: the alienation of everyone else being in love with something, especially some piece of storytelling, that you just can’t relate to. The two times I’ve felt that most acutely have been with the sorts of smart, artsy media that English majors like me are supposed to adore: David Lynch’s film Mulholland Drive and Don DeLilo’s White Noise. And, if you’ll excuse me for being a contrarian for a little bit, I’d like to rag on them a little.
The problem with each of them is that they’re not really stories. Sure, they’ve each got characters and something resembling a plot, but you get the sense that the creator isn’t so interested in telling a story as they are in expressing some kind of idea, layered so deeply in abstraction that it’s incomprehensible to anyone’s lived experience. Which is cool, if you’re into that kind of thing, but not really what people read or watch stories for.
My disappointment with Mulholland Drive is actually sort of context dependent, and sort of own damn my fault: I watched it over a series of three nights, in forty minute segments, which meant that I got all excited by the straightforward story of a lesbian couple in Hollywood chasing lost memories, then felt enormously disappointed when the whole thing fell apart into dream logic that broke characterization and came off as both heavy-handed and incomprehensible at once. I’ve talked to real fans of the movie about its meaning, and now I can kind of see the appeal of putting together what actually happened, and there are some scenes that are perfectly beautiful. But I can’t imagine ever walking away from that movie satisfied, much less happy.
While Mulholland Drive might have made me begrudgingly respect David Lynch, White Noise got me irate at Don DeLilo. It has more consistent characters than Mulholland Drive, and a narrative that doesn’t leave you quite as perplexed, but it’s pretty clear that the author doesn’t really care much about any of it, not even the most emotional parts. What he does care about is making some kind of point (probably something about capitalism) through loads and loads of random details that are a little bit interesting, and clearly meant to be funny, but really don’t make up for the lack of story. The prose was so elegant that I had to finish the book, but I wasn’t very happy about it.
For a time, I took these two examples (and a couple other plotless, characterless, seemingly meaningless bits of media I’d seen) and formed them into a general hypothesis for storytelling: in order for a story to be worth anything at all, it needs to be coherent, direct, and human-centric. But then I found Petscop, which breaks every rule I’d just set out for what makes good art. And I also loved it.
Petscop is a youtube series recording someone playing through an obscure, low-budget Playstation game, using cheat codes to reveal disturbing hidden content about childhood abuse. The game doesn’t actually exist, the recordings are actually just animations, but it feels so authentic to that late 90s-early 00s game style that it gives a nostalgia rush to anyone who grew up with those games, like me. And then it corrupts that nostalgia with reminders that the pain and trauma existed, even, or perhaps especially, in that idyllic time. That feeling is so complex and powerful that I don’t really care that the narrative is incoherent, nonexistent, or inconsequential. Maybe it doesn’t make any linear sort of sense, but I still appreciate it immensely as an experience.
Searching for some answers for Mulholland Drive after I’d first watched it, I found Roger Ebert’s five star review, where he wrote “Think of it as the dreamer rising slowly to consciousness, as threads from the dream fight for space with recent memories from real life, and with fragments of other dreams--old ones and those still in development.” At the time, I thought it was a total abandonment of a critic’s duty to actually work out what’s going on, but now I can’t think of a better way to explain how I feel about Petscop.
What separates my take on Petscop from Mulholland Drive or White Noise? I think it all comes down to experience. Mulholland Drive drew on nostalgia for an idealized Hollywood much in the same way Petscop drew on nostalgia for an idealized childhood cyberworld*. The difference is that I had the nostalgia necessary to feel what Petscop wanted me to feel, but not so much for Mulholland Drive. Plotlines and characters are so powerful in part because they give the reader someone to empathize with, and in doing so understand the emotions of the story and its author. When an author forgoes that, it’s a risky move, because there’s no guarantee that readers will be able to decipher it on their own. That doesn’t make the story bad, it turns out, just risky.
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* Still not sure what, if anything, White Noise was drawing on, but sure, I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt.
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