The Uncanny Valley of Interactivity

I believe mass entertainment suffers from a bit of format rigidity due to the natural inertia from structural ossification in the music, film, and publishing businesses, to name the most prominent.

One of the ways this manifests is in the one-way broadcast nature of much of our entertainment despite the fact that several billion people own internet-connected smartphones now, and even though they consume an increasingly large share of that entertainment on such devices equipped with all sorts of input options and sensors.

Whenever I say this, however, people seem to want to leap to choose-your-own-adventure storytelling, and the most cited example is Netflix’s Bandersnatch. In its earnings report for 2018, Netflix famously declared “We compete with (and lose to) Fortnite more than HBO.” I happen to agree with them that the threat of gaming looms larger than any other in the future, and it’s not surprising to me that they’ve spun up a group to experiment with interactive stories like Bandersnatch and Bear Grylls’ You vs. Wild.

However, stories like Bandersnatch fall into an uncanny valley of interactivity. That is, compared to regular movies, they repeatedly force you to do a bit of annoying work that breaks the suspension of disbelief and the flow of the story: the first choice you’re offered in Bandersnatch is to choose which cereal to eat for breakfast. If you’re in the mindset for lean-back entertainment, you can let the story choose an answer for you on its own after some amount of time, but the distracting question prompt is still displayed on the screen.

On the other hand, if you want real interactivity, something like Bandersnatch feels like a busted low-res knockoff of the continuous interactivity of video games, a step function compared to the smooth curves of video game calculus. Why play a game with such crude branching when so many great games, many of them multiplayer and synchronous, offer a truly unpredictable and immersive form of user controllable storytelling?

This doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy branching stories in concept. One of my favorite movie and television genres is what I refer to as the recursive escape room genre.

You’re likely familiar with it from its most famous examples. Groundhog Day (in fact TVTropes refers to this genre as the Groundhog Day Loop). Edge of Tomorrow. Russian Doll. A Christmas Carol.

“Phil, maybe we should just Google a playthrough video on YouTube.”

In these stories, the protagonist keeps reliving the same set of events in what feels like an endless loop in time. As they realize their conundrum, they start to experiment and iterate until they eventually come to an epiphany as to why they’re trapped. Then, and only then, can they break out of the loop.

In a way, these are the film version of a really popular form of YouTube video: the video game playthrough.

Watching these films reminds me of how I’d read Choose Your Own Adventure books as a child. Every time I came to a choice in the story, I’d dog-ear that page, then eventually revisit it to take the other path, until I’d read every possible branch of the story. However, works like Groundhog Day reduce the effort required of the viewer by simply playing all the branches in a linear fashion, offering both a lean-back viewing experience and the sensation of narrative progression as the protagonist moves closer and closer to breaking out of the loop. Bandersnatch offers the ability to jump back to any decision you made previously and change it through a sort of decision history carousel, but that still requires work on the part of the viewer.

I feel like the author of “You Are A Shark” didn’t really have his heart in it

The appeal of recursive escape room movies and TV shows, I theorize, lies in its echo of something many people feel, that they are trapped in some runaway routine in their lives. Wake up, go to work, come home, scrounge up dinner, unwind a bit, then back at it the next day. These recursive escape room stories offer up the possibility that we can puzzle our way out of these Moebius prisons which keep depositing us back to the same starting point. Maybe if I stop eating carbs. Or meditate in the morning instead of checking social media. Or start working out before the morning commute. Maybe if I’m more assertive and ask for a raise, or a promotion, which I richly deserve. With every test, I close off one branch but converge a little more on a solution.

I’d guess that the easiest way to predict how any person’s day will go is to look at the previous day. It’s quite plausible that most lived days on Earth feel like a barely modified replay of the previous day. We all run, for the most part, a standard script of life routines.

The appeal of self-help gurus and podcasts about the habits of successful people is that they resemble those escape room chaperones who offer occasional hints to groups who get stuck on one particular puzzle. These secrets to success from modern gurus feel like video game tips for specific levels, except for real life. Sleep more. Eat keto. Lift weights. Delete social media apps. Walk 10,000 steps a day.

That sense of progressive mastery is a hell of a drug. That’s why, while I’m bearish on choose-your-own-adventure films like Bandersnatch, I’m bullish on the right types of light interactivity when it makes sense. If you were designing a game show today, for example, it would likely look much more like HQTrivia (RIP) than, say, Wheel of Fortune.

Gamification Someone, I can't remember who, recently described golf as the gamification of walking, and I'll never be able to shake that from my mind.has gotten a bit of a bad rap in recent years, and some of the implementations out of Silicon Valley can feel scammy, to be sure. Still, when I look at the progressive mastery tactics of something like Candy Crush, I can’t help but find them more fun and effective, in some ways, than the Suzuki method of teaching violin playing, or Mr. Miyagi’s “wax on, wax off” school of teaching Daniel Larusso karate.

The more I read about the power of habit in human behavior, the more I think of self-help genre as a series of macros one downloads to try to upgrade one's day-to-day regimen. Pair that with the educational power of failure and I've come think of recursive escape room stories as a way to accelerate the improvement of our life productivity.

Narrative debt

HBO’s Watchmen is fantastic, as many have noted. It may be one of the most polished first drafts of fan fiction to ever appear on the silver, errr, OLED screen.

DC may lag behind the Marvel Universe in box office and audience acclaim, but it feels like DC is starting to find its footing with a different approach. Rather than having its directors conform to the ultimate vision of Kevin Feige, as Marvel does, DC seems to be allowing its directors a bit more creative freedom to put their own spin on various characters and franchises. Whether you liked The Joker or not, it was a very Todd Phillips-esque take, and it’s not even meant to be part of the rest of the DC Universe. It’s a stand-alone vision of The Joker.

The trailer for Birds of Prey, for example, feels like an attempt to take Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn and create a new franchise around that character. The Joker in Suicide Squad, and thus the one that’s implied to be in that branch of the DC Universe, isn’t the same one as in the Phillips’ Joker film. But Birds of Prey director Cathy Yan has stated that they removed the Jared Leto Joker character from their film so they could distance (read: quarantine) themselves from that failed film, creating yet another distinct franchise within the DC universe. Not for nothing is the parenthetical in the title "The Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn."After Birds of Prey came out, I saw it. Sad to say I didn't love it, but the critical and fan reception in my network was reasonably positive. Whereas all the Marvel films exist in a single comic universe, DC seems to be sprouting all sorts of independent branches. Perhaps we should think of the DC Universe as the MCU but with social distancing.

Watchmen capitalizes on this creative freedom. Alan Moore, the writer of the original Watchmen graphic novel, isn’t involved. I’m not sure if he would have given his blessing to Lindelof’s revisions to Watchmen loreHahahahaha let's be real he would've never given his blessing., but it wouldn’t have mattered. HBO and Warner Bros. and the DC folks gave Lindelof free rein to fork the Watchmen mythology for this new series.

Lindelof’s public breakthrough was as co-creator of Lost. To this day, it remains one of my favorite examples of what I call narrative debt. That is, when you’re building out a story, you tease plot lines and characters and conflicts that you have to resolve at a later point in the script.

You accumulate narrative debt. The implicit promise to the audience, the debt holders, is that you’ll pay out the disbelief they've suspended on your behalf.

For a whole variety of reasons, Lost was saddled with so much narrative debt that at some point it was effectively insolvent. Pair that with an obsessive fan base poring over every frame for clues like auditors examining the narrative balance sheet and you had a recipe for a write-down of WeWork proportions. The showrunners couldn’t declare narrative bankruptcy as the show’s ratings were still solid, but they tried to prepare the fans for disappointment via public statements. Ultimately, they whipsawed fans through a series of dramatic story pivots until they were forced to crash land the story in the finale in a way that took the story full circle. The viewers at the end were like Jack and the other survivors on that beach in the series premiere, dazed and bloodied, wondering what the hell had happened.

Chekhov’s gun is the most famous instantiation of the principle of conservation of narrative. Some people want the ledger of stories to balance perfectly. Every first act gun must go off in act three. All non-essential plot elements should be dropped. Not surprisingly, Chekhov was a master of the short story, a form which demands concision.

I’m less of a stickler for obsessively manicured stories than some, though I can nitpick plot structure with the worst of those YouTube critics. I tend to do so only if a film or show is marketed as having been assembled with the delicacy of an expensive wristwatch (Watchmen reference!). There is a certain elegance to a plot in which every last element connects, but as the years go by I find that type of clinical precision can leave a show or film feeling a bit stifled and lifeless.In the original Watchmen, Adrian Veidt can be thought of as a director trying to pull off a massive fork of the global narrative. A la Fincher's The Game, he does it in the real world. Of course, his is a Shyamalan-like effort that hinges entirely on a last minute plot twist, and as we've seen from Shyamalan's later works, often the narrative debt load is too heavy to recover from.

Lindelof seems to be at his best riffing off of something less open-ended. The confines of an existing piece of intellectual property seem to provide guardrails within which his creative forks seem to flourish. The Leftovers had Tom Perrotta’s novel to establish the inciting incident, and he and Lindelof expanded that into one of my favorite television shows, a moving meditation on how humans grapple with loss and grief and faith.

Watchmen from HBO has Moore’s classic graphic novel as a narrative precedent, but Lindelof has remixed it as a story about white supremacy and the racial sin at the heart of America’s origin.

I often think of TikTok as a logical modern outgrowth of remix and sampling culture, but the television world conjuring a remix of Watchmen is one of the most pleasant surprises of 2019.

As large media conglomerates focus more and more on franchises, I’d love to see some of the more progressive leaders at those companies contemplate whether a limited open source strategy on their premium intellectual properties might not be the most defensible, modern approach.

Over a decade ago, Marc Andreessen defined a platform as “a system that can be reprogrammed and therefore customized by outside developers -- users -- and in that way, adapted to countless needs and niches that the platform’s original developers could not have possibly contemplated, much less had time to accommodate.”

Even longer ago, in 1986, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons released a twelve-issue comic book series titled Watchmen. Decades later, an outside writer named Damon Lindelof read a piece titled “The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates in the Atlantic and learned about the Tulsa, Oklahoma massacre of 1921, remixed it with Moore and Gibbon’s original creation Watchmen, and produced an unexpected new take on the franchise which I don’t think anyone saw coming when the series was first announced.

Watchmen is a platform.

Hit by a bus

This supercut of people in the movies wandering into traffic and getting hit by a bus is amusing, but it's always been one of my cinematic pet peeves.

The timing is never realistic: often the person is standing in the street for several seconds before the bus hits them, and to maintain the element of surprise, you never hear the squeal of brakes before impact. It's as if there are distracted bus drivers not looking where they're going driving all over the movie universe.

The shots telegraph themselves because of the way they're framed: head-on, parallel to the street, character centered and usually framed in a medium or wide shot from head to waist or head to toe. This is an odd framing because usually the character is consumed with great emotion at that moment (often rage) and so you'd expect to be in a close-up to amplify the emotional moment, the close-up being the shot size of greatest emotional intimacy (unless it's Les Miserables when the entire movie is an emotional peak). So the cut to a wide shot is signal for "we need to give more room on either side of the character to bring the bus in from the side in post-production."

But the worst problem is that "hit by a bus" accidents in the movies are generally used as a narrative deus ex machina. If you don't know how to organically advance the story, just have a character wander into the path of a negligent bus driver. Presto, instant plot advancement.

There are exceptions, of course, when the randomness of a bus accident is central to the theme of the movie. I won't name those movies here because simply seeing the movie title would be a spoiler given the subject of this post, but you'll know those when you see them because as an audience member you'll feel like the one who was hit by a bus out of nowhere and taken right out of the story and into the lap of a lazy screenwriter.