Some New Fangled System (Part 1 of 2)

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 25 June 2014.

I do like Jo as the documentarian searching for meaning and peace and trying to put together a good documentary in the process.

That could provide for some interesting on-camera and off-camera conversations were it to be staged like last time. It also provides the basic motive for telling the story. And it banishes anything irrational or beyond the scope of human understanding.  I also like the idea that she could have conversations with her faculty advisor as another way of telling the story.

Boy, in some ways, what we had with Joe was unique in that we had an actual person trying to create a documentary. I wonder if that would be a good route to go in the future, finding someone (Joe again?) who would be able to conceptualize some approach. The mainstream approach is beginning to get hackneyed, what with all the Christopher Guest movies, The Office, Extras, etc. How is ours going to be different?

Jim looking at the camera

One thing that bothers me about those aforementioned fake documentaries is that they often require more and more suspension of disbelief on the part of the viewer.

At some point, the idea of all these people willingly going along with a documentary seems more and more unlikely. And the motive for having the documentary too...i.e. why are we spending 11 years documenting the lives of paper company employees in Scranton?

If we wanted to get super postmodern about it, we could make the documentary about the quest of Art and Will to "make this happen"--and, yes, become somewhat famous in the process. This, of course, does not fit your Apollonian leanings, but, as I said before about the blog, it releases a deluge of material to be exploited. Also, it provides much-needed relief from the approach that is getting hackneyed.

Now that I think about it, this was actually the direction we were going with Joe! Joe took tons of footage and interviewed us as ourselves! What was he going to do with that?

I understand the thought that this may be a cop out writing wise. A.D. Melville gives a good definition of cop out in the "Translator's Note" of his Metamorphoses: "some new-fangled system, more or less metrical, turning its back on achievements it is frightened to face." I'm not exactly what he's talking about, but it calls to mind Robert Pinsky's translation of The Inferno, which uses Yeatsian rhyme and loose iambic pentameter (really just 10-syllable lines) to render Dante's stricter terza rima.

Obviously, there are some gifted writers out there developing excellent made-for-TV serial fiction. Are we avoiding head-on competition with them in taking this route?

It's a good question and I don't know the answer.