Wincing at Light

Have you ever read the screenplay for a movie you particularly liked?

Not quite as satisfying an experience as Dolby surround sound, a darkened theater and a bucket full of jujubes, even though the essentially the same information gets transferred from the screenplay to your brain (minus some visual or audio bells and whistles. ).

Screenplays are what I think of as a false medium, meaning that they’re really tools representing another medium all together rather than what they seem to be objectively. What they seem to be is printed text, like a book, or rather an artifact of a bookish length and a standard format with key characteristics that make them instantly recognizable as what they are.

But they aren’t books. They don’t read like books. They don’t immerse like books. In fact, they don’t really even entertain like books. What they are is tools, or markers, or guidelines. They’re placeholders for a film that will, in theory, be made. What a screenplay does is provide a framework that a talented director can build upon to craft something else entirely.

A screenplay is also a perfect example of form following function. The function is to tell sketchily outlined visual story with concrete dialogue. The form stresses white space and big empty gaps between blobs of text. The reason for this: lots of room for marginalia, edits, director comments, notations. White space also makes the text easily scannable, so the story seems to flow more quickly. (Face it: page numbers equal investment. You’re less likely to throw a book across the room that you’ve invested one hundred pages in than one you’ve invested fifteen pages in.)

A screenplay is a working document, the final and intended form of which is a completed film. It isn’t meant to stand alone.

When we read screenplays, we approach them with a different set of expectations than we do a novel. We expect our imagination to do more of the work (or in most cases, since the collective we are not actors or directors, we expect our memory of films we’ve seen to do more of the work) than the narrative. The text exists as a sort of spirit guide with dialogue tags, leading us along.

The problem with fiction on the internet, as I see it, is that the internet hasn’t really decided what sort of medium it’s going to be yet. Is it a newspaper? A film (i.e., YouTube)? A radio? A commercial? A scholarly index? A telephone? Or is it all of those things at once?

What do we want it to be? Do we want it to scan like a screenplay or read like a novel?

Or is it more than all of those things and something that is still evolving into what it eventually will become?

All of these questions are really preparatory to what I intended the topic of this post to be, but they serve as a decent jumping-off point. Over the next few days, I want to spend some time discussing a book by Erik Davis called Techgnosis, which I hope will inform some of the discussion we’ve been having about the viability of long form fiction in this medium and the rationale behind some of my reservations.

I’ll leave you with this quote from Davis to ponder:

Technology structures, and by extension, limits possibility. You can’t think thoughts for which words do not exist to describe them…or rather, the thought experience is structured by words. Medium is an extension of thought through the mechanism of technology.

Until then, Happy Thanksgiving!

D.

Filed under: Blooks and Blognovel Analysis