It's All J.J. Abrams' Fault! (Not Really.)
Hi hi hi! I have a book coming out in August called Lessons in Magic and Disaster, and here’s a quote from it that I really like:
People talk about relationships in terms like, “I like who I am when I’m with them,” or “They make me want to be a better person,” as if the purpose of love was self-improvement. But fuck that — the purpose of love is love.
You can pre-order this book from all of the places. If you send me a receipt to this Google form, I’ll send you some bonus materials about my novel All the Birds in the Sky, including a massive sneak peek of the sequel in progress, All the Seeds in the Ground. If you pre-order from Green Apple Books and specify in the comments, I’ll sign, personalize and draw a silly doodle in your copy.
We’re all living inside J.J. Abrams’ “Mystery Box” now
Okay, so it's not really J.J. Abrams' fault. But I have been thinking a lot lately about Abrams' infamous TED Talk about the "mystery box" in storytelling — and how it feels as though we're living in an era where our politics and our national culture have gotten stuck altogether inside that mystery box.
Abrams, of course, was one of the creators of the massively popular TV show Lost, which became renowned for its many bewildering mysteries and signifiers. Off the top of my head, there was a countdown to planetary destruction, which could only be halted by typing in Hurley’s winning lottery numbers. There was a polar bear on a tropical island. There was a smoke monster. There was the Dharma Initiative. And so much more. People spent countless hours constructing theories and explanations, in an attempt to connect all of the dots and explain all of the mysteries.
The extreme popularity of Lost led to a host of imitators: TV shows and other media that tried to spin out never-ending questions, only to answer each question with several more questions. We lived through an era of mystification for the sake of mystification. (Most of the Lost imitators follow its format in a few ways, including starting off with a massive disaster or trauma, after which the characters are plunged into a world where nothing makes sense despite seeming like it ought to.)
Importantly, this wasn't an exercise in surrealism, in which some things are simply inexplicable and you can tell they will, ever make sense. Rather, we were told that things had a rational explanation, but for the most part we never found out what it was.
Which brings me to Abrams' famous Ted Talk, in which he uses a mystery box from a magic store as a metaphor to talk about storytelling overall. He extols the pleasure of not of of wondering about things rather than having them explained:
What I realized I do in everything I do is I find myself drawn to infinite possibility and potential. And I realized that mystery is the catalyst for imagination. It’s not the most groundbreaking idea, but when I started to think that maybe there are times when mystery is more important than knowledge, I started getting interested in this.
Looking at this Ted Talk now, Abrams kind of conflates two separate but related phenomena. Sometimes things are scarier or more fascinating if we don't fully see them, like the shark in the movie Jaws — infamously, the shark prop malfunctioned so it doesn’t appear much on screen, ironically making the shark scarier. This is not the same thing as being told that a random symbol has a clear and rational explanation, but not being allowed to know that explanation. We know what the shark is: it's a shark.
The thing is, Abrams is absolutely correct that people enjoy wondering and speculating. It’s fun to theorize! We all spent hours and hours trying to figure out about the Final Cylon and the Opera House on Battlestar Galactica for that exact reason.
Sometimes if you spell things out too much, they lose all their juice and become flavorless. Audiences love a narrative that forces them to fill in the blanks by doing a certain amount of imaginative work, and there's something terribly disappointing about a story that plunks all of its cards on the table all at once, instead of keeping you guessing for a while.
So the problem isn't mysteries — it's whether those mysteries ever get resolved in a satisfying way.
Going deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole is a kind of addiction, in a way you get a little serotonin rush from encountering more and more little hints. You get to activate the part of your brain that likes to see patterns in random things. You join with others who enjoy doing the same thing, and you form a community. (Or a cult.)
And here's where I can't help drawing a link with our current political dysfunction. For better or worse, we are now being governed by people who want to dig rabbit holes that lead nowhere. They see endless conspiracies which will never be explained, only mystified further and further. There's not that much difference between endlessly wondering about the Dharma Initiative, and raising endless bad-faith questions about vaccines, climate change, and trans people. In both cases, the questions never stop and answers never arrive — because answers would spoil all the fun.
Similarly, the manufactured paranoia that “they” are out to get you — and yet you can never fully understand who “they” are or how they operate — lies at the heart of a lot of these stories in both pop culture and politics. Ben Linus and the Cylons both have a plan, but we will never fully understand what it is or what to do about it, which makes them a bit like the Deep State.
Obviously, there are types of stories where not everything ought to be explained — see above, re: surrealism. Also, I’m a big believer that stories about magic can be numinous and dreamlike, and that sometimes mystical shit can just be weird and destabilizing. There’s nothing wrong with leaving things unexplained — as long as you don’t lead people to believe that an explanation is coming, and a set of clues will help you find what it is.
And again, it’s significant that Lost and many similar TV shows begin with trauma before leading us into endless bafflement. They’re narratives about the fragility of reality, and how easily our logical, predictable world can give way to a new kind of logic that is beyond our ability to comprehend.
(Eventually, Lost did answer many of its mysteries, but not in a way that seemed to reward the huge amount of weight that was put on them. We didn’t just want to know the facts, we wanted to know why this stuff mattered so much. To some extent, this wasn’t all the show’s fault. The internet and the entertainment media had built these mysteries up to the point where the answers needed to feel not just sensible, but significant in a way that would have been hard to pull off. But it’s hard not to feel as though Abrams’ dictum that “mystery is more important than knowledge” was always fatally flawed.)
To be clear, I am not saying that J.J. Abrams and other creators helped to innovate a mode of storytelling which is now being used by some truly terrible people to destabilize our government and society. I think that would be a very simplistic explanation that’d give too much credit to both sides of this equation. What I am saying is that both of these groups stumbled on the same aspect of human nature, and that it's fundamentally a toxic, addictive part of Who we are. Plus both of these phenomena are aspects of an internet culture that was developing around the same time.
That same internet culture over-obsessed about random “easter eggs” in pop culture, and dwelled on the interconnectedness of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in which every tiny post-credit scene could be the holy grail that tells us where things are going. The extent to which online fan culture and media discussions have dovetailed with conspiracy theory culture goes way beyond stuff like Lost.
The irony is, if you listen to Abrams’ TED Talk all the way through, he actually spends a lot of time extolling the quiet, emotional scenes that can shine through if you don’t over-explain stuff too much. Which is absolutely true — you should always cut exposition whenever you can. And the best parts of Lost feel deeply emotional and character-driven: it starts out as, basically, a soap opera about damaged people dealing with relationships and their own issues in an extreme situation. The mystery stuff is just sort of spice for that dish, especially at first.
In fact, the movie Cloverfield is probably the purest version of how the “mystery box” can work well: the movie itself is a very stripped-down story about a group of people surviving a monster attack, but there was a ton of online augmented-reality marketing that spun out a host of weird plotty stuff for fans to obsess over: what is the Tagruato Corporation? How does the drink Slusho! play into all this? These questions were not at all central to the experience of watching the film, but if you were sufficiently online, you could bring them to the movie-going experience and maybe get a tiny bit more out of it.
The trouble starts when the spice becomes the whole dish — when the sizzle replaces the steak. At a certain point, if the whole media ecosystem and the online fanbase are utterly obsessed with stringing together murder-boards about your show, you’re going to want to play into that to hold their attention. This seemed to happen with Lost to some extent, and to an even greater extent with a lot of the show’s failed imitators. The “mystery box” came to be synonymous with unanswered riddles, rather than the thing Abrams probably intended of keeping the audience focused on character rather than widgets.
It’s hard not to be paranoid in this day and age — but that’s all the more reason to cling to what we know and can prove, and not let ourselves get sucked down rabbit holes. (I’ve had to work hard to resist this temptation lately myself, when I read alarmist theories that go beyond even the truly awful stuff we know is happening.)
As anybody who's read Never Say You Can't Survive knows, I'm a huge fan of intentionality and figuring out what a story means to you as you write it. Increasingly, part of intentionality for me is making sure that I have a strong sense of what’s really going in a story, so I can make sure things actually make sense in the end.
One practice that I've done a lot in recent years, for example, is outlining a story from the point of view of the antagonist. What does the antagonist know, what do they want, and how do their actions make rational sense to them? I don’t need to sympathize with the antagonist, who can be a truly wretched person, but I do need to understand why they are doing the things they are doing, from their perspective. Similarly, I always try to hold onto the sense that there is an objective reality in my story, no matter how confusing things may get or how unreliable my narrators might be.
Even if you never explain something in a story, you should probably have a clear idea in your own head of what it is, and why it's there. It's just good hygiene: the same way you don't have a picnic in the park and then leave all your food waste lying around, you shouldn't spread clues around when they don't lead to any explanations. Clean up after yourselves, folks!
Listen, I love wonder and mystification as much as anyone. I think our capacity to see patterns in apparent randomness can lead to great art and transcendent experiences. But we’ve learned the hard way that these things can also be become destructive, if we keep chasing the high of clue-finding, and never reach the deeper satisfaction of arriving at the truth. We live in an age where people who see clues everywhere and are "just asking questions" are trying to kill the rest of us, and this makes me enjoy the “mystery box” style of storytelling a whole lot less.
Music I’m Listening To Right Now
MonoNeon is a bass player and an experimental musician — I first became aware of him when he did an epic jam session with Prince a while before Prince died. Anyway, I’ve been listening to his new release, Quilted Stereo, and it’s super fun. There are a few upbeat dancey songs on here that are legit bangers, and the bass playing is indeed spectacular on songs like “Crown and Coke.” The song “Stereo” is deeply wistful and kind of gets inside my head and takes up residence there. Quilted Stereo is quite possibly the first record since Prince’s Graffiti Bridge to feature both George Clinton and Mavis Staples. Actually, my favorite song on the album is probably the one featuring Staples, “Full Circle,” which feels like the kind of good-natured, morally upstanding gospel-blues that Staples has specialized in in recent years. It’s very uplifting and lovely, and you get to hear Mavis Staples singing that doing good is “a cheat code for life.” Anyway, Quilted Stereo is well worth giving a spin.