‘But Borges was not interested in the Norsemen’s warlike wanderings as much as he was in their writing. In the Icelandic sagas, Borges found “realism in its most perfect form”. Perhaps it was their lack of allegory that appealed to him, their accounts of daily details, or the dry understatement of saga heroes. He seems to love the scene in Grettir’s Saga when Atli, surprised at his door with a stab to the belly, quips that broad blades are in fashion these days.
“In the twelfth century, the Icelanders discovered the novel”, writes Borges, “and this discovery is as secret and sterile, for the economy of the world, as their discovery of America.”’
Writing to protect against harm was common in medieval England. Written amulets like the girdle were a branch of charm magic, words and rituals that invoked supernatural power, whether divine or arcane, in order to gain protection, medicine and secret knowledge. Those seeking assistance wrote down holy verses, sacred names, symbols, runes and pure nonsense in the hope of harnessing the mysterious efficacy of the written word. Charms were used to confront every manner of problem, from life-threatening illness and terrible misfortune down to the very smallest inconvenience: to cure insomnia or soothe an abdominal stitch; to stop vermin from getting at grain; for the recovery of stolen goods or when someone accidently swallowed an insect. There were charms for problems that you never even knew needed solving. One promised to imbue children with the capacity to understand crows
Once I’ve found out what modes of behavior are most useful to the human race I show them to people and underline them. I show them in parables: if you act this way the following will happen, but if you act like that then the opposite will take place. This isn’t the same thing as committed art. At most pedagogics.
I’ve been asked before about the nature of what we call in comics WFH: Work For Hire. This is when one is hired to work on characters owned by the hiring company. The company owns whatever work you do outright, in return for payment: the old Marvel payment voucher used to assert that they owned all rights to the work “in perpetuity, throughout the universe.” The contracts may still state, as they once did, that Marvel Comics is the legal author of the work.
I entered the comics medium as creator and writer of original works. I had been invited to pitch a Batman piece to Archie Goodwin, which I did because Archie fucking Goodwin asked me to my face to write something for him, and Archie was a legendary writer and editor and when he asked you to do something you did it and tried very hard not to disappoint him.
(Archie once also said to me that one secret to longform superhero comics writing was that they were structured like soap operas, only with fight scenes instead of love scenes.)
Some people happily spend their entire careers in WFH, delighted to write the superhero characters they grew up with and to extend the arc of their stories. Some of us walked into it backwards and had to make adjustments. There are values to working in that area: it pays actual money, it sharpens your technical chops, it’s operating in relatively common culture (any issue of X-Men sells more copies than most novels I read), and you get to play around a bit.
So how do you approach something created by someone else, probably re-created by other people a dozen times, that you don’t own? If you’re a TV writer doing an episode of STAR TREK or LAW AND ORDER, you have a ton of guardrails and you obey and enjoy them. In comics, things are always a lot looser and more ad hoc, and one of the ways to think about it is F FOR FAKE.
The story goes that Orson Welles was hired to edit the footage of a documentary shot by a guy called Francois Reichenbach about a great art forger called Elmyr. Now, editing is its own kind of authorship, its own art and language – subordinate to the original piece, sure, but editing can change everything about and around it. As Welles got to work, so the story goes, he discovered he could do a better job by adding some things. At some point, the biographer of Elmyr whom Reichenbach interviewed on film was discovered to have produced a hoax biography of Howard Hughes. And then things took a turn. Welles grabbed Reichenbach, Gary Graver and Oja Kadar and turned Reichenbach’s footage into a film essay on fakery.
He was still doing the job of turning Reichenbach’s material into a film, mind you: technically, he was still as much a hired hand as anyone writing Batman.
F FOR FAKE is in fact one of my favourite Welles films. It’s warm, clever, mischievous and relaxed. He shoots footage of his own crew. Whole scenes are set around a dinner table as Welles holds court and contextualises the material. It’s as close to having dinner with a happy and garrulous Welles as we’ll ever get. It’s also full of Welles’ interests, obsessions, and personal mythology.
Reichenbach’s material is still in there. Reichenbach’s original intent – a film about Elmyr and forgery – is still in there. Welles serves the underlying material, but he expands it, grows it, adds something of himself into it. He did what he saw as the best possible work-for-hire job by transforming the material he was given into a form he felt was more true to itself and to him.
Taking the work done by other people and infusing it with your interests, obsessions and your notes for experiments. So, yes, you’re experimenting with other people’s money. But since that money is buying your material outright, and they have the right to make you clean up your lab and produce something closer to their desires in the event you produce a three-balled monstrosity, it’s a fair exchange.
In Welles’ case, he makes F FOR FAKE: perhaps a minor work in his oeuvre, but a wonderful experiment in filmic lyric essay. And he did it off a work-for-hire job.
So there are ways into work for hire, ways where you can do the job of repainting a house you don’t own, experiment and learn a whole bunch of new things on their dime, sign your work, apply your new skills and discoveries to your own work later and get shit done with your creative soul left intact.
It can be hard to gain perspective on work for hire, if you find yourself in that position. Maybe this will be useful. Or maybe I just found you a good film to watch.
Actually picked this up yesterday. Here’s why I picked it up:
I wanted to keep alive the nature of my practice, which is to travel the question rather than try to answer it, and then to unsettle my subjects so that they tilted a little as in Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘… tipping/of an object toward the light’. My intention has been to draw things to the surface, place them in arrangement while keeping the parts apart, and to leave the reader free to cast their own light and to turn these things over in their own mind as I have in mine. I’ve come to think of this form as the exploded essay, and a record of how thought builds and ideas emerge. Each is a series of short texts that cast light on one another rather like the aspects of a poem. They align artworks, myth, strange voyages, scientific scrutiny, reminiscence and a poet’s response.
If we crave truth unmediated by art we are chasing a phantom. We need the commentator’s craft, even to make sense of the news. We need historians, not to collect facts, but to help us pick a path through the facts, to meaning. We need fiction to remind us that the unknown and unknowable is real, and exerts its force. Some writers and adaptors disclaim responsibility. They say the public wants escapism – so let’s give them what they want. They cheat their audience as politicians cheat when they make uncosted pledges: the bill comes later, when we lose a grip on our own story, and fall into individual distress and political incoherence.
In this first lesson Valéry announces with all the solemnity of a shibboleth a dictum he had coined years before in the Cahiers, “L’œuvre de l’esprit n’existe qu’en acte” (the work of the mind exists only as act), by which he means two things. There is the obvious first meaning: a piece of music exists only when performed, a choreography when danced; a painting needs to be looked at, a poem to be read or read aloud.
But for Valéry it also means that the centre of interest is always situated some way upstream of the poem, the painting or the score, in the transformation and response, triggered by an initial stimulus, in the body of the artist himself. The stimulus may be a contrast of two colours, a disposition of planes in a landscape or a repeated sound, all of which excite a response in the creative mind. Insisting on the idea that an organism seeks a return to equilibrium after receiving a stimulus, Valéry often describes this process in the mind (the “act” described above) as an imbalance to be corrected, a symmetry to be restored or a dissonance to be resolved. For the artist the work of art can be the means by which a return to equilibrium is brought about.
Valéry attempts to give an ordered “map” of what he called the “implexe”, essentially a physiological reflex translated onto the conceptual and image-making plane of the mind. His ambition is to produce an esthétique généralisée, just as Einstein, whom he knew and admired, had produced a theory of general relativity.
The most-often repeated piece of advice in visual storytelling is “show, don’t tell.” As I have railed before, this leads to the most egregious repeating moment in television: “You need to see this,” someone is told over a communications device, and then it cuts to that person standing with some other people looking at the thing they apparently need to see. This is because the writers have had “show, don’t tell” dinned into their heads.
AND THEN SOMEONE TELLS THEM WHAT THEY’RE LOOKING AT ANYWAY.
Seriously, pick any bit of action tv, particularly streaming, and see if it happens in exactly that way. See how many times it happens. See how many times it happens in a single episode.
It’s a principle. Not a rule. Everyone else may treat it like a rule, but it’s not and you don’t have to.
There’s a bit in the old British show WAKING THE DEAD where crime scene manager Frankie tells prickly insane Detective Superintendent Boyd over a radio link, “Boyd, you need to see this.” And Boyd yells “Just bloody tell me!” Whoever wrote that is my comrade.
It slows things down. You need to choose slowing things down, not accepting it because you think there’s a rule that must be followed.
Like most things, show-don’t-tell is fine in its place. But it’s not connective tissue. It’s a bad end-of-scene gambit, it eats up useful time, it’s so over-used that it creates no anticipation or potential energy any more, and it’s not interesting. Images and words can strike sparks off each other with their frictions. The words can be telling a slightly different story than the image, and thereby enrich each other with meaning. If you want emotion, then emotion comes in the telling of something, not always the showing of it. Show don’t tell is a tool, not a rule – choose when to use it and you’ll surprise your audience.
