I mentioned the term “Aesthetic Residual” earlier this week but left it at that.
I returned today to take it up and find out what I meant.
The thoughts here are still provisional, still exploring, but I returned with a few good idea nuggets to leave on the shelf for a future me to find.
Take a look.
Note: ‘aesthetic residual’ is a placeholder term.
My definition is still evolving.
Summary
Modern stories1 have a very useless feel, they are either pure escape or frustratingly incomplete and don’t offer any souvenir, an absorbed interaction template for example, to bring back to reality.
Before getting to the failures of the middle, let’s start at the two extremes. At the minimalist end are suggestive poems from the imagination, spare atmospheric concepts, places that invite the audience to inhabit and complete as they like. The other end is the fully realized masterpiece where even the details have believable sub-details.
At first I thought my definition for aesthetic residuals was something like the committee-built mashups made from spare parts. Catchy one-offs fused into a grotesque that lack a competent follow through. The committee tried to make a commercial venture of it anyway. But that didn’t quite feel right, these are a thing, they’re just something else.
But now I believe the true aesthetic residuals here are those still visible suggestive concepts. To get at them, one needs to un-embed the raw idea from the final product. To do it is tough, there is a lot of confusing noise in these faulty stories. The unfinished gems are hard to grasp because they were only half there to begin with. I suspect in a year I will be defining it somewhere else nearby.
Those incomplete leftovers tempt us into making a bigger story because we can invent missing pieces in our minds and ignore the bad ones before we speak them into existence, we can easily neglect the rough edges that don’t line up. Cognitively speaking, I propose that this is a result of our limited working memory (about 5±2 slots). This limitation helps to make our day dreams feel functional. We simply lack the capacity to notice that all the story details we invented don’t make a complete picture. It’s fun anyway.
What to do? Aim for the poles: make suggestion the game and let the audience do the work. Don’t publish a masterwork until it’s really finished. Don’t be a sellout that’s being lazy for money. Avoid making messy middle ground pieces packed with loose ends that interfere with having a good make-believe time. Make something to be proud of.
Resonant Phrases
“liminally latent spaces” or “latently liminal spaces”
“workaday craft pieces”
“amputated series”
“zombie corpses that carry on”
“reanimated shamble”
“unfinished gems”
Open Loops
If we had a larger working memory would that help or hinder story craft?
Can we put a finer finger on what constitutes truth in fantastical tales?
I suppose if we could somehow fix up those middle ground stories, that would be a billion dollar idea. Perhaps it’s about taking away instead of adding more. Make room for the audience to add their own juice. The question is, can subtraction turn middling works into workable stories? It’s a collaboration of subtractive synthesis.
Is it the audience or the author that is responsible for making meaning in these stories? Where is that boundary? Naively I thought this was a settled litigation in favor of the audience, once the author completes their work. But they inhabit the system that the author creates to guide them, so authors had better make a good system.
What do we lose in these failed stories? What do we gain?
Ref: 25.2p69-71
I’ll clarify that I mostly mean movies with this. And a lot of television. So you can calibrate on recent movies that I did like: Dune 1 & 2, the D&D movie, I was pleasantly surprised by Superstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, the Knives Out movies. I think you probably get the idea. ↑