Authenticity is All in the Planning
The great director Orson Welles said “a poet needs a pen, a painter a brush, and a filmmaker an army.” That’s no longer true.
When I was a film student in the 1990s, it was still agonizingly true. To record anything with any finesse, I always needed, if not someone to hold the camera, then at least someone to hold the microphone and the reel-to-reel audio recorder to make sure I had good sound to match a good picture.
To really film a scene right, you needed that army.
Today, I can take my smartphone out of my pocket, point it, and shoot at an unbelievably high resolution. If I really want that old experience, I can wirelessly mike my actors and follow them around with a full frame DSLR in one hand. The effort required is still otherworldly compared to 25 years ago.
I’m glad I had that training though, that I learned to thread film through the sprockets and spools of World War II equipment in the dark and cut celluloid with a straight razor blade. It gave me an appreciation for the task of creativity. Making art loses a tremendous amount when it’s casual.
It also gave me an understanding of contrivance. The great painter Pablo Picasso said, “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.” My students have a really hard time with this.
A student just this semester said she didn’t like to edit her words too much because then her writing felt false.
I understand this. She wants authenticity. People want their lives and loves and creations to bubble up from the heart and land in their laps whole, like a child at birth. Clear away the sand from the eyes, and there is blinking perfection. Sit down at a desk and an essay falls right out of your head, complete.
Except, there is no such authenticity. Babies need parents and guidance to grow. Biographies, relationships, and masterpieces are built—they are strenuous manipulation in the face of our biological instincts. An essay that seems to write itself is one that your mind has actually worked on for weeks.
The truth takes work and editing. Writing a speech, memorizing it, and then delivering it to an audience so that it feels genuine is one hundred times harder than speaking off-the-cuff—but no one ever remembers the unplanned speech.
The planned speech is completely manufactured, but appears natural. All language is performance and good speeches are staged to sound impulsive. An overused cliché phrase like “the fact of the matter” feels more comfortable to say than something original, but it sounds terrible.
Sleep outside on the ground tonight and then go back to your king-sized Serta and tell me what feels more right to you. A time-traveling caveman would fear any structure like a house or a bed and run right back to his cave, regardless of the thread count. Everything that feels comfortable to us was the hard work of ancestors to get past what felt awkward to them.
There is nothing “organic” about farming or small town main streets or your first draft. There is nothing “abnormal” about cities, genetic modification, or writing with a computer. It’s all created and contrived.
A yurt and a robot are equally invented. So are you.
Little that is great was ever spontaneous.