Earning the endgame

All the great magicians know it. The reason they never show you how a trick is so smartly performed right under your nose is not completely because it will show them up to be a fraud, a con-merchant, a fake or that it will reveal their secrets so they can never perform that trick again (though that clearly plays a big part of it). Part of the secrecy is that deep down, we simply don't want to know, really. Because we will never get that excitement of not knowing back. Once we know how a trick is performed, that's it. Pack up and go home, life wouldn't be worth living. Ask Quentin Tarantino. No matter what was in that briefcase in Pulp Fiction (unless it was the Elvis costume from True Romance, because that would be pretty sweet), it will never live up to not knowing what is in that briefcase. Our expectations are simply too high. Lost creator J.J. Abrams, the ultimate promoter of the importance of mystery in fiction has a great article from the special mystery edition of Wired Magazine now online which I enjoyed reading this morning...

"True understanding (or skill or effort) has become bothersome€”an unnecessary headache that impedes our ability to get on with our lives (and most likely skip to something else). Earning the endgame seems so yesterday, especially when we can know whatever we need to know whenever we need to know it."

"Think back, for example, to how we used to buy music. You would have to leave your apartment or house and actually move your ass to another location. You'd get to the store, where music would be playing on the stereo. Music you may not have heard before. Perhaps you'd ask the clerk what it was and she'd send you to a bin€”those wooden containers holding actual albums or CDs€”and you'd look through it, seeing other album covers that might catch your eye. You'd have a chance to discover something. But wait, you say, iTunes gives you the chance to browse! To that I nod, concede the point, and say, "Bullshit." Those little icons you scroll past mean almost nothing to most of us. Why? Because we didn't get on the train, brave the weather, bump into strangers, and hear music we didn't choose. In other words, we didn't earn the right to casually scan those wooden bins. Lately I go to Amoeba Music in Hollywood just to watch people flip through albums. It's a lost art".

J.J. Abrams even manages to talk about his failed Superman pitch. Funny how bitter every filmmakers past experience dealing with Warner Bros. over Superman have made them...

"In some cases, spoilers don't just prevent the intended experience of something, they prevent the very existence of it. Case in point: I had spent close to two years working on a version of a Superman script for Warner Bros. Then an early draft was leaked, reviewed, and spectacularly decimated on a Web site that I still adore and read daily. It wasn't just that the review was bad. Which it was. I mean, like, kraptastically bad. What killed me was that the reviewer€”and then readers of that reviewer€”weren't just judging my writing. They were judging the movie. A movie that was barely in preproduction and many drafts away from final. A film that ultimately never got made€”in small part because that review, and subsequent posts, made studio decisionmakers nervous. The fact is, that Superman film might have been awful. Or it could have been something else. We'll never know".

Abrams'Star Trek, which no doubt will carry some mysteries of it's own, opens in a few weeks time.