What I mean by that is that Pepe was never intended to be a fascist/reactionary shibboleth, and was originally intended to be a college stoner that liked to pee with his pants fully down because it felt good, man. Attempts to steer Pepe back with additional comics, lawsuits, and attempts to regain control of the character by the original maker had mixed results and to this day Pepe (and Groyper and other mutations) is unfortunately still generally a fascist/reactionary shibboleth, especially when seen in the wild and presented by strangers.
There was some validity to the original usage of “the curtains were fucking blue” in its original context, especially when it came to the kind of “have a conclusion and look for evidence” sort of bad-faith analysis that was all too common in my upper division courses at university. Not every professor did that, of course, but those that did had a prepackaged expectation for what they wanted to find, everywhere, regardless of what the author or artist originally intended for any given work, or even if you subscribe to “death of the author” it was also regardless of what the viewing public or the class for that matter would have otherwise seen with it. A hammer-shaped ideology would see everything as a nail, so to speak.
Having said that, when I see “the curtains were fucking blue!” said online (or worse, in person, as has happened more times than I would have liked), it is used the same way as saying “shut up, I don’t want to think about that, reductionist evaluation of the thing with pretenses of objectivity only” but with less honesty. If a game (or movie, or show) has skeezy or otherwise questionable content or messaging, the curtains must be blue to that person.
The consequences of the proliferation of “the curtains were fucking blue” can be seen in the fairly common belief that the only good art is only photorealistic drawings, done with some specific medium for novelty’s sake, and typically done of pop culture characters that the viewer is already fond of, as is common on Reddit.
Yes, sometimes the curtains are indeed fucking blue. But other times, it is aggressive ignorance to say so. The most extreme example I can think of that I have personally experienced was a discussion on another site about the ideology of 80s television following Reagan-era deregulation of entertainment, news, and media in general, and the topic of GI Joe came up. I personally enjoyed that show as a kid, but as an adult, I could certainly see just how thick and heavy the messaging was from the introduction onward. “GI Joe is the code name for America’s highly trained special mission force. Its purpose: to protect human freedom against Cobra, a ruthless terrorist organization determined to rule the world.” I didn’t even have to look up that text; it’s burned into my memory, so successful was that messaging.
I heard those exact words, dropped like a bomb into the discussion: the curtains were fucking blue. That same person then said that GI Joe had NO political messaging whatsoever, that it was “nonpolitical” in his own words, and that saying otherwise was wishful thinking and, again in his own words, “having an agenda for your narrative.”
I truly believe it’s possible to enjoy (or have enjoyed) entertainment while both criticizing it and accepting criticism of it. But this wagon circling attitude when it comes to literary analysis is disturbingly common now. I still enjoy Tolkien’s works, for example, but for some fans, something like this: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/175 can and has been seen as a threat, somehow, to the continued enjoyment of the work.
The curtains are sometimes more than blue. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. :rat-salute:
Convincing people that words don’t actually mean anything is how capitalists keep the workers from understanding dialectical materialism.
“Show, don’t tell” started being taught as an anti-communist psyop. I wish I was joking.
The associated idea of “draw your own conclusions, you enlightened public, you” was a sort of bogus empowerment message that became so successful that it’s barely even noticed, let alone even thought about, but it’s ideologically related to the consumer choice illusion. No story has any meaningful message, intentional by the author or otherwise, in that way, and it can all be entertainment with enough unexamined ideology to make :zizek: sniff and tug his shirt.
My public school taught Steinbeck, but even the most basic “rich people are screwing poor people” message wasn’t even brought up, let alone discussed. The floor was given to a bunch of bored schoolchildren and they conjured their own meanings for things without any meaningful response or guidance from the teacher, which were about as :agony-shivering: as you can imagine for me, even as a child of the same age.
One example I still remember: “The grapes of wrath are… like… God?” kids nodding “God’s will.” “God works in mysterious ways…”
In Dubious Battle got the dubious distinction of receiving a “both sides are equally right and wrong” :galaxy-brain: interpetation that the teacher didn’t contest, maybe because the :LIB: agreed with it.
:jesse-wtf:
I agreed with your OP but now I feel like you’re going off the rails. Show don’t tell is fundamental writing advice and I don’t understand how it’s supposed to be anti-communist. Fictional works obviously contain many different messages which can be meaningful and worth analyzing regardless of whether or not they’re intentional.
It sounds more like you had a teacher who either didn’t understand the material or was bad at teaching it, than a problem with “show, don’t tell” or encouraging people to draw their own (informed) conclusions, which are both good things.
Would you say these guys also “went off the rails?”
https://mattiasinspace.substack.com/p/is-show-dont-tell-a-cia-psyop
I might be more willing to hear you out if you didn’t make it personal.
It is useful writing advice for entertaining modern audiences (in part because that’s what modern audiences have come to expect, so it becomes self-reinforcing) but I wouldn’t call it fundamental, considering how the “show, don’t tell” mandate is relatively new when it comes to the very old canon of literature and literary analysis going back thousands of years.
I might be more willing to hear you out if you didn’t make it personal.
Did I?? I thought I just said that I didn’t agree with or understand where you were coming from.
I suppose these guys also went off the rails.
https://mattiasinspace.substack.com/p/is-show-dont-tell-a-cia-psyop
But does this mean that, to fight off the malign influence of the military-industrial complex, we must reverse the advice and begin telling instead of showing?
When I think of fiction writers who are infamous for favouring telling over showing, I think of Ayn Rand. I can’t think of any other writer of enduring fame who is so committed to propagating a specific ideology in the pages of her novels. John Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged is ninety pages long, and for all intents and purposes might as well be the voice of Rand herself. Yet Rand’s non-communist credentials are hardly in doubt.
What’s missed in the opposition to “Show don’t tell” on this basis is the reason it is so successful. When applied moderately, without stripping necessary telling, it naturally produces more impactful writing. Novels that, in service of communicating a thesis, ignore the sensory and emotional world of their characters do so at the expense of those characters. They prematurely end the life those characters would have had in the reader’s mind.
I think that link agrees with me? They say that show don’t tell is good advice, in moderation.
Editing in because, wow, even moreso
“Telling” can also mean “telling the reader what to think”. In my view, this truly is bad creative writing. If it is obvious to the reader that you want them to hate a certain idea, or a certain character, the reader will lose his sense of agency. Reading, too, is a creative process. Ultimately, a novel is a series of collaborations between the writer and each of her readers, the end result of which are interpretations that live on in those readers’ minds. To tell the reader how to interpret one’s novel as he reads it is, put simply, a violation of his boundaries.
It is useful writing advice for modern audiences (in part because that’s what modern audiences, like you,
Who’s making it personal again?
have come to expect so it becomes self-reinforcing) but I wouldn’t call it fundamental, considering how the “show, don’t tell” mandate is relatively new when it comes to the very old canon of literature and literary analysis going back thousands of years.
Aristotle, Poetics
If you string together a set of speeches expressive of character, and well finished in point of diction and thought, you will not produce the essential tragic effect nearly so well as with a play which, however deficient in these respects, yet has a plot and artistically constructed incidents…. Character is that which reveals moral purpose, showing what kind of things a man chooses or avoids. Speeches, therefore, which do not make this manifest, or in which the speaker does not choose or avoid anything whatever, are not expressive of character.
Averroes, 12th century Spanish writer
Poetry should not employ the weapons of rhetoric or persuasion. It should simply imitate, and it should do so with such vivid liveliness that the object imitated appears to be present before us. If the poet discards this methods for straightforward reasoning, he sins against his art.
I’m sure I can find more examples, if you like. Isn’t show, don’t tell, like, the entire idea behind poetry?
I didn’t even say it was bad advice to “show don’t tell” as much as it was pushed dogmatically in recent history as some absolute mandate. Some things simply have to be told, including in the classics in antiquity. The predecessor king of the Danes in Beowulf was told to be a good king; there wasn’t a cinematic presentation made of it unless the verbal mention of the overturning the tables of the enemy camp counts.
Yes, I do think you’re making it personal. I actually edited that bit out because I looked at it a second time (“in part because that’s what modern audiences, like you”) and it was unintentionally incendiary in how it sounded. Yes, modern audiences can and do expect that delivery style. I do as well, actually, especially when I go and see a movie. Maybe I should have mentioned that but I didn’t. That’s on me.
My intention is just to discuss the concepts, I still don’t see what I said that was personal.
When you said that show don’t tell isn’t fundamental, I took that to mean that you don’t consider it good advice, except in a modern context, because of how it’s been pushed. If you agree that it’s generally good advice (in moderation) regardless of time and place, then we’re on the same page. Of course the specific phrase is relatively new, but as I showed, the fundamental concept has been around since ancient times.
As an aside, like, the CIA also funded Jackson Pollock and I don’t think his paint splatters are anti-communist. They also funded psychics and shit. They were just throwing shit at a wall to see what would stick, imo.
Starting off with a :jesse-wtf: and telling me I went off the rails isn’t exactly an invitation for anything but a defensive response.
“Show don’t tell” isn’t new, but the school of thought that started making it more mandatory as an expectation is. Especially if that’s taught in a sloppy and slapdash way, it leads to a lot of author intent failing to get delivered. That doesn’t mean that a bad classroom is necessary for intent getting lost in the “showing” and “not telling.” For example, Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” never actually was intended to be a direct criticism of the meat processing industry but instead a wider-reaching message that culminated in a happy ending with Sinclair himself as governor of California. As the well known quote goes, he aimed for the heart and hit the stomach, and we got the FDA as a result. Still a good thing, at least.
Yes, the CIA funded some slapdash things, but I still disagree about both the intent and success of “show don’t tell” academic reformations. A lot of Marxist theory is very wordy to the point of it being a meme even here (“read theory!”), while by contrast capitalist ideologies and liberalism are very easy to absorb and have been internalized for generations in the United States with very little contest. Simply showing something and only showing something to such people with no telling, students or audiences seeking entertainment, isn’t likely to get any message across even if one is intended unless that message is already supporting the status quo.
Since you started your replies with :jesse-wtf: I’ll use Breaking Bad as an example. It certainly shows a lot. It doesn’t tell all that much. It’s entertaining, and Brian Cranston is a fantastic actor. But in that relative void of literary messaging, how many people quote Walter White because he had all the cool lines and see him as some role model compared to those that see that he was enjoying being the bad guy all along and his path toward it (the “breaking” of the “bad”) was a self-justified exercise from the start of his cancer diagnosis?
I’m not even going to say that telling and not showing that would change minds after the fact. What I am saying is that when so much is left open to interpretation, both in the past and now, people are going to take from it what they were looking for. That’s fine I suppose, but if the author’s intentions were different, that may be disappointing to them.
i think it’s just anti-intellectualism from high schoolers who (quite reasonably) don’t see a use for literary analysis.
Tbf you could also argue that the entire concept of shit you are taught having a direct materially beneficial(usually monetary) use is a part of the education system under capitalism fundamentally being built to train a labor workforce.
Even if I dont have any direct practical use for any of the analytical tools I learned or the analysis I occasionally do on my own, I feel that I benefit in some abstract way by having them.
