You ever asked a girl to grab a beer and she said “I can’t; I have to wash my hair”? Well…yeah. It happens. Of course it does. To the best of us. Worst of us.
But…have you ever had a girl tell you “I can’t; I have to go watch Star Trek V”?
There’s a certain audacity to the smirk of that reply that would make me love her for that. It would at least raise a delighted curious eyebrow. Even more so if she wasn’t joking in the slightest. I mean come on… it “nearly killed the franchise.” That’s a quote from thirty years ago! That’s not my personal opinion. That’s somebody else’s objective, historical, opinion-based fact.
It didn’t. Kill it, I mean. Final Frontier, I mean. Nearly, maybe, but all the same, I’ve overshot the plot and am dangerously close to getting too wrapped up in playing with this metaphor. I want to talk, tonight, on a concept that Gardner doesn’t touch much on. Idiom. And the beauty and danger of metaphor.
To wit – I find myself wondering if I can really appreciate A Tale of Two Cities like the literati of Dickens’ time. If I could appreciate it more, or less, or in a completely different, lateral way that is not carried on that positioning on the back of the time and place and nature of the narrative. Gardner discusses at length the concept of the ephemeral fictive dream. It’s repeated enough in his text to be enshrined as didactic, as holy. All the same, I like it. A lot. And I usually don’t go in for holy, of any sort, but that’s neither here nor there.
What he says is as eloquent and succinct as one could hope to say in trying to express that babel that is the birth of a world in a mind, really. And it leaves me a very interesting question. I love interesting questions. It leaves me wondering, when thinking about something like Dickens or Tolstoy or Dhalgren or Transformers…it leaves me wondering if we are robbed of the fictive dream through the existence of others’ dreams.
To elaborate, to clarify, I ask myself, “Could I watch Citizen Kane and really think, ‘Yeah, this is the best movie ever, plot-wise, character-wise, technology-wise’ when there are so many literary and cinematographic techniques that are being practiced in modern film-making that make it clear that this is completely not the case?” The brilliant imagination of a man like Orson Welles is necessarily trapped in a time when the mechanics of things were not as complex as they are now (very ironic that that is largely the theme of the pathos the audience is meant to feel toward Kane, but again, just an observation, and neither here nor there, for now) and it will shine or suffer because of that.
Maybe that’s not fair. Maybe it’s more fair to say that the complexity is more completely understood now than it was then, when he made his dream. If that’s the case, it is largely due to how many other sprouts of fictive dream have grown up as a result, and how many of those have bloomed into fully-fledged understanding-born practice operating now in the self-same field.
Don’t get me wrong. Of course it’s an awesome movie. A landmark. And it still holds up, without doubt, due in large part to the adherence to that appreciation of the fictive dream that Gardner espouses. But have you watched Wrath of Khan lately? Shatner and Ricardo Montalban don’t exactly inspire quality cognitive suspension of disbelief at this point. And whether that’s a failing of the movie itself, or its age, is, I suppose, essentially the question at hand.
Now I want to be very clear here. There is a very specific reason that this discussion has name-dropped a ridiculous number of literary and pop-culture pin-points, whether I’m recalling Charles Darnay from his grave in the 18th century or I’m talking about the hero-turned-cannibal Shia LaBeouf in his more recent mechanized… OMG that movie is twelve years old!
That reason is nestled in the acronym above, in the nature of the ever-shifting collective unconscious that plays a large part in establishing what is realistic and what is not, and I’m left wondering whether the march of time’s progress in inherently responsible for condemning certain texts to the back shelves in the library or, worse, the recycle bin. Nobody reads Homer for fun. Well maybe me, but even then, it’s the sort of fun that Gardner described in previous chapters as laughing and grieving like philosophers, “not like people who have lost loved ones.” (90) It’s a remarkable distinction in a very subdued sentence in a sleepy little chapter, one that belies its incredible significance in the overall arguments Gardner makes in respect to the dream.
When the world turns, and leaves the plot behind, where does the plot go? When the language of existence has become, if not more refined, at least more nuanced and fractal, definitely with more baggage, how does one appreciate something that cannot acknowledge those things, that can no longer operate in real time, on the same level with the reader? Can he appreciate it as a dream, or can he only look at Kirk and say “How did you not know Kahn was on that planet?! The Federation ripped itself apart in civil war because of that guy!” or “Yeah…sorry 1982, that’s not how explosions work in space at all.”