Tyranny of Content

A letter to Arthur:

This evening I viewed "Children of Men," which apart from its preposterous plot and silly ending was top notch. Don't know why people insist on adding a plot to things which are in essence evocations of a particular time and place, real or imagined. Anyway, the movie had great shooting scenes and provided a nice picture of what I expect, more or less, from the 21st Century once it gets well under way. Sort of a shame, really, because it could've been a swell century -- but people are what they are.

This tyranny of the plot – it has to tell a story – is infuriating in all the arts. Who doesn't love a tone poem or the 1812 Overture or Wellington's Victory or Norman Rockwell's covers for the Saturday Evening Post? Who doesn't wonder what Ulysses is about? Who hasn't heard folks complain their life lacks meaning? In other words it lacks a story line, music, and a laugh track.

Don't much care for computer games, or games of any kind, since I always lose, but I bought one once and almost enjoyed it. It was a realtime simulation of Flying Fortress raids on German targets in WW2. What spoiled it for me was the plot. Just when I was getting off on the Zen of flying, droning over a patchwork landscape towards a distant speck of a city, our formation would be attacked by German fighters or some other adventitious distraction.