The Line Begins to Blur
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Arcadia # 4920 | |
| — Fourth Wall — | |
| |
| year | 346 CE (2409) |
| posted | February 26 2009 |
| previous | Tactical Analysis |
| next | An Added Mystery |
notes
This post's title is from a song by Nine Inch Nails.[1]
A fourth wall discussion inspired this. Its working title was "Fourth Wall in Extremis: In and Out of Character"."It's not all about you, Gray."
Gray stared at me across the table, with his soft, slightly sagging Bassett hound eyes. "I never said it was."
Dominic Gray. I faced my creation across the invisible gulf of reality/nonreality. In reality, the face staring back at me was that of a British actor who appeared once on Voyager as Icheb's father – better known as Romo Lampkin, a shady lawyer on Ron Moore's reimagined Battlestar Galactica. A fascinating character, Lampkin. Memorable. One of my favorites from that show. Ironically, the character I chose him to represent was not British, who went out of his way (at my hands) to point that out to Arcadia's XO, Dante Winters (Oded Fehr). (For the uninformed, it was an intentional contradiction... an inside joke of sorts, known only to me – until now. So there you have it.) In reality, I had never met the actor: Mark Sheppard. It was only his visage... how I imagined him... and thus, it was only my imagination.
I looked around the room... a double-layered room, reality layered over nonreality, the real over the imagined.
The mind is a funny thing. You can almost convince yourself, hypnotize yourself, into believing that what you perceive as unreal, IS real. You can. I can, anyway. When the line begins to blur, you start wondering... Just what is reality? Is it only what we perceive with the eyes in our head, and the brain behind those eyes, processing information fluctuations in the electromagnetic spectrum (light) and sound (air vibrations)? Just what do we perceive? How do we know what is real? How do we know what we're seeing? How do we know?
Imagine if you will, a house somewhere in America. It sits on a street corner, amid splashes of snow on a sunny February morning. It's cold out, with the promise of spring in the air. (It's in Michigan, but anyway, just imagine.) It's a decent-sized house, three floors including a basement, comfortable on the inside, though not much to look at on the outside (painted an ugly brown and apparently in disrepair, in order to avoid tax increases).
On the upper floor of this house, in what used to be a bedroom, converted into an office (if you can call this mess an office), there sits along one wall a gray desk, and on this desk, a computer. It's an old computer, somehow still living beyond its time. At this desk, and this computer, sits a man. (Some debate whether he's really a "man", as certain someones... or, one certain someone, namely his wife... claim otherwise.) He is broke, jobless, and almost out of cigarettes. And what is he doing? What the hell is he doing? He's wasting time, writing this post!
Slapping himself (figuratively speaking), he realizes, too late, that the out-of-character message just sent to the Arcadia sim's out-of-character forum would have been great fodder for a post... in Moonlighting style, conveying his thoughts on the whole concept of "breaking the fourth wall" (as he is now doing). He could have written it to show himself on the UFS Arcadia, for example, in his step-in role as Topaz (remember that weirdo?), or Captain Gray, sitting at his favorite hangout, the conference lounge table, recording a personal log. But the thought came too late. (Damn itchy trigger finger... always ready to hit 'send'
before the brain catches up.) It did seem somewhat hypocritical, considering the content of that message, its closing paragraph specifically. But if he had taken a moment after composing it, he would have seen the brilliant beauty in that approach, and would not now have to write this piece of crap instead, explaining why he didn't. So, give him a little bit of a break.
But... ahh!... there is an escape: The out-of-character board is for personal discussions amongst Arcadia group members. The general public cannot read those posts, as they can in-character posts set aboard the UFS Arcadia. Since this, the post you're reading, was posted on the in-character board, those reading this post... that means YOU... won't know what the heck I'm talking about, unless you read the out-of-character message. Yes! Brilliant! I'm a genius!
I sat in a stuffy, dank room of walls painted blue, buttressed by brown bookshelves filled with books, at a gray desk dotted by more books, scattered bits and sheets of paper, pens, an empty cup, compact discs, a bottle of aspirin, nail clippers, a scanner, stickers given to me by Kill Tomorrow (a local band) at a recent concert, an ashtray, a pack of cigarettes, my wallet, my cellphone, and assorted other minutiæ. The shade was drawn, blocking illumination from a gray, snowy day in February.
That was the reality. But I could look through it, and see what I wanted to imagine: Arcadia's conference lounge, a cleaner, sleeker room, with a long, glossy black table, situated between three brown walls. The fourth wall, a row of large vertical windows evenly spaced, revealed a startling outer environment: Blue slipstream, screaming silently by in long, mad streaks. The only oddenda decorating the table were hologram generators and manual control touch sensors.
I sat near the end of the table, in the chair normally reserved for the first officer. At the very end, in his proper place, sat Captain Dominic Gray. A character. A figment of my imagination... only as real, or unreal, as I elected him to be, like the room and the starship in which we sat, enclosed. Like the slipstream, and the entire universe beyond. All of it existed in my imagination... and yours, those of you reading this.
Yes, the mind is funny. It can run away with an idea... take off into directions unintended, taking control of one's own thoughts along with it. My thoughts. Coming up with the next story thrust of the sim where this all took place, Star Trek: Arcadia, had been proving difficult, amid the various distractions of my life. Piled onto that was the trouble of deciding what to do with Gray – how best to handle this character, whom I had designed to be elusive and shady in background. I kept wanting to delve into that background, clarify it and make it known. But once that happened, what then? What would become of him? Obviously, he was not Gray – Christopher Dominic Gray, in name only. "The Long Journey Back" established, or alluded, that he was not truly the former first officer of this ship. But then who was he? Of course, I knew the answer. But I didn't want to give away the secret all at once... rather, to unveil little details over time, and keep readers guessing. The problem in this approach pressed me to not delve into that background too much, excluding his personal perceptions except through dialog or described mannerisms. How could he come across as a genuine character in this atmosphere, with individual nuances, without revealing too much, too soon?
I wanted to tell a story on a broader canvas, utilizing and benefiting an array of characters. But my mind kept going back to Gray. It kept me... both of us, from going forward. This was not supposed to be about Gray. This was supposed to be about Arcadia. About everyone, for everyone involved. But no matter how I tried to attack the problem, Gray kept coming up right in the middle, a cipher. I had to do something.
I considered just nixing him... blinking him out of existence. But the ship needed a captain. I had no one else ready to take his place. Then, also, I had invested too much into his creation. He provided a major presence in my mind. Characters like that, I had great difficulty letting go, when their very existence became a loose end, an untied thread. They demanded closure. I demanded closure. I could not just toss him into oblivion. He had a life... a life ahead, things to do, places to go. He had his own story. The mystery of his identity remained to be resolved.
Pulling a cigarette from the pack, I lit it up, pondered for a moment and started typing again. In the conference room, the cigarette appeared from nowhere between my fingers. Over a long drag, I studied Gray. He was my creation. He sensed what I was thinking, insomuch as I let him.
"Look," he said, in that soft, slightly rough voice, like sand grains pouring softly through a metal funnel. "I know you're having trouble deciding what to do with me, and all of... this." He waved a hand, indicating the surroundings. "Might I make a suggestion?"
This should be interesting, I thought. My character, telling me what to do. But then, that's what any good character did. Sometimes writers need to keep control. Other times, especially when experiencing the vaunted writer's block, the only thing a writer can do is loosen the reins, and let the mind free.
I nodded. "Let's hear it."
"You're the writer. You already know what you're going to do," Gray said. "The thought is forming even as you write this sentence. But I'll spell it out. Just do what you're doing. Follow it. See where it goes. What do you call it? Nonstop writing?"
"Yeah." I nodded again. I used to go on binges of nonstop writing... the only way to break writer's block, as I was now doing. When faced with a blockage, staring at a blank screen (or sheet of paper), you just start writing, whatever comes out, anything and everything, regardless if it makes sense. Just write. Put down words. It used to take me two or three pages, once upon a time... stuff that didn't make sense. I had it down to half a page, invariably in the form of a story. By the time I reached a few paragraphs, the block was gone. Ideas started coming. It was a start. This, then, seemed enough to get rolling.
Gray helped — or, to be more accurate, that corner of my mind, the place of imagination where he existed, forming a pathway through the block, opening it up, letting creativity flow once again.
"Yes. Thank you, Gray."
He grinned. "Just remember one thing."
"Oh yes yes," I said, waving him off. I already knew what he would say. The thought ran through my own mind, after all. And that thought was: Did anyone else want to read this stuff? Was it at all interesting?
Moot point. If you've read this far, then you've read this far. Here you are, and it's too late to go back. You can't unread it.
With a sigh, and another cigarette (I smoke too much), I glanced again to the slipstream's blue tunnel. The ship was en route to the galaxy's Perseus Arm, a region occupied by two nebulæ five-hundred light years apart, called Heart and Soul. I had already worked out background details for the species dominating this region. I thought they were interesting. Hopefully, others would too. (That's you.)
"Shall we get on with it?" Gray asked. An initiator. I liked that. There are two kinds of people: Those who make things happen, and those who let things happen. I preferred my characters to be the former... the kind of person I tried to be.
All of my characters had me in them. And therein lay an interesting facet of a solution to the dilemma of Gray's identity. Who was Gray? I was.
Gray found himself staring at the slipstream, alone in the room, arms crossed. He lifted one hand, eyeing his palm, and flexed his fingers. "No more of this existentialist nonsense," he said, almost a plea. (I didn't think anyone really found it interesting, despite trying to make it so.)
A com-relayed voice broke in:
"Captain Gray to the bridge. We're nearing the rendezvous coordinates."
"Drop to impulse and send the signal," Gray said. "I'll be right out."
(And that, as you'll know if you've followed the storyline, leads into "Identifiable Suspicions".)
Before he left, Gray found himself inside a computer screen... or... was it a hard drive? A server? A network line?
Where did these characters actually reside? Call it cyberspace... made of pixels, made of imagination, made of nothing really, in the same place where he was, and is, all along. Yet he was still in the conference lounge, with Lieutenant Oberon.
Gray shook his head. "Why do we keep doing this?"
"Doing what?" Oberon asked.
"Breaking the fourth wall."
The men turned their heads, glancing at those reading this post.
"Because," said a third voice, "this is a fictional medium, and fiction isn't real. Reality is more important." From out of nowhere, in walked the ever-mysterious Topaz (that's deus ex machina to you... and you know who you are *coughShuzocough*), joining them. "Unfortunately, most people don't want to deal with reality and try to avoid life, by escaping into fantasy worlds, like this one, where we can make up the rules. Where everything makes sense, if we want it to. It helps to cope with reality."
"Most people?" said Oberon.
"Americans," Gray chimed in.
"Regrettably, it will be their downfall," said Topaz, "when reality crashes in on them, destroying whatever means of escape they have into the unreal."
"It's all in their minds anyway," Gray said. "Deprive them of their television, and their movies and books and computers and all that other nonsense... They'll still have their minds."
"Exactly," Topaz agreed. "No matter where you go, there you are." He frowned as he looked around. Wasn't he just here, a moment ago? Continuing: "To stop all this escapist fantasy nonsense, and grow up and act like true adults, they'd have to change their minds. Escaping into a world of fiction obviously hasn't changed a thing. So now we're trying a different way... by acknowledging the difference between what is and isn't real. We, for example, aren't real. We're just words... pixels... imagined concepts. But the people reading this post—" They glanced out again. "–are real. If their lives and their future and their descendants mean anything to them, they'll stop being ignorant and start thinking about this."
"Thinking about it... and doing something about it," Oberon added.
"Right."
"So," Gray said, "what was the point of all of this?"
"I think we've covered it."
"But... the out-of-character message..."
"Oh. Yeah."
The three men looked to me. With a deft copy-and-paste, I plopped the message in (slightly edited, to protect privacy):
While the fourth wall angle was never intended to become the whole point, it's sort of the only way Star Trek can make sense. There's suspension of disbelief, and then there's realistic suspension of disbelief. It's hard to believe in Hollywood's narrow vision, ignorant of the fact that we have now, or will likely have most of Star Trek's technology before this century is out, at the current rate of advance. Technology plays a large role in determining society, as for example, computers, television and nuclear warheads prove. Steam created the Industrial Revolution. The future will be very different from anything Star Trek portrays, either far more advanced, or not as advanced at all due to social trends. The only way one can accept it is by acknowledging that it's fiction, the product of imaginations in people who are interacting now, not in the future. I always like to cite the TV series Moonlighting (if any of you have seen it) as a good example of the value in breaking the fourth wall. They knew how to do it. Everyone's got a point to make, based on current lifestyles and limitations, and they do it through this medium. And that, itself, is the point. So why pretend it's anything other than what it is?(It's interesting to note that television has produced this mindset in modern audiences... waste time by lazily staring at a hunk of glass, plastic and metal for hours, oblivious, then want to live in that world rather than do something useful or take advantage of what the real world offers. The "opiate of the masses", indeed. It's rotted America, and through America, the world.)Another reason for incorporating the fourth wall angle: In the past, on Arcadia, bold, unexpected directions got the most (and usually favorable) reactions. I've always strived to make Arcadia different from every other Star Trek sim, on or off the internet... as realistic, original and refreshing as possible. That's what sets it apart (or should, and would if people would just "get it"). Imagine a pitch: "Why should you join this sim? What makes it different from all others out there?" (points a finger) "This is why." I'm aware of very few Trek sims that do this, and I've seen many.But even so, again, it's not the entire M.O. My recent post "Identifiable Suspicions" illustrates playing by traditional rules (suspension of disbelief). No fourth-wall-breaking nor God devices, there, nor in Nakencha's post. Fade left after the latter. Since he couldn't at least say 'Hey, I don't feel right for this, because ( ___ ),' only he knows why. However, the fourth wall stipulation was in place when he joined... right on the front page of the Arcadia website... so it's not like he didn't know about it. No one can say it was unexpected.
And, that was that.
▷ TBC ◁
