Terror.
Terror without face or form, terror by the subtle knife of implication, that’s terror of the most haunting, paralysing kind.
The Monster that lives in our vivid, livid imagination - he’s the true bad-ass. Because the idea of The Monster is always more terrifying than when you finally see the monster. The face of The Monster revealed is invariably a bit of a come-down.
“That’s what I was getting so freaked out about? That thing that looks like a giant bug made of Styrofoam?”
Spielberg made Jaws (1975) work so well because the film only revealed the shark at the very end, by which time, it didn’t matter how realistic it looked, because you were all the way hooked into the plight of three guys in a boat that needed to be bigger.
It’s where Stephen King falls down, if he falls down anywhere. King is so brilliant at building the tension, that when the denouement hits, it can veer close to anti-climax.
It’s possible to be too damned good a tease.
The Prometheus (2012) viral’s (promoting Ridley Scott’s Alien prequel) were just too good a tease. But I loved how they fed the imagination, even if they fed the imagination too well. After so much smarts and stylistic tease, Prometheus (the movie, not the Titan) needed to be the mother of all follow-throughs. And it wasn’t. It was just ok. Just the monster revealed.
But this isn’t a movie review. This is about success that needs to be toasted, even when there’s a victim involved.
There were three Prometheus viral’s prior to the film’s theatrical June 2012 release:
1. Peter Weyland (as played by Guy Pearce) at TED2023: I will change the world.
2. Then came, “David 8” a kind of 2 minute 30 “corporate” ad for Weyland Corps’s new 8th generation android.
3. And third up was Noomi Rapace, in character as Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, making a video appeal to Peter Weyland, to fund her space mission to find God.
The three digitally-seeded virals were back-stories (to the back-story), askance glances of the Prometheus story universe. It was “Transmedia” theory (if you want the parlance), put into spectacular practice.
The second instalment, “David 8”, was short-form film-making of the finest kind; mesmerizing, creepy in a cool way, curious as hell. (I wanted to hang out more in the story world of the viral executions than I did the final feature length movie.)
Robert McKee, the guy who pretty much wrote the book on story craft, argues that back-story is a waste of time. If the back story is so good, then set the story in it, tell that story instead. While McKee makes a very solid point, story-tellers like JJ Abrams and Damon Lindelof have pretty much lined McKee’s argument up against a wall, and shot it.
Parallel and non-linear time lines, “multi-verses”, grand narratives with crazy-rich character arcs, the TV show Lost turned “back-story” into more story, added byzantine layers of meaning and depth. You don’t create a world by stripping away, but by layering.
Lindelof, who co-wrote TV show Lost and Prometheus, seems to approach “story” as if throwing a stone at an uneven surface, taking joy in the unsuspecting angles, delighting in the ricochet. He creates story worlds you can disappear into and get hit by.
For me, the ultimate highlight of Prometheus’ viral campaign was their first TED viral. It showed Lindelof ignoring the limits of where you can take story, overlapping fiction and reality, bleeding “story” into our “real world”. It marked the first time TED had involved themselves in a promotion, in a marketing tie-up, but then, there was no reason to get precious and say No. The Brand-Fit couldn’t have been snugger. It was the most conspicuously obvious kind of mutual win; Prometheus lands some higher-brow associational kudos, and TED gets some Hollywood-Glam and is introduced to a broader audience.
When Lindelof discussed the canvass of Prometheus at Comic-Con in July 2011, he said, “We’re exploring the future... Space exploration in the future is going to evolve into this idea that it's not just about going out there and finding planets to build colonies. It also has this inherent idea that the further we go out, the more we learn about ourselves.”
Imagination, like space, has no boundaries. In the Digital State, story-tellers like Lindelof are exploring just what that can now mean, blurring the borders, taking us into ever deeper water.
What we know of ourselves is this. What lies in the deep (and the dark) will always tease, excite, and delight us. Whether we are heard or not, we crave happy cause to scream. What we will come to learn, in this digital age, is that there are new monsters to meet, and new occasions for introduction.
So come on in, the water’s likely to be bloody.
SP.
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