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Essays, Not Rants! 239: Am I Making Sense?
Sometimes I wonder about the accessibility of this blog. Not literally, I mean “Essay Snot Rants dot net” is really easy to remember. I’m talking about the content here.
Sure, I talk about movies a lot. And a lot of the times those movies are blockbusters. You’ve got your discussions on why Rey is the best in The Force Awakens, your discussions on how Age of Ultron portrayed masculinity, and the close reading of an epic monologue from Pacific Rim. Popular movies being discussed deeply! But then you’ve got my oddly well thought-out in-depth analyses of dumb, underperforming
But then I’ve talked about comics like Mockingbird, which, alright, comics are kinda mainstream, but not as much as movies or tv, but probably more so than Don Quixote or trying to find the middle of the venn diagram between Borderlands 2 players and those who have read Jacques the Fatalist. And then last week I prattled on about an off-Broadway play that had just started previews in New York.
Now, that last one is where things get tricky. Most everything I talk about on this blog is readily available. Streaming services like Netflix or old-fashioned piracy makes movies and tv easily watchable; video games are sold everywhere, as are comics and books to an extent. But something like Vietgone is trickier; it’s a far more exclusive experience of a story. So if I wanna talk about it and how it uses language to personalize the immigrant experience, I gotta use more words to introduce the work and describe what I’m talking about before I can actually jump in to discussing why what I’m talking about is relevant.
Which kinda of begs the question: how important is it for stories to be accessible? And I don’t just mean plays here, I’m also thinking of video games.
Hear me out.
To watch a play there either has to be a recording of it available (of which there isn’t for, say, Fun-Home or Vietgone) or you have to be somewhere where it’s showing (like New York) and be able to afford the price of admission.
To play a video game there either has to be a recording of it available (which is, but then there’s a lot of gameplay you’re watching, not playing) or you have to have a system capable of playing that game (so, a PS4 for Uncharted 4) and, in addition, be able to beat said game.
But the inaccessibility of a story doesn’t necessarily make it less important. I’ve heard Ulysses jokingly referred to as the final boss of literature, but it’s also one of my favorite books for the beauty it lends to the everyday. It is a shame that I can’t refer to it as casually as I do Iron Man, but it doesn’t make the story any less worthwhile.
So am I making sense? Or is this just me prattling on about where stories get told? To be honest, I’m not entirely sure. There are so many stories out there, so many that I love but can’t share with someone due to importance of being there. Fun-Home closed on Broadway, so if you see it you won’t see the one I saw, and watching a video is different than being present. Similarly, a video playthrough of Uncharted 4 won't do justice to the experience of being able to explore Nathan Drake’s house.
Maybe this is related to what I wrote a couple weeks ago about how books are a conversation with the reader that creates a personal experience. Maybe it’s just about how stories are so related to who and where you are. I’ll never heard the stories your family told you the way they were told, but does that make them any less? Sure, that bedtime story isn’t The Princess Bride, and it’s nowhere near as accessible as that movie, but that doesn’t make it less important.
Because those stories matter and make sense to you, and I guess that’s enough.
Writer’s Note: Woah. This one turned out ramble-er than I expected. Might be because I’m tired from a six day work week and finishing up post on The Conduits (remember that?). In any case, this rant (definitely a rant), is getting the bloggish tag.
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