đ I am writing these notes at Brick, a magical mystery no-bullshit publishing platform. Turns out writing goes much faster when I don't have to hit âPublishâ or do
git commit
.You can use it too â check it out at Brick.do.
I hope to rewatch Synecdoche, New York soonâand while reading about it I stumbled upon a BAFTA lecture from Synecdocheâs director and writer, Charlie Kaufman.
Here it is: http://www.bafta.org/media-centre/transcripts/screenwriters-lecture-charlie-kaufman. Worth reading in full.
Kaufman is talking about public self-therapy, opening up, and what comes out of it. Perhaps heâs even talking about public self-therapy as a way of life. Iâm not sure.
Letâs start. Why is he doing the speech at all?
I think I wanted to do [with this speech] something true and I wanted to do something helpful.
Relatable, perhaps boring. Nobody would mind being true and helpful, right?
But his way of being true and helpful is not giving advice. It is talking about his own experience giving this speech, and simultaneously trying to explainâdemonstrateâhow this kind of thing can be useful to others.
Note: his experience is not the only possible experience. It wonât be useful to literally everyone. But to someâyes.
The primary experience he is going to dissect is âwanting to be likedâ, the fear of opening up, an entirely valid fear:
What complicates it, in addition to the fact that thatâs a hard thing to figure out, is that I also struggle with wanting you to like me. In my fantasy I leave here and people are saying, âGreat speech!â you know, and, âNot only is he a great writer but boy, I really learned something tonight, he really brought it!â So as much as I know that this neediness of mine exists, I also have a difficult time extricating myself from it, or even fully recognising it when itâs happening.
This is the struggleâby wanting to be liked, you give up a) being true, b) being useful to others, and c) advancing your own development. It sucks.
His brain tries to find excuses to not be true, to make âbeing likedâ a good thing:
Iâve had that nightmare a lot of times, and I know you want to be entertained, so for me to calculatedly not entertain you in order to be true seems sort of selfish.
So he tries to counter-convince himself and others that this thingâtalking about your own experience rather than trying to entertain peopleâhas value:
What can be done? Say who you are, really say it in your life and in your work. Tell someone out there who is lost, someone not yet born, someone who wonât be born for 500 years. Your writing will be a record of your time. It canât help but be that. But more importantly, if youâre honest about who you are, youâll help that person be less lonely in their world because that person will recognise him or herself in you and that will give them hope. Itâs done so for me and I have to keep rediscovering it. It has profound importance in my life. Give that to the world, rather than selling something to the world.
A side-note: yes, it has value, but it doesnât mean itâs the only thing you âshouldâ do. Nobody is saying that being yourself is âenoughâ, or ânot enoughâ, or whatever. The only claim is that opening up is good for you and for others. And yet, for many itâs still a controversial claim, and this is why this speech is necessary.
Does he say that everybodyâs inner world is interesting and thus writing about your own experience is a good thing? No. Heâs saying that you wonât be able to convince yourself that youâre interesting, anyway, but ratherâitâs the only thing you can offer so you have no choice:
[When writing, do yourself, not somebody else.] It isnât easy but itâs essential. Itâs not easy because thereâs a lot in the way. In many cases a major obstacle is your deeply seated belief that you are not interesting. And since convincing yourself that you are interesting is probably not going to happen, take it off the table. Think, âPerhaps Iâm not interesting but I am the only thing I have to offer, and I want to offer something. And by offering myself in a true way I am doing a great service to the world, because it is rare and it will help.â
Itâs simultaneously true that âinternal experience â entertainingâ and that âinternal experience = can be useful to othersâ. This is the tradeoffâyou wonât be entertaining to many people, but you will be deeply helpful for some people.
And itâs a hard tradeoff to swallow. Being entertaining to many people seems just so much cooler. In fact, it might not even be a âuniversallyâ good piece of advice, but itâs okay. The speech is self-demonstrating. Itâs great advice for some, and useless advice for others, and itâs fine.
The bit about âthis speech is self-demonstratingâ is very important. He doesnât just say âdonât care about being likedââhe shows how it feels to not try to be liked. Heâs doing, right now, not-being-liked as an experiment.
âThatâs two hours Iâll never get back,â is a favourite thing for an angry person to say about a movie he hates. [âŚ] So you are here, and I am here, spending our time as we must, it must be spent. I am trying not to spend this time, as I spend most of my time, trying to get you to like me; trying to control your thoughts, to use my voodoo at the speed of light, the speed of sound, the speed of thought, trying to convince you that your two hours with me are not going to be resented afterwards.
As a part of the experiment, he actually wrote a piece on how it would feel to give the speech, before giving the speech. He reads it outââheâ in the quote below is Kaufman himself:
He is to speak on a subject, he has been chosen as an expert, but the subject is unclear to him and heâs lonely, is the truth of it. He feels trapped under burdens so immense, the history he carries, the thwarted relationships, the compromised relationships, the longing that drapes him like a shroud. The want. He is a wanting machine, ever wanting. He looks out at the audience. They donât know what to make of him. Why is he reading this story up there? He is to be giving a speech about screenwriting. Someone in the audience is happy, a train wreck is in progress and he is witnessing it.
The speaker knows this. He believes he has considered every possible audience reaction. He wants to be liked by them, he wants to be admired and adored, he wants to be found attractive. He hates himself for this, this is the stuff that it always comes down to and his goal here tonight was to be different. He wants to be real. Real in this contrived place. But he canât be. The truth suddenly stares him in the face, this is who he is, this is the real him. This needy, wanting thing. Up here for the same aggrandisement as everyone else who does this. âLook at me.â
Another aside: is everybody a âneedy, wanting thingâ? Nobody knows. There is great danger in listening to people who sound certain, and thinking âThey must be fools for acting so certain! Everybody is differentâ. Yes, everybody is different, but perhaps certainty is what it takes to get people to even consider they might have the same issue. Itâs easy to say âoh, Iâm not Xâ when youâre told âsome people are Xâ, but when you are told âyou are Xâ, maybe you will consider it more seriously.
In fact, this is what Kaufman needs for himself to consider it more seriously. âPossiblyâ is the mind killer in self-therapy. And he admits that the speech is for himself more than it is for others. (It doesnât mean it will be useless for others, but admitting your true intentions matters a lot.)
The speaker stands on the stage, he looks out at the audience, he doesnât really know why heâs here. Not really. More and more in his life he finds himself in places he canât explain, not really explain. He knows heâs here to give a speech and heâs told himself he intends to do some good with it. But he knows that reason crumbles to dust under investigation. What he wants is to change who he is. Each predicament such as this one, each challenge, he accepts. He accepts in order to move himself to the next level of truthfulness.
He contrasts it with a different approach: go and say something entertaining. Give useful advice. Deal with rejection one way or another, but without accepting it. And as you do it, the wound will grow deeper.
If you donât acknowledge this you will come up here when it is your time and you will give your speech and you will talk about the business of screenwriting. You will say that as a screenwriter you are a cog in a business machine, you will say it is not an art form. You will say, âHere, this is what a screenplay looks like.â You will discuss character arcs, how to make likeable characters. You will talk about box office. This is what you will do, this is who you will be and after you are done I will feel lonely and empty and hopeless. And I will ask you for my two hours back. I will do this to indicate my lack of love for you.
I will do this to communicate that you are a waste of time as a human being. It will be an ugly thing for me to say. It will be intended to hurt you. It will be wrong for me to say. It will lack compassion. And it will hurt you. And you will either dismiss it or take it in, but in either case you will hear it and it will affect you. And you will think about what you can do next time so you can be more lovable, and with that your wound will be buried further. Or you will think about how hateful people are and how your armour needs to be thicker so that you can proceed as planned with your ideas. With that, your wound will be buried further.
What is this wound? This piece of Kaufmanâs speech is the most cryptic and probably the most important. Try to decipher it.
I do believe you have a wound too. I do believe it is both specific to you and common to everyone. I do believe it is the thing about you that must be hidden and protected, it is the thing that must be tap danced over five shows a day, it is the thing that wonât be interesting to other people if revealed. It is the thing that makes you weak and pathetic. It is the thing that truly, truly, truly makes loving you impossible. It is your secret, even from yourself. But it is the thing that wants to live.
I think the wound is not merely âfear of rejectionâ, fear of being disliked. It is that, but combined with the belief that itâs not okay. Either not okay to be someone people dislikeâor not okay to care about being dislikedâor not okay for other people to dislike youâor all of these at once. And as you try to fight it, challenge it, bury it, you also make it harder for everybody else with the same wound.
I donât think everybody has it as bad as Kaufman. If you do, reading Scattered Minds or The Courage to Be Disliked might help. But, regardless of whether you share the experience, it was a beautiful piece of self-therapy.