Lifting The Veil Of Familiarity And Seeing The World Anew

How the veil of familiarity is a beautiful key to making successful creative works.

Some People Know Some Things

I’m constantly trying to work out what makes art, entertainment and content good, what makes it successful and how those things align and intersect. Just because it’s impossible to answer these questions definitively, that doesn’t mean we can’t get a deeper and richer understanding of the forces at work. There’s a tendency to recoil from even the attempt - to hide in the shadows of subjectivity and mutability. Decision-makers in creative industries seem to comfort themselves with the idea that such things are utterly unknowable. There’s a popular conception that to seek to predict audience behaviour, to bet better and reduce risk, to ascertain what qualities might help a creative work resonate is to try to know the mind of god¹. 

William Goldman’s all-caps assertion that “NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING”² has seen a notable uptick in quotation as the streaming industry convulses through its various growing pains. It’s from his sparky, acerbic and illuminating book, “Adventures In The Screen Trade” and he goes on: “Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess—and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.” It’s the italics and the addendum that are so often omitted. “Nobody knows for sure but people can get better and better educated at the relative apparent guesswork of creative business” is considerably less memorable and unlikely to be diligently parroted by the fearful. 

Obviously, some people know some things. The hit rates, either creatively or financially, of the MCU’s first 26 movies or Pixar or HBO or A24 or Blumhouse or countless others easily prove that. Don’t get me started on “lightning in a bottle” - another nugget of received wisdom used incessantly to further promote the gospel of unknowability. You’d think that the idea that it’s entirely possible to steer one’s fate towards the production of more reliably successful creative works would be excitedly received as good news but, remarkably, it’s often rejected as hubris or mendacity, witchcraft or heresy. The nature of this field has left me sometimes feeling like a positive Cassandra, cursed to know paths to repeatable success, but forever be pointing the way, trying to corral and cajole people towards their own best interests.

The Veil Of Familiarity

It was in this context, in a moment of frustration, that I thought I should step back, get out of the weeds and ask myself, “What can be said about any successful creative work, regardless of genre, medium, length or subject matter? What do they all do?” The first thought - simple, obvious, potentially trite - that came to me was that “they change you”. My mind went back to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s searingly brilliant 1821 essay “A Defence Of Poetry” in which, among an array of astonishingly clever things, he says that poetry “strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty, which is the spirit of its forms.”³ It’s so well said that I’m reluctant to parse it - but just that idea that the world, simply through out continued experience of it, has become ordinary, commonplace, dull to our eyes and our minds, so the job of poetry, art or creative works of any kind is to awaken its true nature and reconnect us with it is powerful, simple and gloriously hopeful.

It rings true. Almost every successful creative work, documentary or poem, article or short film, every resonant “piece of content” I could think of has that admirable quality of letting us see its subject with fresh eyes. Anaïs Nin wrote, in 1968’s The Novel Of The Future:

“It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.”

At the risk of dissecting beautiful things to see how they work, helping people see things anew is often the very purpose of form - the reason why we’re engaging in making something creatively in the first place. Victor Shklovsky, was enquiring into the same thing in his 1917 essay, Art As Technique:

“The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar," to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.”

He called it ostranenie or “defamiliarization”.⁴ There’s something a bit clinical in that - I suppose to be expected from Russian formalism - but it’s not just about making things less familiar-seeming. It’s about bringing the subject closer and into sharper relief, feeling the ideas more distinctly, understanding something you know well in a clarifying new way, going back to your life refreshed and with new perspective.⁵ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in another work of staggering genius, 1817’s Biographia Literaria, expressed this idea as well as I can imagine anyone ever doing, describing Wordsworth’s contribution to their collaboration, Lyrical Ballads, writing that he would:

“…give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.”

“Awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom”. Wow. There’s a connection here to shoshin, the Zen Buddhist concept of beginner’s mind, a state in which the veil of familiarity dissolves.⁶ Not every creative work, of course, has to reach towards triggering enlightenment in its audience, but there definitely is something universally useful and impactful to understand here. Crucially, it isn’t just useful for classic Russian literature and romantic poetry, but for anything that seeks to connect its viewer, reader or listener more deeply to something.

Let’s say it’s a video about tomatoes. Ask yourself how to bring a viewer closer to the essential qualities that make up tomato-ness. Look at it under a microscope? Slice and dessicate it? Shoot a timelapse of a tomato growing and ripening? Find new angles to shoot it from? Cook it using every possible method? Taste every variety? Interview great chefs from different cuisines about the significance of the ingredient? Blow it up in slo-mo? Follow it from seed to purchase? Explore tomato history?⁷ What gets you closest to the quiddity (the essential nature or quality of something that makes it different and distinct from other things)⁸ of a tomato? How do you elicit thousands of comments to the effect of “I will never look at a tomato the same way ever again” or “I can’t believe I watched a 40 minute video about tomatoes”? Richard Feynman noted that “everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough”⁹ but it’s not just depth in the sense of rigor and detail, but twisting things round, reimagining and recontextualizing them, being playful and cross-disciplinary, finding new and strange angles - and romanticizing the world.¹⁰

Links

• Andy Baio’s Waxy is a remarkably long-running and endlessly reliable interesting set of links. I’m so often glad I clicked.

• For example, this crazy “hand-drawn, crowd-pirated” version of Bee Movie.

• A lot of people hold forth about MrBeast. Max Read did a much more even-handed and thorough job in his NY Times article and subsequent appearances on The Daily & The Culture Journalist.

• I’ve noted for ages how strange it is that YouTube’s brand is so inextricably linked to the YouTuber, when their product/offering is really the concept of video on the internet. Aaron Shapiro wrote about YouTube and the fundamental difference between centrally-managed and centrally-facilitated.

• This playlist is an extra-good one, cause it’s been a while:

“The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity.’ The child enjoys his cold meat, otherwise dull to him, by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savory for having been dipped in a story…by putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it.”

― C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature

1. Isaiah 40:13 Who hath known the mind of the Lord? and who hath been his counsellor, to instruct him?

2. “Raiders is the number-four film in history as this is being written. I don’t remember any movie that had such power going in. It was more or less the brainchild of George Lucas and was directed by Steven Spielberg, the two unquestioned wunderkinder of show business (Star Wars, Jaws, etc.). Probably you all knew that. But did you know that Raiders of the Lost Ark was offered to every single studio in town—and they all turned it down?

All except Paramount. Why did Paramount say yes? Because nobody knows anything. And why did all the other studios say no? Because nobody knows anything.” Adventures in the Screen Trade, William Goldman, 1983

3. “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar; it reproduces all that it represents, and the impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who have once contemplated them, as memorials of that gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which it coexists.” A Defence Of Poetry, Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1821

4. “In studying poetic speech in its phonetic and lexical structure as well as in its characteristic distribution of words, and in the characteristic thought structures compounded-from the words, we find everywhere the artistic trademark - that is, we find material obviously created to remove the automatism or perception; the author's purpose is to create the vision which results from that deautomatized perception.” - Victor Shklovsky, Art As Technique, 1917

5. “We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.” 

                                 - TS Eliot, Little Giddings

6. “The mind of the beginner is empty, free of the habits of the expert, ready to accept, to doubt, and open to all the possibilities. It is the kind of mind which can see things as they are, which step by step and in a flash can realize the original nature of everything.” - Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Shunryu Suzuki

7. The tomato wasn’t widely eaten in Italy until the 17th or 18th century.

8. "So the gusto of Munden antiquates and ennobles what it touches. His pots and his ladles are as grand and primal as the seething-pots and hooks seen in old prophetic vision. A tub of butter, contemplated by him, amounts to a Platonic idea. He understands a leg of mutton in its quiddity." - Charles Lamb, On The Acting Of Munden, 1823

9. “I don’t know anything, but I do know that everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough. My son is like that, too, although he’s much wider in his interests than I was at his age. He’s interested in magic, in computer programming, in the history of the early church, in topology–oh, he’s going to have a terrible time, there are so many interesting things. We like to sit down and talk about how different things could be from what we expected… Yeah, he’s a lot like me, so at least I’ve passed on this idea that everything is interesting to at least one other person. Of course, I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not. You see?” - Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure Of Finding Things Out

10. “By giving the commonplace a higher meaning, by making the ordinary look mysterious, by granting to what is known the dignity of the unknown and imparting to the finite a shimmer of the infinite, I romanticize.”  - Novalis, Pollen And Fragments, 1798