The Necessity of Strangeness
The absence of strangeness is sorely felt in American media. That your average Marvel blockbuster is predictable is a given. What is worse is that it never feels genuinely strange. There might be moments of weirdness, but these are largely ornamental and have little bearing on the outcome of the film. The same is true of narratives from Stranger Things to Sally Rooney’s Normal People to even the fantastic new Top Gun movie. Strangeness does not equal quality, nor is it identical to being subversive or surprising. Works can be daring, thoughtful, and well-written without being strange. Still, the persistent absence of strangeness nonetheless coats the media landscape with a desiccating feeling of sameness. Whether the work is good or bad, whether it takes place on an alien planet or in suburban New England, the underlying assumptions are that it should employ clear chains of reasoning and an airtight cause-and-effect structure. There’s the assumption that the setting, even if it involves magic incantations and channeling spirits, should adhere to identifiable empirical laws and formulas.
Critics call narratives “illogical” as a condemnation, as though stories have an obligation to adhere to logical principles. This hostility toward the illogical and irrational relates quite directly to our perceptions of the world in which we live. Aristotle explicitly advanced the idea of narrative as mimesis: art should copy life. We consciously accept the validity of this hypothesis even if we’ve never read Aristotle because the alternative, that art is completely separate from life, would make art a largely absurd venture. The belief that art should be lucid and rational comes from a belief that life is, on a basic level, lucid and rational too.
Few would assert that the murky, the enigmatic, and the senseless are a part of existence. Cartesian rationalism asserts, however, that these elements can be understood logically as part of a larger pattern of existence. What appears meaningless fits into larger, coherent narratives about existence. These narratives can be devotionally optimistic, such as the common “everything happens for a reason,” or cynically pessimistic, such as the oft-quoted “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” While different in tone, these statements are similar in that they are general, abstract statements that claim to reveal truth applicable to specific experiences. Reasoning is crucial; it allows us to understand existence as more than a series of disconnected events. Stories too need reasoning. A story without any reasoning at all would be malformed mush. What differentiates artful narrative-making from bland anecdotes is the use of specific structures, techniques, and principles.
Well-reasoned stories are, thus, not antithetical to strangeness. What is antithetical to strangeness is a dogmatic, mechanistic rigidness that asserts that logic and reason can provide a complete, crystalline view of how the world functions and how people will act. Both Cartesian reasoning and empirical, scientific observations can tell us a lot about the world, but their power is limited. The world is ultimately not made of logical precepts, nor is it only made of numbers and statistics. Emotions, values, and experiences cannot be erased from our view of life without that view becoming so reductive as to be useless. Yet these are parts of existence that cannot be made clear and unambiguous, particularly considering how they are constantly in flux. A true view of art as mimesis would embrace the mysterious, the strange, and the unsettling.
Certainly, characters should not make strange decisions in order to allow a miraculous heroic escape or to solve narrative problems that couldn’t be solved if a character acted “normally.” Contrived writing is cheap—not because a character acts illogically, but because that character acts in a way that is not organic to the person they are. Determining who a person is, however, proves difficult. The psyche is vast and capacious, refusing to give way to clear rational categories and classifications.
Scottie’s obsession in Vertigo is not rational, and neither is Betty’s in Mulholland Drive. Tony Soprano acutely recognizes the problems with his world, yet he cannot force himself to be better. These characters don’t lack the capacity to reason, but reason can’t help them become the people they want to be. The short-sighted viewer might condemn these characters for not being reasonable enough, but such an objection derives from the viewer looking at a given situation the characters face as an abstract, isolated incident. Asking why Scottie doesn’t notice the negative consequences of his actions is equivalent to asking a drowning victim on a tempest-tossed sea why they have difficulty grabbing a life preserver. Saying these characters act irrationally is technically true, but one could more accurately say they’ve reached a position where reason, abstract and colorless, is of little help to them in achieving the clarity they seek.
Pure reason seeks to separate itself from individual ideals, sensations, and experiences, but even if such a feat were possible, it would be practically useless considering how real situations are never separate from these factors, but rather hopelessly knotted in a confluence of dozens of different desires stemming from thousands of different experiences. The concept of an isolated, self-contained situation wherein reason alone has the capacity to provide perfect, piercing clarity is as much of a comforting fantasy as any Harry Potter book. Imagining the trolley problem without considering that one of the people on the tracks might be a friend of yours, and that your boss might have given you an ultimatum not to pull the lever, and you might be feeling distressed from a particular news story you saw yesterday, presents an image antithetical to reality.
An astute study of the social conditions characters encounter can help us better understand their actions, but reason and empiricism cannot explain these actions. A different person under the same circumstances might react an entirely different way; their inner lives remain strange. At the end of Psycho¸ a psychologist monologues about why Norman Bates made the choices he did, yet this hardly makes his actions not-strange because it fails to explain why even a mentally damaged character with a distorted psyche necessarily must make those choices. The experience remains disquieting and disorienting, immune to rationalist explanations.
That these characters make decisions that we find inexplicable, even bizarre, is not a problem with the writing, but by the widespread valorization of logic not as a useful tool, but as a method for attaining absolute understanding. These characters consistently make strange choices that logic can penetrate but not fully explain. Unlike in the average blockbuster, the likes of Better Call Saul and Mulholland Drive comprehend that our lives don’t operate on clear chains of causes and effects. We can’t be fully rational beings, not because we’re stained with passions and desires, but because reason is insufficient to help us explain our interactions with the chaotic, fluctuating world in which we live. Our perspectives, yearnings, and experiences can be informed by reason, but they aren’t bound or determined by it. Strangeness remains.
John Dewey in Art as Experience discusses how, when the viewpoints of art clash with those of conventional morality, the blame is inevitably placed on art. In reality, he claims, the blame should be placed on our ideas of morality, whose flaws art allows us to overcome. The same is true of the relationship between art and the mundane and explicable. Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky discusses the “defamiliarization” that characterizes the best writing, which describes actions in such a way that there is a stripping away of convention and rationalizing, allowing the action itself to be seen and understood. The demand of logic that has swallowed popular culture is a demand to reduce actions, decisions, and experiences to the explicable and the clear.
This process results in art that can be satisfying but rarely daring, reaffirming the idea that the world is a place that can be fully comprehended by those who are smart and savvy enough. The wild, uneasy side of our experiences, the side that can be contextualized but never reduced to logical precepts and reactions to material conditions, is thus erased. Strangeness is necessary because it provides a relief from this mechanistic thinking. The disorienting and uncanny are inevitably components of existence. Ignoring them doesn’t make them go away.
Joshua Fagan is a writer and critic currently residing in New York City. His creative work has previously been published in venues including Daily Science Fiction, The Fantastic Other, and Star*Line. He is the author of the Amazon bestseller The Philosophy of Avatar, an extended study of Avatar: The Last Airbender in the context of the Western philosophical tradition. As an academic, his work focuses on the intersection of literature, myth, and technology in the aftermath of Darwin, and his critical work has been published in The Robert Frost Review. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of the literary speculative-fiction publication Orion’s Belt. His YouTube channel has received over 1.6 million views.