The magic switch

If you understand the good magic trick, and I mean really understand it right down to the mechanics at the core of its psychology, the magic trick gets better, not worse…I like stripping things down to the absolute simplicity, and it seems like a ball and a hoop and a person is about as simple as you can get….You can’t look at a half-finished piece of magic and know whether it’s good or not. It has to be perfect before you can evaluate whether it’s good. Magic is a fantastically meticulous form. You forgive other forms. A musician misses a note, moves on, fine. He’ll come to the conclusion of the piece. Magic is an on/off switch. Either it looks like a miracle or it’s stupid.

—Teller, to This American Life

Thinking inside the panel

Note: Every Friday, The A.V. Club, my favorite pop cultural site on the Internet, throws out a question to its staff members for discussion, and I’ve decided that I want to join in on the fun. This week’s topic: “What non-comic creative type do you want to see make a comic?”

Earlier this year, I discovered Radio: An Illustrated Guide, the nifty little manual written by cartoonist Jessica Abel and Ira Glass of This American Life. At the time, the book’s premise struck me as a subtle joke in its own right, and I wrote:

The idea of a visual guide to radio is faintly amusing in itself, particularly when you consider the differences between the two art forms: comics are about as nonlinear a medium as you can get between two covers, with the reader’s eye prone to skip freely across the page.

The more I think about it, though, the more it seems to me that these two art forms share surprising affinities. They’re both venerable mediums with histories that stretch back for close to a century, and they’ve both positioned themselves in relation to a third, invisible other, namely film and television. On a practical level, whether its proponents like it or not, both radio and comics have come to be defined by the ways in which they depart from what a movie or television show can do. In the absence of any visual cues, radio has to relentlessly manage the listener’s attention—”Anecdote then reflection, over and over,” as Glass puts it—and much of the grammar of the comic book emerged from attempts to replicate, transcend, and improve upon the way images are juxtaposed in the editing room.

And smart practitioners in both fields have always found ways of learning from their imposing big brothers, while remaining true to the possibilities that their chosen formats offer in themselves. As Daniel Clowes once said:

To me, the most useful experience in working in “the film industry” has been watching and learning the editing process. You can write whatever you want and try to film whatever you want, but the whole thing really happens in that editing room. How do you edit comics? If you do them in a certain way, the standard way, it’s basically impossible. That’s what led me to this approach of breaking my stories into segments that all have a beginning and end on one, two, three pages. This makes it much easier to shift things around, to rearrange parts of the story sequence.

Meanwhile, the success of a podcast like Serial represents both an attempt to draw upon the lessons of modern prestige television and a return to the roots of this kind of storytelling. Radio has done serialized narratives better than any other art form, and Serial, for all its flaws, was an ambitious attempt to reframe those traditions in a shape that spoke to contemporary listeners.

What’s a little surprising is that we haven’t witnessed a similar mainstream renaissance in nonfiction comics, particularly from writers and directors who have made their mark in traditional documentaries. Nonfiction has always long been central to the comic format, of course, ranging from memoirs like Maus or Persepolis to more didactic works like Logicomix or The Cartoon History of the Universe. More recently, webcomics like The Oatmeal or Randall Munroe’s What If? have explained complicated issues in remarkable ways. What I’d really love to see, though, are original works of documentary storytelling in comic book form, the graphic novel equivalent of This American Life. You could say that the reenactments we see in works like Man on Wire or The Jinx, and even the animated segments in the films of Brett Morgen, are attempts to push against the resources to which documentaries have traditionally been restricted, particularly when it comes to stories set in the past—talking heads, archive footage, and the obligatory Ken Burns effect. At times, such reconstructions can feel like cheating, as if the director were bristling at having to work with the available material. Telling such stories in the form of comics instead would be an elegant way of circumventing those limitations while remaining true to the medium’s logic.

And certain documentaries would work even better as comics, particularly if they require the audience to process large amounts of complicated detail. Serial, with its endless, somewhat confusing discussions of timelines and cell phone towers, might have worked better as a comic book, which would have allowed readers to review the chain of events more easily. And a director like Errol Morris, who has made brilliant use of diagrams and illustrations in his published work, would be a natural fit. There’s no denying that some documentaries would lose something in the translation: the haunted face of Robert Durst in The Jinx has a power that can’t be replicated in a comic panel. But comics, at their best, are an astonishing way of conveying and managing information, and for certain stories, I can’t imagine anything more effective. We’re living in a time in which we seem to be confronting complex systems every day, and as a result, artists of all kinds have begun to address what Zadie Smith has called the problem of “how the world works,” with stories that are as much about data, interpretation, and information overload as about individual human beings. For the latter, narrative formats that can offer us a real face or voice may still hold an edge. But for many of the subjects that documentarians in film, television, or radio will continue to tackle, the comics may be the best solution they’ll ever have.

Radio free will

If you haven’t yet listened to Invisibilia, the new podcast launched earlier this month by NPR, I encourage you to download its latest installment right now. As soon as it was over, I simply thought: “I’m going to remember this for the rest of my life.” It reduced my wife to tears in two out of three episodes. And if it’s so successful, it’s because it takes place exactly where radio lives and breathes. It describes itself as a show about “the invisible forces that control human behavior,” which means, in practice, that it’s a show about thought, and particularly about how we’re shaped by our thoughts and those projected on us by others. Which is really what radio professionals do for a living. Radio’s true medium isn’t words, or even sounds, but the sequence of thoughts in the listener’s mind. This applies to all forms of narrative, but it’s especially stark in radio, where that chain of thoughts is all there is. Unlike written works, which allow us to reread or skim ahead at will, radio is ruthlessly linear: while it might be possible for a listener to replay a section of a podcast, it’s unlikely to happen. Everything has to be as clear as crystal in the moment. And Invisibilia is the product of a creative milieu that has spent years thinking in practical terms about the nature of human thought and awareness.

I happened to start listening to Invisibilia shortly after reading Radio: An Illustrated Guide, a comic book produced fifteen years ago by the cartoonist Jessica Abel and Ira Glass of This American Life. The idea of a visual guide to radio is faintly amusing in itself, particularly when you consider the differences between the two art forms: comics are about as nonlinear a medium as you can get between two covers, with the reader’s eye prone to skip freely across the page. Yet this little book is as elegant and practical an introduction to any narrative craft as I’ve seen—it leaves you wanting to make radio. It also attunes you to the many small bits of trickery that a show like Invisibilia uses to manage the presentation of its material. Its hosts, Alix Spiegel and Lulu Miller, keep things obsessively organized while maintaining their chatty, casual tone. Whenever they introduce a new character or story, they tell us to sit tight, reassuring us that we’ll circle back soon to the central thread of the episode, and they’ll often inform us of exactly how many minutes an apparent digression will last, which is the auditory equivalent of thumbing through the pages of a book or article to see how much longer a section has to run. It’s obvious as hell, but it works.

And much of the interest of radio as a metaphor for other kinds of storytelling lies in how visible its bones can be. As Glass notes in Abel’s book:

This is the structure of every story on our program—there’s an anecdote, that is, a sequence of actions where someone says “this happened then this happened then this happened”—and then there’s a moment of reflection about what that sequence means, and then on to the next sequence of actions…Anecdote then reflection, over and over.

Glass compares this structure to that of a sermon or homily, and he concludes that radio is an inherently didactic medium. It isn’t enough to tell your listeners something; you also have to tell them what it means. What’s funny is that this sermonizing doesn’t necessarily emerge from a particular social or political agenda, although it certainly can: it’s more a solution to the structural problems that radio presents. When we’re reading a book, we can pause to consolidate our thoughts and figure out how we feel about the material, which satisfies us that our time has been well spent. The ceaseless stream of radio doesn’t permit that kind of silent reflection: as listeners of Serial know, if you stop to try to figure out what you’ve just been told, you’ll miss the next tidbit of information. A compelling radio show allows us to briefly outsource that critical faculty to the program itself, which frees up those levels of the brain to continue paying attention.

It’s a good trick, but also a risky one. Radio can be insanely persuasive to dittoheads and latte-drinkers alike because its didacticism is embedded into the fabric of the medium itself, which so shrewdly mimics our stream of consciousness that it can be hard to separate it from our own conclusions. Even television can’t compare: if we’re watching a news broadcast, we can tune out for a second to gather ourselves, trusting in the stream of images to keep us oriented. Radio, at least in its most successful incarnations, doesn’t allow for that kind of distance. (If it does, it needs to be as consciously built into the structure as anything else, which is why programs like This American Life often use extended musical breaks to provide five seconds or so of breathing space.) If it’s true, as many say, that we’re entering a golden age of podcasting, it also means that we need to be aware of the kind of thinking, or the suspension thereof, that it creates. Radio can be used to educate us, move us, or entertain us, but it’s only after the program has ended that we have a chance to think for ourselves. Invisibilia is a masterpiece of the form, but it’s also an example of the same invisible forces that it describes. And if its message has any meaning, it’s that we occasionally need to make time for the kind of scrutiny that it gently requires us to abdicate.

When reality isn’t good enough

Is reality a bore? Well, it depends on who you ask. Edward R. Tufte, in his wonderful book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, devotes many pages to combating the assumption that data and statistics, being inherently dull, need to be dressed up with graphics and bright colors to catch the reader’s eye. The result, Tufte argues, is chartjunk, ink wasted on flashy design elements that have nothing to do with the information presented. Instead of investing resources in tarting up uninformative numbers, he says, one’s time is much better spent unearthing and analyzing relevant information. The best data, presented simply, will inspire surprise and curiosity, but only if the numbers are interesting and accurate, which requires its own kind of skill, ingenuity, and patience. Tufte sums up his case magnificently: “If the statistics are boring, then you’ve got the wrong numbers. Finding the right numbers requires as much specialized skill—statistical skill—and hard work as creating a beautiful design or covering a complex news story.”

Replace “statistics” with “stories,” and “numbers” with “facts,” and Tufte’s sound advice applies equally well to authors of nonfiction. It rings especially true in light of a number of recent controversies, both of which center on the question of when, if ever, reality should be manipulated for artistic reasons. One is the release of The Lifespan of a Fact, a book chronicling the five-year struggle between essayist John D’Agata and factchecker Jim Fingal over the accuracy of an essay finally published by The Believer. The other, of course, is the furor over a recent episode of This American Life, in which Mike Daisey’s account of his visit to a Chinese factory making components for Apple was revealed to have substantial fabrications. These are very different cases, of course, each with its own underlying motivations, but both are rooted in the assumption that reality, by itself, isn’t good enough. This led D’Agata and Daisey to embellish their stories with what might, at best, be termed “artistic” truth, but which can also be seen as the prose equivalent of chartjunk: falsehoods inserted to punch up the uncolorful facts.

D’Agata’s case is arguably the more instructive, because it’s founded on what appears to be a genuine artistic interest in blurring the lines between fiction and nonfiction. The original version of his essay, which uses the real suicide of a young man named Levi Presley as a means of exploring the culture of Las Vegas, contained countless departures from the facts, all purportedly for artistic reasons. Some were minor, such as changing the color of some vans from pink to purple because it scanned better, while others were fundamental: in his first paragraph, D’Agata refers to a series of strange events that occurred on the day of Presley’s suicide, including a tic-tac-toe contest against a chicken—none of which actually took place on the day in question. In other words, his list of unbelievable facts is literally unbelievable, because he made them up. In D’Agata’s hands, truth isn’t stranger than fiction; instead, fiction is exactly as strange as fiction, which raises the question of why we should care. In the end, his inability to find the real Las Vegas sufficiently colorful comes off as a failure of will, and the fact that he embellishes facts throughout the essay while keeping Levi Presley’s real name—presumably to gain a free artistic frisson from the circumstances of an actual suicide—seems like a particularly unfortunate case of wanting to have it both ways.

At least D’Agata has some kind of literary philosophy, however misguided, to justify his deviations from the truth (although it should be noted that most readers of The Believer presumably read his article as straight journalism). The same can’t be said of Mike Daisey, who altered the facts in The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs to make it sound as if he personally witnessed events that occurred a thousand miles away, and to manufacture completely imaginary incidents for the sake of manipulating the audience. (In retrospect, it’s especially horrifying to hear Daisey’s voice grow soft and choked as he describes an injured factory worker’s first encounter with an iPad, a fictional incident that he describes as if it actually took place.) Daisey’s excuse, unlike D’Agata’s, is an emotional one: he wanted the audience to feel something, to be touched, implying that the true facts of his trip weren’t moving enough. Meanwhile, the legitimate journalism on Chinese factory conditions, as conducted by such reporters as Charles Duhigg and David Barboza of the New York Times, is far more fascinating, and it doesn’t depend on fabricated melodrama to make an impact.

As Tufte says, if the facts are boring, you’re using the wrong facts. But isn’t there a place for the judicious mingling of reality with fiction? Tomorrow, I’ll be talking more about this, and the importance of truth in labeling.