You Don't Need the Mystery: What the Promotion of a Netflix Show Tells Us About Human Nature
The Netflix miniseries Adolescence is this month’s pop culture phenomenon. The harrowing four-part drama tells the story of a fourteen-year-old boy who murders a female classmate. Set in the north of England, Adolescence has been described as “bleak” and “brilliant” and an indictment of “toxic masculinity.” Even the Prime Minister -- and the former head of the England national football team -- have said they were deeply affected by the program. It is evidently Very Important Television designed to spark conversation and legislation alike.
(I have not watched any episodes of Adolescence yet, mostly because I have the attention span of a hyperactive gnat, and also because I have a son who is nearly thirteen and I don’t want to be badgered or hectored into pathologizing the culture in which he and his friends marinate. I’m sure I’ll get around to it eventually. I have just begun watching Better Call Saul, a show that’s been out of production for three years, but I’m fast-forwarding through the parts that bore me. Left to my own devices – pun intended! – I am an absolute philistine.)
Everyone is talking about Adolescence. And the producers are very, very eager to tell anyone who will listen exactly how they made the show. The cast have done this month’s talk show rounds with great enthusiasm. Stephen Graham, who plays the distraught father and also wrote most of the script, seems to do five interviews a day. Owen Cooper, the teenager with no prior acting experience who plays the young murderer, is doing at least as many. The press can’t get enough of young Cooper’s sunny, mischievous personality, so at odds with the character he plays. Netflix has released dozens of behind-the-scenes clips, explaining how each episode was filmed as a single long, uninterrupted shot. (We are told that the camera, lighting, and sound crew all needed to be very light on their feet, moving with and around the actors.) The intent is clear: the producers are very proud of this piece of work, and they want to satisfy the public’s insatiable – but surely fleeting -- curiosity about how they pulled it off.
Stephen Graham and Owen Cooper will tell you all about this scene as often as you like.
Netflix knows something else: there is very little remaining value in mystery. In the history of entertainment marketing, that is a new conclusion indeed. In 1980, United Artists released Cannibal Holocaust, directed by the Italian horror master Ruggero Deodato. The film is famous for being the first to use the “found footage” trope, a conceit that would only catch on in the United States after the success of 1999’s Blair Witch Project. (My ex-wife Victoria was a horror buff, so we tracked down a copy of Cannibal Holocaust, and even to my very jaded eyes, it was astonishingly graphic. Almost everyone dies in a very unpleasant way.) Deodato and United Artists came up with a clever marketing scheme: pretend that this really was “found footage” of an Amazonian trek gone horribly wrong. The cast of the film was contractually obligated to stay out of the public eye for twelve months following the film’s release. Prospective moviegoers were enticed with the possibility that the deaths they would see were all too real. It worked very well – until an Italian court opened a murder investigation and arrested Deodato. He was exonerated as soon as he produced the bemused – and living -- actors. (Cannibal Holocaust was banned anyway.)
It’s all a good pretend.
The advent of first the Internet, and then social media, make it much more difficult to sustain a fiction like the one Deodato and company peddled. In 2013, when American horror director Eli Roth made his own tribute to Cannibal Holocaust – a nearly-as-graphic picture called Green Inferno – he made sure to shoot plenty of “behind the scenes” material. The cast – most of whom play people tortured to death in the movie -- appear in these extra promotions. They laugh and discuss the various cinematic techniques used to make their murders even more stomach-wrenching. Thanks to the Internet, Eli Roth knew what Ruggero Deodato did not: people don’t need to be tricked into believing the pain is real in order to find the pain compelling. If they find it really compelling, they won’t demand to know if it’s “real,” anyway. They’ll just demand to know the trade secrets.
Game of Thrones – the international television phenomenon of less than a decade ago –was also famous for killing off most of its cast, often in brutal and upsetting ways. After every episode, HBO released a “behind the scenes” video, featuring often touching “exit interviews” with the actors whose characters had just been murdered. When a young girl was burned to death in one particularly grisly scene, the producers made sure to produce the teen actress who explained that not only was she quite alright, but that she had had great fun recording and re-recording the required shrieks of agony. The producers of GoT understood the modern assignment: people are hungry to see exactly how things really work. Showing the craft, the sweat, the effort, and the bloopers doesn’t diminish the magic. Transparency intensifies rather than diminishes the appeal.
“Everyone wants to taste the sausage, but no one wants to see how it’s made.” That’s an old adage, and I’ve heard it used in everything from meatpacking (obviously) to megachurch management. The presumption is that if we saw how the hog or cow is turned into a hot dog, we’d be horrified. That’s always been the claim of the vegan movement, and to that end, they’ve produced countless hidden-camera exposés of slaughterhouses. Those turn out not to be very effective. As most children who grow up on a farm can tell you, raising animals for meat turns very few country kids into committed vegetarians. The Times just ran a great story about young Karis Dadson of Paso Robles, California. Dadson, just 15, raises and shows pigs; her fixed stare of concentration has made her an internet celebrity. Karis loves her pigs. She also cheerfully gives those hogs up for slaughter when they are grown. It’s her family business.
As the Times tells us, Karis and her twin brother Krewe also like a good pulled pork sandwich. The Dadson kids know exactly what’s in that sandwich, and they know how it’s made, and that knowledge does not lead to disgust. It leads to an appreciation that borders on reverence.
There’s a lesson there.
Karis Dadson, who loves the sausage and knows exactly how it’s made.
My daughter Heloise arrived in this world via cesarean section. Her younger brother was born via VBAC (vaginal birth after cesarean.) I was present for both, as fathers are generally expected to be in the modern world, and on both occasions I was cautioned not to “look too closely.” With the C-section, the nurses were worried I’d faint at the sight of the blood and be a hindrance to the proceedings. With the vaginal birth, the doula – who was an Orthodox Jewish friend of the family – was worried that viewing my child crowning would make it impossible for me to be sexually attracted to my wife in the future.
“There are some things a husband should never see,” the doula advised. I nodded politely and ignored her. With both children’s births, I was an eager observer of the entire process. What a wonder to see a human cut open so another human could come out! How amazing to see my son slip into the world – and my hands! How utterly preposterous to suggest that the preservation of desire was contingent on obscuring this sublime – but admittedly visceral – moment! That marriage did end, as mine all seem to do, but my witnessing my children coming into the world was absolutely not one of the reasons why.
Despite what the peddlers of modesty sometimes say, libido is not sustained primarily by concealment. Mystery and illusion are not, in fact, prerequisites for appreciation and longing.
Popular entertainment, animal husbandry, and childbirth are all very different. And yet in each arena, conventional wisdom has insisted that mystery, concealment, and secrecy are essential. That wisdom seems more and more archaic with each passing year. It turns out that we really, really do want to see how the movies are made. We can love the cute pig, know how it will die, and also love the pulled pork sandwich. Husbands can watch their babies born and still crave the body that gave birth. We do not need the curtains, the camouflage, the concealment. We already know that in our digital world, it is more and more difficult to discern what is real and what is fake. As a result, our hunger for the truth – the whole truth – has only grown.
We love the sausage. Tell us everything about how it’s made, we plead, so we can love it all the more.