Cut To

This newsletter, lately, has become an experiment. The experiment is this: can I say less?

My worst quality as a writer is the need to make a grand sweeping pronouncement about what it all means—philosophically, politically, culturally, etc. etc. This is a widespread inadequacy at the moment, and in most moments. The idea is, why would anyone read you unless you were making a big important point? Isn’t that what the work of being a writer is? Struggling through ideas until you reach a point of clarity? The word “essay” comes from the French “essayer” etc. etc.

I wonder about this. Personally, I regret being too certain or too forceful more often than I regret lingering in ambiguity.

I am thinking about something called the Kuleshov effect. It’s a concept from film editing. You can film an actor with a lack of expression on his face, and depending on what it’s cut with, the audience will perceive his emotion differently. Cut from his face to a bowl of soup, and he will appear hungry. Cut to a child in a coffin, and he will appear sad. Cut to a beautiful woman, and he will appear horny.

Writers do this all the time, in a way. A sentence about something mundane. The dishwasher is whirring. A sentence about something big. Fascists are in the White House. Oh, look, the dishes in the dishwasher are about complicity, or my escape into the domestic to avoid the horrors outside. But they are actually unrelated. The dishes are just in the dishwasher.

What’s interesting to me right now is that you can essentially do the Kuleshov effect without the second image. Here’s how:

He is looking at you. What do you think he sees there?

Children are playing on the playground outside. What does that mean to you?

I am drinking tea. What does that evoke in you?

The cut is to you, to the reader, to everything you mean and think and do. Writing can be a lecture, or it can be something that requires something from the reader; it can be a co-creation.

I am tempted to say more, about whether writing this way is always a good thing, about what this implies about how no one seems to be able to focus on books anymore, about ambivalence, about social media, about Jeanne Dielman (a movie I have never watched), about ambient music. But for the sake of the experiment, I am not going to do that. This newsletter is over!