The only comment I dared make once we’d finished, exhausted from untangling the knots that we ourselves had tied, was that the recourse of a fiction within a fiction should be forbidden. That business of several levels had already been overexploited, and it was beginning to show its true colors as an easy way out, a “whatever.” One might even begin to suspect that in our technological state of globalized civilization, there were no more stories, and to make one — or the remnants of one — work, the stories of the stories had to be told.
But had it not always been like that? Wasn’t reality, to which all stories aspired, the story of stories?
Feeling discouraged, as if we were infecting each other back and forth and that this was all the result of mental fatigue, I shook my head and said that I refused to follow him along that path of subtleties. I refused to defame reality. I reminded him of my motto, taken from the work of Constancio C. Vigiclass="underline" “Simplify, my son, simplify.” Reality was simple. It did not have levels. That stupid movie might have taken us a bit too far afield, and now it was time for us to return to our point of departure.
To return to our point of departure, in practice, meant to change the subject. And, in fact, we were about to do so when we realized how much time had passed and that it was time to say goodbye. Along with time, our desire to change the subject had also passed. My friend said that on balance he could affirm that he liked the movie. Or, at least — he corrected himself after thinking about it for a moment — after our thorough critique of it, he was now starting to like it.
In the conversation, I partially agreed with him, but at night I had time to do so fully. Above all because there was nothing to agree or disagree about: he hadn’t said that the movie was good, but rather that he had liked it; with taste, one can only concur or not. My own taste had not been so complacent, but with the reflections surrounding my mnemonic exercises, it became more flexible. I was experimenting on myself with the benefits of repetition. It is not that I was comparing that ridiculous movie lacking all substance to our conversations, which were pure substance. But the mechanism was similar. Whatever was improvised and stuttered and stammered, sometimes without proper syntax when we got carried away in the excitement of the discussion, I then polished and smoothed out and varnished during my nocturnal repetition. Out of sheer chance, my friend had had a hint of the aesthetic sensations my secret activity afforded me; this placed him and his taste in the perspective of art and thought once again, that is, a transfiguring perspective.
Hence, anticipating my own remembering, I had no problem telling him that I also liked it, or at least that I did not regret having seen it. It was ingenious, and had given rise to a range of musings. Adventure was never completely squandered. Its explosions released fragments that, as opposed to all the other objects in the universe, did not obey the laws of gravity; instead, they were like miniature universes, expanding in the mental vacuum, and definitely enriching time.
My friend pondered the metaphor, but for his part he thought that they did act in accordance with gravity, even metaphorically: because the movie’s creators arranged things so that all the episodes led back to a central point, and he found this to be its main value. Not only of this movie in particular, but rather of all the ones he’d ever seen. Not that he saw that many; they were a byproduct of his evening fatigue, his need for relaxation after a day of high-level intellectual effort. Merely entertainment, but one against which those same efforts rebounded, and by so doing, were enriched. And even with the small amount of attention he paid those movies, he could not fail to be amazed at the skill with which they tied up all the loose ends, and the threads of the characters’ motives, and made all the divergent subplots coincide. Movies made purely for entertainment were a business; nevertheless, they employed the recourses of serious art, and with the help of some kind of miracle, they turned out well. The most surprising aspect was the enormous number of movies made (that had been made and would continue to be made), and all of them without fail were and would be puzzles. How did they do it?
I was more prepared to explain how Kant had written his three Critiques than how an adventure movie was made. Even so, I had one idea. I had read somewhere that there was never only one screenwriter who developed the script for a movie, but rather a group, and a large group at that. This was understandable, due to the huge capital investments involved. The studios could not depend on the inspiration or talent of a single individual, because that would be like betting everything on a single card, and North American businessmen prefer to play it safe. In the first place, of course, because the creativity of a single person necessarily tips things too far toward the personal and the idiosyncratic, necessarily limiting the target audience. But the principle motivation is practicaclass="underline" to tightly pack in the attractions by filling the dead times that inevitably exist in a story told by a single person. Refined after decades of practice, the assembling of those groups of screenwriters follows a well-thought-out division of labor: one specializes in jokes, another in romance, another in science, another in politics; there is an expert in verisimilitude, one in police procedural, one in psychology, and so on. From the artistic point of view, the method has its advantages and its disadvantages. Personal unity of the imagination is lost, and one runs the risk of reducing the flights of fantasy to a normative level of consensus and conformity. A superior, transpersonal unity, however, can be achieved. After all, the solitary mind is also subject to multiplicities that create consensus around unconscious conventions and conformity, and it is very possible that a real multiplicity could liberate energies that would otherwise remain dormant.
We need to be sensitive to these arguments because to a certain extent they could be applied to us. What is attractive about conversations is right there: in the other being truly an other, and in his thoughts being unfathomable to his interlocutor. When I go over conversations at night, alone, I turn into the artist or the philosopher who works his material at his will, like the director of a movie who does what he wants to or can do with the script. I, like all of them, have to face the superior unity of collective creation. However, the simile of movies is not quite right because I do not work with cameras and actors and stage sets but rather only with thoughts, and thoughts are made only of words.