Special Effects

[Repost From Old Site]
As a sci-fi nerd, flashy special effects in movies has always been a given.  It really isn't sci-fi unless there's something fantastic or unreal about it, and in movies this almost always demands the use of prosthetic makeup or CG.  It's something you learn to expect.
But for some reason, I've always disliked it when the CG is in your face, even when it's done well.  Like in the God-forsaken Star Wars trilogy re-release; where elaborate CG scenes are cut and pasted onto otherwise perfect sequences; lasers that were once totally believable beams of fuzzy light are suddenly crisp, three-dimensional lines that only highlight the limitations of 1070's film making; Yoda, who was once a totally believable, even life-like puppet, suddenly jumps and spins and loses every ounce of his wizened credibility.
Or take Avatar, a movie whose entire reason for existing was a masturbatory exercise in computer generated reality.  There, you don't even have the obvious contrast between what's real and what's green screen or motion capture suits.  The CG blends seamlessly, even artfully with the live-action shots.  And yet it still left a bad taste in my mouth.  I, a master of suspending disbelief, walked out of that movie with a pervasive sense of implausibility and falsehood.
I've felt like this for several years, and its only recently that I've been able to put my finger on why
If you keep reading this blog, you will no doubt continue to catch references to the book Self Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Brown and Dave King.  The book gave names and rules to vague feelings I've always had about story-craft, be it in film or on paper.  It crystallized the unknown reasons behind objections I'd never before been able to articulate.  It even managed to shed light on why I don't like overblown CG in my sci-fi movies.
In the book, a great deal is made of the fact that when one is reading a good book, one is immersed to a point where the real world falls away, and only the story exists.  If you've ever read a great work of fiction, you've no doubt experienced this; where you crack a book, blink your eyes a time or two and suddenly four hours have passed.  John Gardener, in his equally life-changing book On Becoming a Novelist (another book you'll probably see me refer to a lot), refers to this experience as "The vivid and continuous dream."  In Self Editing, Brown  and King repeatedly emphasize that all decisions a writer or editor makes must be in service to the vivid and continuous dream.  Every word must be crafted to enhance it, and when a particular turn of phrase or a badly jumbled sentence distracts from it, the reader is robbed of part of the intended experience.
When a word is mispeled, or a sentence is so long that verbs and subjects are forgotten in the sea of unnecessary, obscuring, unwelcome adjectives, when subclauses extend to the point of inviting ridicule from editors, readers and critics alike, when punctuation, is, used... improperly or (without merit), the reader is robbed of a part of that vivid and continuous dream.  Like I just tried to do with that last sentence.  I'm betting some of you had to read it twice to put it all together.  Isn't it maddening when you have to do that in the middle of a book?  Doesn't it draw you out of the story?
That's exactly the point that Brown and King make.  And it's not only errors that damage the vivid and continuous dream.  Subtle stylistic choices like unnecessarily flowery language, or the noticing of details that a particular character would likely be blind to, or the sudden switching from my point of view to his, all of these draw attention to the writers technique and thusly away from the story itself.  A casual or uninformed reader may not notice this explicitly, but they are likely to recall less of the book, or they may have a vague feeling like something is wrong, without knowing what.  That's because the writer's technique or style is commanding your attention instead of the story.  So every creative decision that is made, must be made in service to the vivid and continuous dream.
And that, my friends, is exactly why I hate in your face CG in movies.  When I see a 1970's Harrison Ford talking to a very 21st century Jabba the Hut outside of the Millennium Falcon, I'm not thinking about the fact that Han is trying to talk his way out of a confrontation with a powerful crime lord, I'm thinking about the fact that Jabba stands out against the background.  When I see a tall blue guy galloping through the magical forests of Pandora with his new found alien love, I'm not thinking about the fact that his loyalties are evolving and that the humans are cruelly exploiting a beautiful and wondrous place, I'm thinking about how many interns it took to render that glowing plant, or how the motion capture suit works, or at best I'm thinking about the fact that the background looks really cool.  Either way, I'm not  thinking about the story.
And now that I think about it, this is why I prefer musicality to technical skill in my rock music. When Ynwie Malmsteen is shredding my face off, I'm thinking about how fast his fingers are moving, not about the music, and that's why I can't remember a note of it.  When Inferno is slamming out blast beat after blast beat, there's really no hook that I can tap along to.  But when Hendrix played the national anthem, all I could think about was the ironic and yet patriotic statement he was making, and how his rendition of that song distilled the entire spirit of Woodstock, hell the entire idiom of the 1960's into one piece of simple, expressive music.
So, in conclusion: anything, in any artistic medium, that draws attention away from that which is expressed, and draws attention to how it is expressed does a disservice to those who experience it.  Good art is transparent, and the best artists are invisible.