RLM Trap and the Tyranny of Coherence

I’ve come full circle on evaluating art. For a long time I slipped into the trap of over-indexing on structure and pacing of narrative. Not to say these things are never important, but neither should they be a universal rubric to evaluate every narrative work by. Not everything under the sun that’s worthwhile excels or even cares about that rubric, and a lot of stuff that could be praised for “concise three-act plotting” and “tight character arcs” is, in practice, boring as fuck.

In its worst incarnation it becomes a straitjacket for your brain, reducing your brain’s range of motion and pulling you away from potential new ways of thinking and new modes of creative expression because they’re “sloppy” and “go nowhere.”

I call it the Red Letter Media Trap. For better or worse RLM has become one of if not the default model for how to dissect nerdy stuff in the post-AVGN, post-Ebert world. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were some people’s first meaningful exposure to being articulate about the nerdy stuff you like/dislike and delving into the dusty chambers of your mindpalace to actually extrapolate on why some things are good and why some are bad. There’s nothing wrong with that — you’ve gotta start somewhere — but therein lies the trap.

Like any good mid-grade film school alumni, RLM places in an inordinate amount of focus on the three-act story structure -- keep an eye out for keywords like “neat,” “efficient,” and “good arcs”. The Mr. Plinkett reviews of the Star Wars prequels that catapulted them into fame are the foundational texts for their approach. Spot-on as all of the analysis is, it’s all from the perspective of calling Gotcha on plot holes and incomplete or inconclusive character arcs. Sure a lot of that is aggregated into larger critiques of how the prequels represented a monumental failure of imagination, but the guideposts were established for the RLM trap.

“Why does RLM only ever praise Marvel Cinematic Universe movies?” Because when your rubric for a successful creative work is coherence and “bringing it all together,” you’re going to be condemned to reserve your thumbs-ups solely for the franchises that have millions and millions of corporate dollars behind them to hire industry directors, veteran industry scriptwriters, and legions of hardened veteran script doctors to make sure everything in your interconnected fictional universe is locked in tighter than the septic tank on the International Space Station. Fine and good, but lately I find myself yearning for the ephemeralities of striking imagery, undertone and vibe, driving action or mind-roiling horror or psychedelic reverie. Is a creative work really a waste of time if it touches on one or more of these deep psychic nerves, opens up new ways of thinking and feeling, but doesn’t quite “pull it all together” in a buttoned-up work the way a Hollywood script doctor would’ve done it?