So our old absent friend Mikka has been tweeting about how dialogues are dead again.
I don't use twitter but I was under the impression dialogues are indeed dead. Nobody was sharing any with me so I figured they were just done.
I clicked on mikka's name just to see what he was posting because I find him funny, and I find a reference to Keith Woods.
Yes, based, a guy got a hit in for our team, that's not why I'm making this post. I'm just leading you through my experience with pictures because I enjoy media-rich posting. I saw this post and was reminded Keith Woods exists and is on twitter. I look into that.
If only dialogues were just
dead. You know. Over. We had fun now they're gone. Little did I know more people are apparently posting them than ever. And they're all degenerating into this.
This one made me smile because I hadn't seen the shirt in a while and it's funny being mentioned in strange places out of nowhere.
Now.
This is not good,
however, this person likes Griffith and appears to have at least imbibed axioms that make him more agreeable than the average person so I'm not going to say I hate that this exists.
You can all talk about the state of how people I've never heard of feel about people I don't care about, but I'd like to bring this back to what Mikka said. The dialogues being dead. Or
undead, maybe.
I really think when these things were good they were really good. A very short lived literary form that rapidly developed, bloomed, and died. As one of the masters said, only about 5 or 10 people really ever understood Gigachad. Not all dialogues contain gigachad, but virtually all are attempting to channel him. Some more thoughts from masters. That
satire is about superiority. And on the characters who commonly stood in the gigachaddian role in dialogues,
they cannot be self-conscious, only entirely themselves. Nobody put any strict form to these dialogues. It's no haiku. It was all feeling, inspiration, and what was funny. But now the good ones are behind us and imitations which obviously don't work are all around us maybe we can put some thought into this and retroactively impose a satisfying order upon what made good dialogues work.
What does
satire is about superiority mean? Sharpest way I think I could put my interpretation of that, satire is when you are above the issues and subjects at hand, not when you are in and amongst them, fighting. Satire is laughing from above. It's when you've already won. Why do the first two attempted dialogues above not work? I think it's because you can feel genuine
anger and
upset behind them. Gigachad (or gigachaddian traits) worn as a mask of composure rather than a mocking expression of authentic feeling. Gigachad I believe works because he's so extreme that he just does not work as a mask. He is such a grotesquely superior figure that someone with taste could only use him as a joke. If someone is directing a true gigachad dialogue at you they are not attacking you. They don't need to. They're laughing at you.
And the characters this general style worked for. Gigachad, Keith Raniere, Jared Leto, BHL, I think what was admired in these characters was how complete they could be. You cannot imagine them undermined, disrupted, appealed to, compromised with, they are entirely what they are no matter how shocking, upsetting, offensive, or wrong that might appear to be. Leto's perversion, to BHL's narcissism, to Raniere's merciless judgment, to Gigachad's characterisation of the moment, the impression one gets from these characters is that they're so solidly and fully formed that they're like walls. You don't engage in dialogue with them, you are faced by them. You can do what you will in the face of them, but they will not yield to you. It's inconceivable.
From here there are two things that can go wrong. One, you use this wall-like nature as a rhetorical tool rather than a joke, basically recreating the "I AM SILLY" meme. Second, you
self-insert as one of these wall-like presences, either directly or through something which stands particularly for you. Again, this is fighting. The purpose of the wall character is not to own someone. They're a comic device. They're very conducive to these short humorous scenarios because they're so simple and static. They're best directed at someone owned by their own absurd nature,
This is not an attack. There is no fight with this guy to be won here. It clearly never even began. The line given to the subject is too particular for Russell's Conjugations to apply. Too personal. It's a pretty damn good affectation of his voice and ideas left to stand in contrast against an equally solid impersonation of the self satisfied attention seeking of BHL. Can anybody look at this and even consider the question of whether the tweeter or the subjects are winning? What's the fight? What are the sides? This is not a punch thrown in a fight. This is an extremely short and sharp comic skit. These people are not enemies to be fought. They're dolls or props to be played with. Characters. They just become more scenes in this internet Punch & Judy show. If someone can do that to you and make it funny is there any question they are your superior?
Now scroll back up to Keith and friends, even
our guy above, and decide for yourself if we've gone off track.