I’m thinking about innovation today. In order to innovate, to create a new business model, or to do anything new you have to abandon some existing illusions. This is alarmingly difficult to do. It’s often hard to watch.
I saw No Country for Old Men on its opening day. I was enamored from beginning to end. Like A History of Violence and Limbo, it uses the suspense genre and subverts it to discuss more significant ideas. Yet, that subversion comes at a price. The audience is frequently alienated.
I think all the films require some inspection (and perhaps introspection) to understand, but I don’t believe that any of them are inordinately complicated. Yet all three films were simultaneously criticized (by the public) and adored (by the literati) for their endings. And I won’t even discuss the Sopranos. There are two elements at work:
First, all these works attempted to introduce new ideas in traditional form. They broke the artistic contract between the viewer and the content producer.
Second, the new elements were not obviously called out. The audience had to come to them.
The best analogy I can draw is a very good consumer product with awesome features and no clean UI. Does that make it smug? Perhaps. But there’s an insistence that the work should stand on its own terms, rather thanobeying convention. In a vacuum, we laud this approach. In reality, it is painful.
