Well-Defined Constraints

[bcholmes]

One of my boss's favourite sayings (although he tells me he can't remember the original source), has to do with creativity arising not from total freedom, but from a few well-defined constraints.

I've run into some interestingly creative exercises on some newsgroups and bulletin boards. Here's one. Pick a bunch of superheroes, and take all the individual words of their names. Hawk man super man wonder woman green arrow phantom stranger red tornado fire storm. Jumble the words around and create a new super team. It's a fun exercise, and kinda inspires creativity.

In university, one of the things that we talked about was the idea that theatre is an interpretive art. There is a text (the play), but more interestingly, there are productions of a text. Bertolt Brecht and Andrew Lloyd Weber seem to favour the idea of "pre-canned productions", but in general, each production of a play is a very different re-working of the original text. People get to make choices about how to interpret a part. I think that's neat, and I enjoy comparing and contrasting different productions of the same play. This past summer, I saw the fourth production of Into the Woods that I've seen, and I love thinking through the different choices that were made in each case. And I've seen more productions of the Scottish play than I care to count. Consider two of the filmed versions: Lady Macbeth from the Roman Polanski's and Orson Welles' versions are very, very different.

Given that Hollywood is remaking everything that ever made any money, I've been enjoying the exercise of watching two different versions of the same source. Take The War of the Worlds for example. The other night, I watched the new Tom Cruise version. I'm fascinated that he plays a guy who spends the whole movie running for his life. He doesn't think for a moment that he can fight the aliens, so he just keeps trying to survive and keep his kids alive. That's not the template of the typical Hollywood hero. So yesterday I picked up the 1953 version, to check it out. See how it compares.

A couple of years ago, I did a panel at a con on when (if ever) something stops being the same story. Is Smallville no longer the Superman story because of the way it's been "re-imagined"? SF fans, in particular, seem to have this big thing about fidelity to an original text. Mind you, I suspect I'll shed real tears when someone tries to remake Casablanca -- we all have our sacred cows.

One other interesting example: I recently watched Woody Allen's Melinda and Melinda. This film tells two versions of roughly the same story. Both involve a woman named Melinda trying to get her life back together and find love. One version is told as a comedy and the other is a tragedy. Part of the fun of the film is seeing the same story elements show up in both versions. The struggling actor. The "genie" lamp. The piano player.

Comments

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

One of my boss's favourite sayings (although he tells me he can't remember the original source), has to do with creativity arising not from total freedom, but from a few well-defined constraints.

I don't know where your boss got it, but it's an idea I've encountered in quite a few places. Tom Lehrer likes to say his songs are more creative because the constraint of rhyming caused him to think of things he wouldn't otherwise have. I think Hofstadter discusses this in Le ton beau de Marot.

Also Georges Perec's literary output seems to have been inventing constraints and seeing what kind of results they produced.

[king-tirian.livejournal.com]

I think that it's important that the source material never be forgotten, but at the same time I like seeing new generations interpreting The Wizard of Oz or Peter Pan or Cyrano de Bergerac in their own manners. My big hobby horse is eternal copyright, which means that Walt Disney was able to yoink Snow White out of the public domain and may never be obligated to give it back just because he gave names to the Seven Dwarfs.

Admittedly, I'd be a little frightened to see Richard Gere and Julia Roberts playing Rick and Ilsa, but is it really worse than locking away the theme that global justice is more important than personal happiness in a sixty year-old movie that kids can't be paid to watch?

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

I could go for locking away kids who can't be paid to watch Casablanca. Would that work?

[jodawi.livejournal.com]

creativity arising not from total freedom, but from a few well-defined constraints.

a few, or many. creativity for me is identifying the implicit constraints, removing them, and then imposing new constraints. the actual thing being constrained is less important, apparently, as i may not finish using the shiny new constraints :\

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

Did you see the "re-imagined" movie trailers that went around the net a little while back: Shining, Titanic and West Side Story?

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

Yeah, they were really funny.