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I’m playing with a new theory about the theater, and I’m going to write it out here.  It is probably actually not a new theory, according to Braak’s Law of Limitless Frustration:  “If you’ve thought of it, so has someone else.”  I kind of cribbed that one from Ecclesiastes, but I think mine sounds less pretentious.

Anyway, I want to articulate this theory of art in general, and the theater in particular, based on the cognitive function of the brain, according to a theory that I read in New Scientist magazine and thought was interesting.

So, the brain does a lot of different things.  It keeps track of your heartbeat, makes sure you breath periodically, it lets you know that you need to eat, and enables you to enjoy movies starring George Clooney.  There is no doubt that the brain accomplishes a lot, but cognitive scientists have for quite some time been trying to come up with a Grand Unified Theory of Cognition–a single process that would explain all, or most, of what the brain actually does.

The theory that I’m going to work with now is that the brain’s essential function is to gather information and then make predictions based on it.  This is how you are able to, for example, recognize things that you see (patterns of light and color form shapes that you’ve got data on, so you know–it’s a chair!), it’s how you’re able to understand langauge (the meaning of a word is learned through past experience; the meaning of a new sentence is extrapolated from existing data), it’s how you can appreciate music (there’s a lot to this one; have a look at This Is Your Brain on Music).

I’m going to call the two basic things that the brain does–i.e., gathering and recognizing data, and then making predictions based on that data–the statistic and stochastic functions, respectively.  I am not a hundred percent sure that this is precisely correct, but I don’t care; they sound cool, and the good thing about writing artistic theory is that no one expects you to be too scientific.

This is pretty good for me, because I’m always a little more scientific-sounding than my peers, which will lend my theories a little more credibility.  Which brings me to the most important implication of this Stochasm theory:

All art is about the relationship between action and expectation.

Save that, hold on to that, I’m going to do some more explaining.  The brain’s goal, in this model, is to make more accurate predictions about the world, and it’s got a couple of different ways of training itself to do that.  In the first place, it rewards itself for recognizing familiar things–to reinforce the statistical process.  The first time you see a chair, your brain gives you a squirt of dopamine, or what have you.  When you see a chair and successfully recognize it again, you get another squirt.  You probably don’t remember any of this, because all of the basic statistic reinforcement happened when you were a baby.  As you got older, your brain upped the ante a little bit, no longer rewarding you for recognizing the obvious, and instead saving those dopamine squirts for when you recognized things that were increasingly complex.

The next thing that the brain does is that it rewards you for making successful predictions.  If you see a thing that resembles, but isn’t quite, a chair, guess that it probably is a chair, and then sit in it, you get your biological high.  Successful predictions are the basis of the system, so they get better rewards.

There’s a problem with this idea, though:  if people were being rewarded for stochastic processes, why aren’t they always trying to think of new things?  Well, because there’s a punishment for making bad predictions–embarrassment.  You feel stupid, ashamed, disgusted with yourself when you’re wrong about something, not because your brain hates you, but because it wants to make sure that you don’t make that mistake again.  And since making the same mistake twice is worse than passing up a reward a second time, the shame you feel for failure has a greater magnitude than the pride you take in success.

There’s one more thing, and then I’ll get to the important part.  The last thing is surprise–this is a kind of a conditional reward that your brain doles out.  When your predictions are wrong, but the consequences aren’t catastrophic, instead of being ashamed you’re rewarded in a new way.  Your brain assimilates the new possibility, instead of just furiously reminding you not to guess that way again.

Given these principles, I want to reassert my thesis, that all art is the relationship between action and expectation.  Effective art is a particular ratio of statistical pleasure (i.e., new data being recognized as familiar) and stochastic pleasure (predictions being fulfilled OR surprising us).  Any of these things, in overabundance, kills the piece; to much of what’s familiar and your brain doesn’t bother rewarding you for it anymore.  (“Chairs?”  It says.  “Dude, I know what chairs look like.”)  Too many correct predictions and the show is predictable, too many surprises and the brain stops trying to make predictions as it realizes it has no idea what the hell is going on.  It makes you feel embarrassed and stupid for clearly not paying close enough attention.

This means that juxtaposition is the single most important element of art, and I’m kind of upset that we just glossed over it in art class when I was in the sixth grade.  The way that you create surprise is by first using elements that indicate one thing, and then juxtaposing them with something that upsets (or fulfills) those expectations.  Since we process new information mostly serially (i.e., we generally only think one thing at a time), this works both atemporally (like in paintings), and over time (like in the theater).

Let’s find a good example of how this stuff works.  Let’s say, television.  Okay, you know how Fringe is actually pretty dumb, but you keep feeling like you want to watch the next episode anyway?  Why is that?  It’s because J. J. Abrams is exploiting your desire to have your predictions satisfied–he’s giving you elements that force you to guess what’s going to happen next, but then doesn’t show what happens next.  He is creating suspense by increasing the lag time between expectation and action (in some cases, increasing it over the course of a hundred episodes).

Then look at Law & Order.  Law & Order has been on for a million years, everyone’s watched it, and every episode is basically the same.  Law & Order creates a set of expectations that it repeatedly fulfills.  And, remember, most people in most places prefer to see their expectations fulfilled than to be surprised (because surprise carries with it the risk of shame, which people are desirous to avoid).  Law & Order does upset expectations, sometimes–I haven’t done a statistical study, but I’m guessing it’s about one in ten times that what really happened turns out to be miles away from your guess, and this is the reason that the one out of ten people who like to be surprised also like Law & Order.  And the structure of Law & Order enables the showrunners to create artificial suspense every time:  because we have an expectation that the legal system is uncertain, every trial carries with it the possibility not only that Sam Waterston will put the right guys behind bars, but the possibility that the guilty parties will get way, or that an innocent party will be punished.

(There are more numbers that can be applied to this; there’s probably an optimal number of outcomes, and it’s probably something like three, four, or five, to create maximum, repeatable suspense.)

Or, how about something like House.  Why would a person watch House the first couple seasons, and then stop?  (Well, primarily because they didn’t realize that the show isn’t actually about the medicine, it’s about the characters, and so they were making predictions about the wrong stuff, but leave that for now.)  There’s a distinction that an audience makes between…let’s call it statistical spheres.  The “reality” of the show itself isn’t a reality at all, it’s a sphere of statistical information.  That information interacts only with itself, not with the rest of the world; it does not require things outside itself in order to be justified.  The predictions that we make are either more or less involved only with the sphere–the more House demonstrates that its statistical sphere does not suffer influence from our own spheres, the less we apply our own rules to it.

In the reality of House, Dr. House never recognizes the fact that his first two ideas are always wrong, so he never skips right to the third one.  That is because, as a character, he must make his predictions based entirely on the information available to him, which does not include the rest of the script (and, as far as the medicine goes, does not include previous episodes).  However, we the audience do not operate in the same statistical sphere as the characters on House.  We have access to a larger statistical sphere that includes previous episodes, what we know about how long an episode has to be, what kinds of things they can show on television, &c.  This information allows us to make meta-predictions about House–we know, for instance, that it will never be Lupus, no matter how accurately the symptoms in the first twenty minutes match.

You’ve noticed, I’m sure, that after a certain point a television show starts to do weird episodes.  At the end of the first season of House, the format abruptly shifted so that Dr. House, rather than diagnosing a patient, was teaching a lecture.  The last season of Seinfeld had the episode where everything was told backwards.  In Moonlighting, they did an episode that was like Taming of Shrew.  For a continually-operating show to be successful, they must not only surprise the audience within the show’s statistical sphere (i.e., maybe this time it actually turns out to be Lupus [it will not]), but they must surprise the audience within the show’s metastatistical sphere.  They often did this in the Old Days by making two-part episodes, until people got used to that, and format and structure had to be revamped again.

So, I know what you’re thinking.  What about character, art design, direction, blah blah blah?  Well, two things.  First of all, those are important because they’re useful tools in creating juxtaposition.  You cannot surprise an audience using a character that is not well-played and that we feel like we don’t understand, because we instinctively recognize our predictions about that character as being far-off.  The second thing is that character, art design, and direction are all based on precisely the same stochastic principle.

Think about how you know about a character, for example.  It’s not because you read their biography–indeed, a biography about House would probably be extremely boring.  And think about how much you know about a character.  It’s not everything, certainly; I don’t think it’s ever been established what kind of beer Dr. House likes, and I can’t imagine that I’d really care (unless it was surprisingly familiar to me!).  We understand character because of elements that either fulfill or upset our expectations; if a character is established (statistically) as being caring and nice, we are pleased to see that that character (stochastically) fulfills our predictions.  If the character is established as being mean and cranky, we are both pleased when he behaves in a cranky way, but also intrigued by the times that he does not behave that way.  These unexpected elements lead us to predict another field of data, beneath the visible one; when this happens, we say that the character has depth.  (Sometimes.  Sometimes we say that he’s inconsistent, which only shows that good writing and good performance serve the juxtaposition, and not the other way around.)

If I weren’t at work right now, and if I were maybe being paid money to study things, I could figure out the optimal ratio for surprise-fulfillment.  I’m guessing that for long-running stories, it’s about one in ten.  For shorter forms, it’s probably one in three, which is the traditionally-accepted number of iterations a joke is supposed to go through.  A movie studio could use this information to create an optimally-interesting TV show or movie, but!  I could create an even more interesting movie by recognizing that an audience will eventually become adjusted to the numbers that I’ve provided–rather than being surprised when the punchline comes after the third iteration, the audience will come to expect a punchline there.  So it’s important to sometimes deviate from the optimum to further enhance the experience.

Family Guy is actually an excellent example of this last feature; in particular, the famous fight bewteen Peter and the Chicken.  The fight lasts first as long as we would expect, and then longer, which disappoints is.  But it passes a threshold of length, such that the length of the bit itself becomes the joke.  It is a metastatistical joke, because it’s not just a joke, but a recursive joke.

This has been the introduction to what I shall call Stochasm:  A New Theory of Art.

This entry was posted on November 19, 2008 at 11:18 am and is filed under Braak, poetics with tags Braak, poetics, stochasm, theater. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.