CHRISTOPHER SEAN BATT - 

“I have a tale to tell. Sometimes it gets so hard to hide it well. I was not ready for the fall. Too blind to see the writing on the wall.” - Madonna, Live To Tell (1986). 

As a young and impressionable Film, Television, Audio, and Multimedia Arts student in Oakville, Ontario, Canada in the autumn of 1996, what an impression I did receive. Ultimately, according to Marshall McLuhan’s theories, the massage of the medium is to replace reality with a presentation layer that is more enjoyable and compelling than the mundane of everyday life. The Audience will naturally prefer to concede to a layer applied so ubiquitously covering the real world (which is unable to be seen in its entirety) because Humans prefer a well-oiled illusion over the raw responsibility of life every time.

On the first day of classes in Television Studio Production, the students were asked a simple question by the professor, an experienced studio director who had graced many a control room in her career, and could conduct a broadcast in her sleep. She asked “Who is the Audience demographic of a particular TV show?” – and of course she sent us home to prepare our homework to answer the question – though she could have simply hit us with the punchline as part of that first lesson. But perhaps she wanted to send us on the inevitable wild goose chase and waste our time, to give the full effect to what would hit us as we returned to the next class with our smart 19-year-old student efforts to answer the question.

“Throw away the genre, the plot, the characters, all the analysis of the story. Those don’t matter. It’s what lies between, in the commercial advertisement breaks. That’s the intended Audience.”

It may seem obvious now, but at the time that ballast served as a perfect motivator toward my eventual complete disillusionment about creative media and the role of Journalism, and by extension the whole matter of Human communications – everybody is selling something to themselves and those around them. We presume it is products and services, but it is lifestyle. We presume a Journalistic endeavor is meant to tell a story about what happened… yet it is what the public is supposed to believe that is prescribed in the carefully constructed talking points and prose of all projected media in the sphere of Human publication to the airwaves and the information superstructure we enjoy today, in complete immersion and hypnosis.

Having said that, many knee-jerk reactions of well-intentioned youth are aligned with ‘exposing the truth’ and convincing the Audience to pull back the curtain from these mirrors of deception we call The Media. Maturation will either extenuate or contextualize this self-defined role.

As a Magician from the age of five years old, I learned by direct experience, not by teaching, that people are so easily fooled, and are disappointed to know the mechanism of the illusion they have just witnessed, so it’s better to leave them in their mystery.

This writer vows to uphold the code of The Brotherhood of Magic. To reveal the secrets only to others of tact, technique, and wisdom, another worthy Illusionist or Magician. Discretion is the key lever of power over the Audience and within the worthy game of life.

A Performer may only present the character they inhabit for a time... and hypnotizes the Spectators to assume their own role even deeper and harder to see without the contrast of objective reality.

The Performers achieve the suspension of disbelief as a cohesive cast on a stage that has no edge over which to fall, as Christopher Columbus soon discovered. Then the Director appears fully actuated with nothing more to do than joke around with the Architect and pass the time, the days, nights, and aeons. Meanwhile, explorers continue to venture around the globe searching for that elusive edge by which to escape the inevitable cycles of The Matrix, to no avail.

The usurpation of diverse and ancient Creation and Nature beliefs serves to unify surrender to a global religious institution with one single decree about a particular property of the earth and its adornments. Failure to comply and validate this fallacy, which some people resisted under the threat of death, resulted in an acquiescence to a science religion.

Institutions present unproven conjectures to a paying Audience with the promise of eternal progress toward proof, usefulness, and profit. The money and worship are pledged to benefit the mission of the leaders of that religion, graphing always up and to the right.

The Character in one’s own story can commit the ultimate heretic act of asking “What if their theory is wrong or incomplete?” without violating fundamental discretion or exposition of certain primary sources and the actual records of history.

You need only ask the banal question “What if the losers got to write the history books?” and then go back to sleep certain of the futility of that theoretical proposition. Then in the morning, sober, decide to write Science Fiction literature or produce a fictional piece of Drama film – or if really daring and with full understanding of the consequences invited upon oneself, even a Documentary.

In our digital age, the more The Media changes, the more it stays the same. The algorithm today can present any quantity of dissident materials and revelations to those who resist the rich presentation layer of reality, educating the Audience about the system of massage in which we live and breathe fact and gossip. Architecture and its memes rest secure in their designs regardless of the destruction or reconstruction of particular edifices – the founding and deprecation of Cities and Nations across the eternal film reels of Human Civilization.

The lens remains in perfect focus, and the Director calls ‘Action’ on every new day that dawns upon us.

– Chris :)