These Things We Create0:00/391.1053061224491×

Transcript:

These Things We Create are Living Things

So I am recording this on the day of the release of the first episode of Season Five of Midnight Burger.

It's always an interesting day. It's a day full of a lot of questions. I'm wondering how it's going to be received? I'm wondering how it's going to be interpreted. You'd think I would be used to it by now, but it's always fresh because I don't know that anyone ever has a concrete expectation as to how the season's going to start or what it's going to look like.

So you never really know how people are going to react. I mean, you do and you don't.

If you ever have the pleasure of making something that people really like, you'll find that a lot of them come to depend on it for this, that, and the other thing, and that can put a certain amount of pressure on you because you need to stay true to what the story is, but at the same time, you don't want people to feel abandoned somehow, like you've left them behind. I do get emails sometimes from people flat out begging me to go back to what we were doing in season one.

When you really think about it, those complaints are, in my opinion, more about the fact that people are upset that things change at all—not just your show, but everything. I do get emails.

And even though you can put thoughts like that in a certain perspective, and you can say, "Well, it's this or it's that, or it's the other thing," or "There's nothing you can do about it," you still do. You know, you still don't want to abandon people.

The thing about that is when it comes right down to it, you're not all that in control, or at least you're not as in control as you think you are. Or at least for me, that's how it is.

Arseny Tarkovsky was a Russian poet and the father, incidentally, of Andrei Tarkovsky, the legendary filmmaker. One time he wrote, "I would readily pay my life for a safe place with constant warmth, were it not that life's flying needle leads me on through the world like a thread."

You feel like you're being absconded with a bit sometimes. If you tell a story over a long enough period of time, like I've been doing, well, it starts to be its own thing. It starts to take on a life of its own. It starts to have wants and needs like a person outside of yourself, and the longer you work on it, the more independent of you it becomes, and you go from being the creator of this thing to the person who is almost acting like the translator or caretaker of this thing.

This thing is going its own way and you're just there to make sure nothing bad happens.

And while that seems like a strange way to regard something that you create, because it certainly doesn't happen without you there, I really haven't found any other way of thinking about it. These things we create, in a sense, are living things and they move past you.

Which helps when people are begging and pleading with you to do something else with it, because you're not in charge, as it turns out. Maybe you were at the beginning, but now you're following the natural progression of something. It would be like yelling at a river, telling it to turn.

So that pressure that you feel—that you want people to receive it well—can be relieved somewhat by the fact that now, in your apartment somewhere, is this thing that's alive and it's actually not up to you what it does.

And I know I'm supposed to be like an artist and be all masterful and like "this is my grand design" and everything like that. And it is, but it's also—it's about the way that you think about it. It's about the way you think about these things. And this is how I've come to think about this big, long, expansive story that I've been telling. It's its own thing now. And you can see that happen in stories that take place over a long period of time.

You can see there's a point where the creator of this thing tries to reel it back in to the thing that they've created. This is a weird thing to bring up, but there was this moment where I was watching this conversation online and someone was talking about how the characters of Bert and Ernie made them feel more comfortable coming out as a gay man because they were watching this gay couple coexist on Sesame Street.

And Frank Oz, the literal creator of Bert and Ernie, logs on, and he says, "Bert and Ernie aren't gay, because I created them and I decided that they weren't." But it's kind of not up to Frank anymore because he put it out there and it became its own thing, and for him to try and reel it back into his creation—it just doesn't work anymore.

You've got to go where the thing wants to go. These things we create are living things.

It's so weird to talk like this because this is not the type of person that I am. I'm a very—you know, I've never used a smudge stick. Okay? I've never read my horoscope.

But with these things, these things that I make, there is a certain amount of spiritual—I don't know—mumbo jumbo that I kind of embrace because I've never found another way of thinking about it. So on these days when the new thing is being rolled out, there is a certain amount of calm that comes from the fact that I'm not in charge anymore.

These things we create are living things, and you've gone from the thing that created it to really just the thing that feeds it.

And though you may want it to go this way or that way, or the other way, in the end, you're not in charge. Not anymore.