Two Audiences

Note to self on getting feedback

There are two audiences I consider when making art for a marketplace. Usually I consider both at the same time, unaware they are different. This leads to depression and emergency therapy and this one time I just… vomited after I got passed on for a directing gig. I really didn’t know that was a thing my body did.

To avoid this I might consider the two audiences one at a time.

In Phase One, I have to honor that my artistic drive is in a relationship with my toxic shame. Artistic drive is my desire to make things for other people to see. Toxic shame is my suspicion that, actually, I am trash and should evacuate the gaze of all people.

When I am fantasizing about the things they’ll say about me once the work is out, I have not completed phase one. A part of me still hopes that my brilliance is so perfectly realized that when it is mirrored back to me as acclaim and reward all of my toxic shame will vanish in a kind of rapture. That part of me is very young. Too young, perhaps, to have realized that every biopic about musicians confirms the opposite. Success exacerbates toxic shame.

Adult me knows that one can not actually die from being disliked and that praise sparks joy for about ten seconds tops. Still, the fantasy persists.

THIS will be the one that proves once and for all I belong and have value. It never is, leading to that cut-up feeling from being told that my movie “looks beautiful” after a screening. Hearing that, or that you “liked it,” or that it was “fun to watch” is as close to being shot in the face as a social interaction can get.

But even when the criticism is constructive and the praise is thoughtful, the part of me that is looking to be cleansed of shame will not be sated. It will endlessly search in between the words. What was not said? What praise not given? How many times have I given positive, honest feedback that simply leaves out the vital fact that I hated it? Is that what they are doing with me?

All of this due to a move from Phase One, too soon. The audience I need to address first is this younger part of me which I’ll call the kids. Until I have addressed them, I will not be able to navigate the next phase peacefully.

When finishing a work, I first need to see the things my kids have unearthed from my unconscious over the course of making it. Really see them. This is dream work. That is not a woo woo phrase. I mean it psychologically. Anything I make is deeply personal and pulls from my unconscious kid selves. They seek to be known by me and will use any means they can, such as dreams and / or screenplays about sentient weaves to meet that need.

“The kids” are younger versions of me that live in my unconscious. Everyone has their own. Mine are a pair of twin brothers. One a free child and one a devastated child.

I need to give my free child recognition for the hard work and genius he has lent to me and mirror all the beautiful things he has shown me. My free child is the wellspring of my creativity. He is grandiose yet lives inside of wack ass me, which can sometimes suck for him. We don’t tend to reflect back to gay Black kids their own divinity, to say the absolute least about the subject. I’m still learning to do this for him.

Then there’s the devastated child. A version of the free child, but that always has a beanie and dark eyeliner on. Sometimes he’s a boy made of dead fish in my mind when I dialogue in a journal with him after smoking weed.

Devastated is not the boy who I aspired to be growing up, like free child, but who I feared I was. He is certain he’s worthless, because his caregivers and the world at large have unintentionally (mostly) confirmed this countless times. I need to sit with him and nurse him with true heartfelt feedback. If I continue the world’s patterns of neglect and avoidance of him, he will metastasize and kill me from the inside out.

To keep that possibility at bay, the kids must be screened the film or given the blog post I published before spell checking it. In private. Only when they can weigh in and feel heard will they allow me to enter Phase Two without interruption.

In Phase Two, I can’t listen to great or terrible notes from the studio, friends, mentors or test screenings if I still believe the work might redeem or damn me. The stakes are too high. Praise and criticism from the outside world spark too much internal clamor among the kids, to hear much else.

In Phase Two the work finds its audience and becomes ready for the marketplace. My great recipe becomes a can of soup. Whether a masterpiece or piece of shit, it’ll sit next to other cans of soup all being sold for the same price. How many units will it move? How many minutes will it be streamed and how many dollars will it extract are what matters to the marketplace. And it will demand me to alter the soup and or the can to maximize its market value. The marketplace and the white straight men who speak for it do not care about my redemption or damnation. And I’m a fool for attempting to get either from such a marketplace.

The second audience is “the public” and they are considered in Phase Two because they don’t give a shit about how the soup was made or whether it is good for them or me. They want it to taste the way they want it to. Not necessarily good mind you, just as expected. If you can manage it to be a little better than they expected, cool. But it better be what they thought it would be, or I’m fucked. If they came to buy chicken noodle and I try and give them Coq Au Vin in a chicken noodle can, chances are I will confuse and anger that customer. That customer will look for me in the test screening so that they can personally tell me that I’ve ruined society and all of cinema in less than two hours. Sometimes I hop from analogy to memories.

This is good. Phase Two is the selfless phase. It’s the part where I build a bridge from where I was as an artist to where potential audiences are. I want people to see the thing I made.

There’s an art to this phase, but it is more labor intensive than fulfilling. It will necessitate compromise and watering down. Putting forward things my devastated child would normally not allow, and tucking away things my free child might demand I make a bigger deal of. This bridge may have to be redirected multiple times to arrive at a suitable location. This bridge may collapse upon use. The kids must be tucked away before one constructs this bridge.

They usually are not.

Even right now, in publishing this.

But I will keep trying.