Pattern Follows Function

Form follows function is a principle of design that means bones first, skin second. Whether it’s buildings or bridges, microprocessors or mousetraps, it must perform its function. Nobody wants a bomb that doesn’t go boom. You can let the marketing team doll it up, paint a Hollywood starlet on the side, give it a fun name like Fat Ass or Lady Boy, but first, it’s gotta work.

In fiction, a character is the product of their action, not the other way around. You don’t make the dad a cordon bleu chef or stick the mom in a shower scene unless it advances the plot and character (or increases box office take). A character is what the character does. Characters aren’t built from the ground up to be amusing and colorful, but backward from their intended function. Set design, wardrobe, costume, dialog, music and audience are all a function of function.

A character on Saturday Night Live in the eighties repeated the catchphrase, “It’s better to look good than to feel good,” and it’s funny-pathetic because that’s really how we operate. Juveniles seek external validation because they can’t self-validate. Human children can only see themselves by the reflection they cast in the eyes of others, which basically means living from selfie to selfie. What’s an actor without an audience? What’s the point of latte foam-art or a barbed-wire nose-ring or a full-body tattoo of the cast of Lost if it doesn’t get us likes and upward-pointing thumbs and applause emojis? No one puts on a tie or high heels from authentic desire, we do it to animate a fictional character.

We suspect of ourselves what seems untrue of others; that we are without substance. We’re right to think ourselves insubstantial, but wrong to think others aren’t. We need our surrounding herdmates to tell us we’re not nothing, and that how we see ourselves is how we are. That’s a critical feature of the herd dynamic; everyone gets their sense of selfhood from everyone else. No one has any actual substance, no one can stand on their own, but we have consensual substance so we can all prop each other up. 

You can call it animating a fictional character or living a lie. The question is, who are we when we’re not in character? In truth, we are no one, but in the integrated state of human adulthood, there is something akin to an authentic self. Adults can understand themselves within the context of their function. One of the benefits of being away from the things of man is not having to animate and project a long-discarded character. We are all projecting and promoting a fictional self, sometimes more or less depending on the audience of the moment, but when your function doesn’t require an audience, you don’t need to be propped up by your herdmates, which means you don’t need the herd at all.

Adulthood is the closest thing we have to freedom in the dreamstate. Only when your self-image is not dependent on others can you be self-contained and independent; actor and audience in one. Strip out of your costume, wipe off your makeup, stop reading your lines and hitting your marks, and discover who you are behind the mask. The risk, of course, is that you’re no one. That is knowably the case, but there’s no need to take it to that extreme. You have a place of right-belonging in this fictional reality; maybe you’re already there, or maybe, as you seem to believe, it’s still up the road a bit.

Adulthood is a pretty drama-free state so you don’t see it much, but it’s there waiting for you if you can muster the energy and resolve to get there. It’s not that it’s better (it totally is), it’s that it’s not completely bogus, and some people find that worth the price of admission. It’s not a simple matter of a weekend makeover, but the result of self-deconstruction, a realer-than-real death-rebirth process; not like an outpatient nose-job or tummy-tuck, but like self-decapitation with a dull blade. For most people, spiritual seekers included, cutting off your head kinda defeats the whole purpose, but maybe for you it makes sense. 

This is how a fictional character in a dramatic production should be; a pretend person in a pretend world playing to a pretend audience. You, however, seek to shed your false character and discover your authentic self (oxymoron), so you’re the one who’s not being a good sport, not playing their part, not going with the herd-flow. The actor should bury himself in the character until no trace remains, but here you are going in the opposite direction; peeling back the character to reveal the actor. Bold choice. Most spiritual seekers are polishing and refining their false self, not casting it off, which makes you an odd duck.

The artifice of selfhood applies to all juveniles and it’s only when we transition to adulthood that we are able to behold ourselves rightly and directly, rendering other people almost entirely superfluous. When you can only see yourself through the eyes of others, then everyone has something you want, but if you can see yourself directly, the only people you need are the repair guy and the checkout girl and maybe a good bartender.

The film American Beauty addresses the juvenile fixation on image. Character Lester is experiencing a mid-life crisis, beginning with dinner on the wall and ending with a bullet in the brain. (Is that really what neighbors are like in California suburbs? A gay couple on one side and a Nazi homophobe on the other? Dinner party seating arrangements must be a challenge.) Now, instead of wanting to be a good husband, father, man, provider, citizen, etc, Lester’s new ambition is to look good naked and boff his daughter’s bestie. We never see this character develop in a positive direction (except the decision not to go full pedo), because the Nazi-neighbor redemption-device spares us from all that character-arc fuss. In other words, the movie is weak on form but it was a big earner, so it fulfilled its function, and that’s what really matters. In Hollywood, it’s better to earn good than to be good. (Sad-face emoji.)

We are all just characters in a dramatic production that serves only to entertain. Human children are amusing, human adults are not. (I’m the exception that proves the rule.) Most functions can only be performed in herd-pattern, meaning that, for most people, herd-pattern is right-pattern. It may not be authentic pattern, but if it’s the pattern that makes their function possible, then it’s right pattern. If your authentic function is to be the world’s greatest Flamenco dancer, you’re gonna need a stage and costume and an audience (and yes, the dreamstate needs Flamenco dancers – not many, but some).

The dreamstate is a creative playspace and creativity comes with a list of demands. The first one is, function first. If what you’re creating is an authentic or awakened character, you have to climb up into the light, but for the vast majority, the sewer-dungeon is the place to be – the place of right-belonging – because that’s where their function can be performed and beheld. You can’t make it to Broadway or win at Wimbledon or have the best Christmas lights on your street in the Australian outback, you have to go where the action is, and in the dualistic dreamstate, that means Maya’s Palace of Illusions is home.

Or, maybe everyone else is an NPC and you’re the only self-aware being in your dreamstate universe – who knows?