Has this ever happened to you?
(Cue black and white Shopping Network montage of frustrated customers)
You are reading a novel/watching a TV show/movie/play and the plot is starting to not make sense, when… SUDDENLY, the characters go into a collective trance, contorting all over, saying weird shit. Or one of them turns into a bird and flies away. Or the ghost of their great-grandma appears and delivers a monologue in Spanish (with no subtitles). You have no idea what this means, as the story has not given you any tools to interpret it. You are confused.
You are reading a novel/watching a TV show/movie/play that tackles an Afterschool-Special Big Subject, more often than not ripped from headlines (and more often than not, those headlines are from a few decades ago). Or, alternatively, you are watching a reinterpretation of an older piece of work that has theoretically been rejuvenated by the injection of Afterschool Special elements. You know this is supposed to be important, and yet you’re failing to feel anything. You are bored.
You complain about either of these scenarios out loud and are quickly told by Twitter (or the people who stand in for Twitter in your life) that you “don’t get it,” either because you are too dumb, too uncultured, or too privileged. You are ashamed.
“This confusion, boredness, and shame is my fault,” you think. “If only I was a smarter, more artistic, more enlightened person, I would’ve enjoyed this.”
You are wrong. What has actually happened is you’ve been the victim of vibes.
The modern use of “vibe,” Google tells me, comes from the expression “good vibrations,” a staple of 60s counterculture (Merriam Webster points to the first use of the word as a noun—“a distinctive feeling or quality capable of being sensed”—in 1967, and as a verb—“to be in harmony”—in 1971). The hippies, in turn, were borrowing from 19th-century Spiritualism (which of course they were—is there anything more California than taking a serious religious or philosophical concept and rendering it meaningless? Namaste!). There’s a meeting of science and spirituality in “vibe:” it nods both to physics, in its reference to vibrating waves of energy, and to metaphysics, by conjuring a synchronicity between the internal and the external. To vibe is to be in tune with each other and/or the world at large, like singers harmonizing.
For the purposes of this essay, however, a vibe is a gesture that lacks intrinsic meaning. In our modern cultural landscape, a vibe is white noise, taking up space by pretending to say something while in fact saying nothing. A vibe is a parasitical entity, relying completely on external factors to acquire significance. The aforementioned book/TV show/movie/play has nothing to say (or nothing new to say), so asks its reader/viewer to do the lion’s share of the work—but, because money and reputations are at stake, any complaints from the public about what it’s being asked to do is swiftly castigated. If vibing was, originally, a harmony between two or more entities, the contemporary vibe is a leech, growing fat by sucking the blood of those it comes into contact with.
In her incisive review of the live-action/CGI remake of The Little Mermaid, critic Angelica Jade Bastién noted that “mainstream pop culture is stuck in a gear where the people involved in a production argue for the work’s importance rather than its artistry.” To this clear-eyed take, I would add that the very concept of artistry has been emptied of meaning by those same people. The twin evils of modern culture are the defense of a work of art on the values it engages with, or on its aesthetics—but never on its ability to truly engage its audience.
Let’s take, for example (and I realize I might be making myself unemployable in some corners of the TV world by saying this, and my agent may have me take this essay down—read it while you can!) the second season of Yellowjackets, which recently wrapped. The initial success of the show, in my opinion, rested on the audience’s morbid fascination with the clash between feminity and violence. “These are not good girls,” we were told. “They will literally hunt and eat each other if needed.” This thesis is built on the two pillars of relevance and aesthetics. By portraying the trope of the “monstrous” woman who will not bow down to the patriarchy, the series argued its necessity on the grounds of feminism (in my recommendation of its first season, I wrote that it “comes dangerously close to boiling its message down to ‘women! [flexed biceps emoji]’”); with its picturesque depiction of cannibalism and wild spirituality, it argued its quality on the grounds of experimentation. Was that what made it watchable? No, of course not—that’s like saying a painting is beautiful because the frame is ornate and the subject is famous. A painting is beautiful in its ability to move the person who looks at it, in the bridge it lays between the artist and the audience—in its individual expression that, through specificity, manages to be universal.
Yellowjackets’ ability to connect with its audience during its first season came primarily through its actresses, which elevated the often wonky writing with grounded performances. (Warning: spoilers ahead—skip this paragraph and the next if you prefer to remain unaware). Have I ever butchered a bunny from my backyard and served it to my family? Have I ever kept a journalist chained in my basement and threatened to send poisoned bonbons to her father? Have I ever destroyed the black box of the plane I crashed in because the other survivors make me feel special, and I don’t want us to be rescued and for that feeling to fade? No! But the women of this cast did the work that was necessary to humanize their characters and allow me to empathize with them, leading me to think that yes, if my circumstances were different, I too might butcher that bunny, chain that journalist up, and smash that black box. And, when all else failed, there was the promise of cannibalism to come; the show was so aware of its potential to bore that it made its first-ever scene a flash-forward to a gruesome human feast that, two seasons in, we still haven’t gotten to—the television equivalent of “if you want dessert, you have to eat your vegetables.”
Perhaps inevitably, Yellowjackets devolved into pure vibes during its second season. The plot, strained by its obligation to last multiple years, attempted to deliver half-hearted thrills. Facing the impossibility of killing essential characters that we knew from the future timeline to be alive, the writers introduced new supporting players we are meant to believe were there the whole time, and asked us to care about their fates. Realizing the future timeline has suffered too many twists to make sense (the incidents that kickstarted the whole show turned out to be a combination of ruse and coincidence), they concocted contrived reunions and ambiguous visions that add absolutely nothing to the story. Even worse: the girls finally eat one of their own—but she was already dead when they make the decision, and they don’t even intentionally cook her. It’s a house of cards held together with dental floss, but it’s been sold as prestige TV by the power of—you guessed it—vibes. The plot is nonsensical enough that not even seasoned actresses can sell it, so hey, let’s throw in a musical number sung by a personified parrot. What does it mean??? Vibes ask us to do the work: “What do you think it means?”, they ask, just in case our answer could confer brilliance to this empty vessel.
Vibes are responsible for endless boring, frustrating hours of popular culture. They’re responsible for entertainment that feels like homework, not to mention deranged debacles the likes of which led me to delete my Twitter. Vibes have inspired people to revive old-ass musicals in “inclusive,” “modern” productions that feel disrespectful to both the source material and the people the revival was meant to uphold. Vibes are responsible for many a strobe-lit dance break in a play that hoped against all hope that meaning would manifest if the music was loud enough. Vibes gave us horror movies in which the metaphor is painfully obvious and yet still treated as a revelation, novels in which nothing happens and “that's the point,” endings that send the internet to a tizzy trying to determine if it was a joke, a dream, or something else. Spoiler alert: it was none of those. It was just a vibe.
When discussing vibes, I’m often reminded of the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes (also from the creator of The Little Mermaid—Handersen Cinematic Universe?). It deals with two scammers who come up with the perfect grift: they approach a vain Emperor and tell him that they’ll make him the best outfit known to man—but, they specify, it can only be seen by intelligent people. The Emperor eagerly agrees, and gives the scammers a bunch of money, periodically sending different members of the court to check on the garment’s progress. The scammers show these inspectors all manner of non-existing fabric and designs, and the inspectors, afraid of being branded dumb, say “ooohhh” and “aahhh” and report back to Emperor on how flame his lewk will be. This, of course, leads the Emperor to panic when he’s presented with the final, non-existing outfit, and he has no choice but to “don” it and walk outside to meet his subjects, who are all stunned into silence at the sight of their ruler in the nude. Eventually, a child yells what everyone is thinking: “he’s naked!” The spell is broken, and everyone laughs.
If I do nothing else in life, God, let me be that child.
“Art is subjective, Francisco,” you say. “This is just your opinion.” Yeah, no shit, Sherlock. If you want someone else’s opinion, sign up for their newsletter.
All trash-talking aside, though—yes, this is my opinion. What comes across as vibes to me might register as important and meaningful to someone else. I get that. But I need to believe, for my sanity, that we haven’t gone full Tower of Babel. That our ability to communicate and empathize with each other isn’t completely broken (yet). That, in general lines, we can still differentiate between things that are doing the work and things that are coasting on vibes.
Vibes, after all, needn’t be solely bad. At their best, vibes are what happens when an artist has brushed up against the limit of what language or structure is allowing them to communicate, and therefore must resort to vibrating in a different, unknown frequency, one that hits the audience with the power of a code they are not familiar with, but can somehow perfectly understand. I’m thinking of the second act of Fairview, where we see the first act again but now experience it as a sort of TV show with the commentary track turned on. I remember my mind being blown, thinking “What a unique use of theater; I could never come up with something like this.” I’m thinking of the second season of Hannibal, which would often use imagery (a shattering teacup, a looming elk) to communicate what words couldn’t, because words would bring us back to morals, and morals could not condone what was happening on screen. I’m thinking of the first season of Atlanta, which would often eschew TV structure for a dream-like logic that could better capture the surreal feeling of being left out of the American dream (but still feeling like you could make it in). I’m thinking of the ending of The Humans, which terrified me without doing anything besides turning off the lights, and comforted me by simply opening a door. It explained the whole play that came before it without saying a single word. We just vibrated at the same frequency. We met halfway.
In my own work, I often embrace mystery and ambiguity. More than one of the short stories I’ve published in this newsletter end in scenes that don’t provide a clear, factual conclusion, but express the primal feelings I had while writing them. My play Patriarch often engenders passionate discussions during rehearsals about what actually happens in the end, and some of the theories that people come up with fascinate me because I did not imagine them at all while writing the script. However, I don’t rely on them for meaning—I think I said all I needed to say. Patriarch ends exactly at the moment that its main character, Paula, achieves enlightenment, and takes the tiniest of steps towards salvation. What seemed like the larger question of the play (was her father possessed by the devil, or just trying to make amends?) is meaningless in the face of Paula’s return to faith. She doesn’t need to understand exactly what happened in order to change her life.
Life is mysterious and so should our stories; there’s nothing more boring than a full explanation. But that’s not an excuse for meaninglessness. It’s like I often tell the students of my college essay class: “Sometimes the story you are writing doesn’t have a factual ending. Maybe you haven’t patched things up with your dad, maybe you’ve yet to hear back about whether you won the award. But that’s not the journey. The actual journey of your essay is what you learned, how you changed. And that doesn’t depend on external factors.” I often think of my stories as little Inceptions (talk about a movie that needed to explain everything) in which my characters are put through situations that are going to reveal their fatal flaws and (if I’m feeling benign) push them to change for the better. When that is done, the story can (and often should) end, because that’s what matters, that’s the meaning—everything else is just the frame. It shouldn’t be lazy or ugly, but it’s not important if it doesn’t serve this central purpose.
There’s humility in acknowledging that as artists, we cannot create a perfect, bulletproof world; we can only communicate that which terrifies us or gives us hope. To quote Memoirs of a Geisha: “The rest is shadows. The rest is secret.”
That is not to say that people won’t see my work and think “That’s a piece of shit with nothing to say.” And that’s their right! Just as much as it is their right to create their own meaningless pieces of shit. It’s been this way as long as humans have been around. But now we have Twitter (and by Twitter, I mean modern discourse—which includes, but is not solely relegated to, Twitter).
In my insulated world of New York theater, I’m starting to lose count of the number of times I’ve seen a playwright go off on social media because their play got a bad review. I can still recall a whole thread in which a playwright enumerated the multiple works someone should read before approaching their work (which, by the way, had been produced at one of the biggest non-profits in the country)—apparently, they were teaching an advanced college course, not putting on a play. Another writer called their followers to #resist, because according to them, the reviewer was basically waging war on their human rights, regardless of the fact that said reviewer shared their identity (and that the way to fight back was, of course, buying tickets to the play). Another (very famous) one has never failed to engage individually with every single critic of their work (and by critic, I don’t mean the profession, I mean whomsoever dares post something bad about this playwright), often pointing to the work’s defenders as if to say “they liked it, which means you’re wrong.”
Why? Just: Why? Let people hate your stuff. It’s one thing to make sure that a single negative opinion doesn’t dominate the conversation, but for fuck’s sake, treating every criticism (as long as it’s not truly made in bad faith) as an attack must be exhausting—it’s certainly exhausting to witness. We are artists; the best we can aim for is to connect with our audiences, make them feel something, expand their worldview. We are not saving the world.
Let me repeat:
WE ARE NOT SAVING THE WORLD.
We must not demand to be treated as if we were. The work we’re doing can at most move the needle a few inches (if you’re in theater, make that a few hundredths of an inch). Let the haters hate; if you are a fan of your own work, you’ll carry on and find people it connects with.
If you, however, are not a fan of your own work, but were hoping other people were… well, we have a problem, don’t we?
I know I’m screaming into the void—a void crowded with vibes. This little article won’t change Hollywood or Broadway or even other artists’ hearts. But at least I can tell you, reader: yes, the Emperor is naked. So next time you find yourself confused, bored, and ashamed, shake it off and shut the book/turn off the TV/walk out of the theater (but only if you’re sitting near an aisle—don’t be an asshole).
You are not obligated to put up with vibes.