Alfred Malmros

I’m watching Synechdoche, New York written and directed by Charlie Kaufmann. In Adaptation he seemed to have the perfect recipe for writers block, write about screen writers with writing block, or write about writers that are writing about writers. When he so does his debut as a director, it is with a movie about a director that ends up directing a character playing himself as a director directing the director, confusing.

Many many authors have tried and failed writing about writers. Aaron Sorkin does TV series about the superhero writer, in West Wing it was the speech writers, in Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip it was the writer who dated the star of the show, who was the target of all press etc. I guess it makes sense, writing about the one you know the best, but often it feels like the writer characters are struggling too much with the dilemmas of being writers, they’re stuck in a jungle of meta. The garbage man character on the other hand never struggles with being a garbage man, he has other interesting stories to tell. But I do know some people who should base more on their own lives (and not by basing every ad on an art director character).

In Grant McCracken’s brilliant article in the Atlantic about consumer habits in a downturn he writes in a detached and objective way and from an anthropologist’s perspective. What’s interesting is how everyone else in the communications industry also always talks about consumers like they’re completely detached from them. The only people in the world who never consumes seems to be the marketers themselves. No one would ever admit that they buy a product because of advertising, we’re supposed to see through that. We’re the only consumption professionals, who consume solely on, what?

So the instincts we try to define, appeal to and reach we have no personal experience of?  I think we almost always find them, pragmatically within ourselves. Putting ourselves in other people’s shoes and imagining what they care about, then we relate that to ourselves in similar situations but with perhaps other products. To not seem unscientificle and getting paid to go with gut feelings, we rationalise it to the point where we’re again detached from it. And it’s there where we loose control over the communications. The best insight one can possibly have about consumers, is that you are one yourself and observing and not denying the consumption patterns in your life.