Craft

To me, the most powerful compliment I can pay a movie, a tv show, a book, a play, etc. is that I’m still thinking about it days, weeks, or months after it’s ended. That’s the line I hold between momentary entertainment and something deeply profound. Between pushing out content and creating art.

This is often the case when there’s intriguing character development and choices at play, but it could be anything. In Severance, it’s how they portray the office job with such truth even though the office culture is clearly highly dramatized. With The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, it’s the way a line of dialogue will suddenly cut through everything like a knife, or the way Sidney becomes a passive observer in his own story the moment he becomes disillusioned about his influence on the world. In Hadestown, it’s how time slows down to a pace that is familiar at a cellular level and we relax into this story that feels like it’s being told in a Greek amphitheater thousands of years ago even though the setting is much more modern.

And for Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, well, it’s been pretty much everything about the film. From the acting to the costumes to the reconstruction of the story to bring in elements of del Toro’s own story, there’s a lot to digest.

The thing that’s tugging at me most immediately, though, is how much del Toro invested in making sure that everything felt as real as possible.

He is a builder of worlds, and this movie is no exception. This meant building elaborate sets, making 450 ft models of the castle only to blow them up, ensuring the paintings on the wall were authentic to the time period, and in general refusing to compromise on even the smallest of details. When the studios told him something was too expensive and they should just do it with CGI, he paid for it himself. Because every single detail mattered to him. He wasn’t going to compromise the story he’s been wanting to tell since he was 11 because it would be easier and cheaper to do it in a less authentic way. He knows that the audience would instinctively know if something wasn’t real, or at least if something wasn’t based in reality.

Here’s an example. I read a reddit post a few months ago asking why so many tv shows look so cheap nowadays, and there was a simple response: they don’t weather the costumes anymore. It’s a time-consuming and expensive process. So they just skip it, because to the person signing the checks, just having a costume is good enough.

But when your main characters have been in battle for days and their faces are covered in grime and there are leaves in their hair, but their costumes are perfect? Or perhaps there’s some dirt or a tear, but it doesn’t match the grueling fight that’s been taking place? Well, it doesn’t look real. It looks like a group of actors raided a Spirt Halloween and threw some makeup on. We might not always be able to name why something feels off, but we know it does and it takes away from being absorbed in the world.

That’s not the case in this film. There’s a scene where the Creature finds the decomposed body of a solider and he takes the soldier’s cloak for himself. We can see the soldier is a skeleton at this point. The body’s been sitting there awhile. If that cloak looked like it had basically just come from the dry cleaners, we would have assumed someone pulled it out of a box, put it on the ground, and scattered some leaves on it just before yelling action. It wouldn’t have been a real world anymore. But this cloak had dust settled into it. It was dull and torn. To the eye, it had been sitting there for years because someone took the time to think through what that coat went through the years it was sitting there. And even beyond that—what that cloak went through when the now dead soldier was wearing it. The cloak has life to it because someone took the time to shape it as if they were shaping a character.

On a spreadsheet, these tiny, obscure details look like unnecessary costs. But to the audience, these details can make the difference between being engrossed in the film and being buried in their phone, half paying attention.

This movie and dedication to craft makes me think of something I’ve been trying to express about how I feel about AI. And that is the question: are we here to merely show up and make money to survive by outputting as much as possible as fast as possible? Or are we here to express something unexpressable to the best of our ability through the work we do and the ways we are in relationship with each other.

Because what is the point of work if it’s not to build relationship and create an outlet for expression? Especially in a world where we have the ability to feed and house everyone if we chose to do so.

In the world of capitalism, time is money and money is king. So, for many of us, we’ve fallen into a drudgery of outputting the thing we are tasked to create as fast and cheaply as possible. Good enough is just fine. And this has been true long before AI became the hot fad. It’s just the way most workplaces operate now, and this, to me, is why so many of us feel so detached to what we do on a daily basis. No one cares about the craft that goes into our work, the work just has to make money.

Which is why AI is so hot right now. Because people don’t even have to take the time to learn how to do something, they just have to put the right input into a machine and make sure the output is good enough. One person can be an “good enough” in almost any discipline with the help of a machine.

No one takes pride in this kind of work, though. Sure, it can be fun to generate something you wouldn’t be able to do on your own. But there isn’t the same satisfaction. It’s dead boring to check over an essay generated in 5 seconds to make sure everything that’s being written is true or to make sure generated code isn’t going to let a hacker gain easy access to your website and any private date you’ve collected. That’s why newspapers have been caught printing the names of fake books in their lists of top books of the year and lawyers have been caught referencing made up court cases. People will perform the generation, but they don’t have the motivation to make sure it’s even good enough. They just want to submit the output and be done with it because that is supposedly all that matters.

On top of that, there’s the fact that the audience can tell. We can tell that half the blog posts on Substack essentially sound the same. We can tell when there is a bizarre hallucination.

And we can tell when the computer knows to make a certain choice, it doesn’t always know why. It makes the choice feel off.

For example, my company sent us a video of a woman (supposedly from HR) explaining our open enrollment benefits. She was in a park walking toward the camera as she explained, and then there was a cut.

This isn’t unusual, cuts help keep people’s interest. That’s why a documentary might show someone talking straight on to the camera and then move to a side angle. The person keeps talking as if nothing happened, so the interview feels natural. But visually, we get new information so we want to keep watching.

That’s… not what happened in this case. There was a cut. The woman kept talking as if nothing had changed on her end. But something had changed. She went back to her initial place on the sidewalk and started walking toward the camera again. It looked like she had run out of sidewalk, didn’t know how else to make the shot interesting, and therefore just reset the shot. But how could she keep talking like nothing had happened? Because it was computer generated.

It felt wrong because the computer doesn’t understand the why behind the cut, it just knows that many people would add a cut in that moment. A decision like that requires the context that comes with learning and studying, but also experimenting and perfecting a craft for years. And when we skip that part, when we just let the computer make these close but not quite right decisions, I think that impacts us as consumers and creators of that content. It has a dehumanizing effect that subconsciously says that we don’t need to understand what we’re making and why it works, we just need to make something so there is something to sell. It tells us that the human no longer matters in the equation, that their enjoyment of creating or of interacting with the final creation are not the goal. The goal is the transaction. Anything before or after that moment is inconsequential.

After decades of watching our arts and our workplaces become factories that drain our humanity one spreadsheet at a time, we should be fighting tooth and nail for a cultural renaissance that recenters the human.

It can feel impossible when the people who want us to simply accept dehumanization hold so much power. But in a world of unweathered costumes and CGI everything, Guillermo del Toro came along and made a movie with no compromises.

It’s not easy, but it’s also not impossible to pull the world in the direction that makes us all feel more alive, that creates more wonder and curiosity, that centers the human over the machine and the spreadsheet. The first step is to remember what truly matters and believe it’s possible.