Lens Decay: Our Obsession With Imperfection

The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra is a meticulously put together homage of 50′s creature features, with all requisite cliches in place.  Aliens crash-landing in a rocket ship.  Farmers eaten by mutants.  Talking skeletons.  Mad scientists.  Made up elements with -ium at the end.  Space age weaponry made out of caulking guns.  Aluminum foil.  So for nerds like me who like old cheesy sci-fi, it’s right up my alley.  But there was something that kept bothering me as I watched.  A question.

Where did this obsession with imperfection come from?

I’m as guilty as the next fake-nostalgia-ridden guy.  My Netflix queue is full of Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento films (with a sprinkling of 80′s sci fi), I’ve damn near memorized every MST3K movie, and I think Ray Harryhausen did better special effects than all of Industrial Light and Magic put together.  Gojira trumps any modern-day Godzilla remake with one rubber-suited arm tied behind his back.  I don’t go to the movies anymore, but I’ll sure as hell pay $10 when the little art theater has another midnight showing of The Room.

I know I’m not alone on this.  The popularity of B-horror films, the resurgence of vinyl–hell, even the whole quasi-ironic Journey revival–indicate we are growing more and more addicted to imperfect art.  Sure, I don’t storm the Louvre and demand they hang the poster to Plan 9 from Outer Space by the Mona Lisa and throw the Manos cloak over the Venus de Milo (…actually, hold that thought), but I’m entertained.  I can pop on a shlocky flick and reasonably enjoy the next hour and a half.

via satomi

It’s not just cinema either.  Smashing Magazine recently put an article covering the history of toy cameras and their unpredictable photography–a style colloquially known as “lomography” after the Russian company LOMO and their Lomo LC-A camera.  It emphasizes unruled and unruly photography, an enthralling amateur vibe, shooting from the hip.  Not perfect, but entertaining.  Maybe even real.  So that’s why I was a bit out of sorts at the end of the article and their extensive collection of Photoshop tutorials.

Photoshop tutorials are a dime-a-dozen on the Interwebs (almost as prevalent as their pirated mothership program), so why should I get worked up over these ones specifically?  Think about it.  We’re using a cutting-edge photo manipulation program on a fairly beefy graphic-intensive computer to take hi-res, brilliant photos taken with state-of-the-art digital cameras to mimic what happens when you jam a crumple of 35mm into a tiny plastic camera and just start wildly snapping photos.  We’re working, and working very hard with highly sophisticated tools, to go backwards, technologically speaking.  All the things that camera makers strived to eliminate from their work–light leaks, camera shake, over-saturation, chromatic abberations–we’re putting back in.

via life_on_mars

And to what end, I ask.  Lomography started as a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants type philosophy, take pictures and be surprised later.  Creature-feature movies and all the other terrible tin-foil sci-fi flicks of the 50s were made to warn about the dangers of Cold War radiation.  Pulp detective novels, which have become a cult in their own right, were written and illustrated to keep the pot boiling at home (hence: potboilers).  There was no aesthetic revolution in pulp cover art, no manifesto of sci-fi film makers.  They did what they could with what they had.

Funny then, that we who have everything have to make a conscious effort to keep it real.  Keep it imperfect.  After all, the terms “airbrushed” and “plastic” and “Photoshopped” are slurs thrown for skin too clean, teeth too white, eyes too bright.  The real world is shaky and blemished, tilted to the right, a little out of focus.  I wake up and tie my days together with fishing line, shoestrings, scraping the bottom of my budget.  Things are ad-libbed.  Things are jury-rigged.  Hands creep in from the side to hold up the scenery.  The sound cuts out.  Dust gets everywhere. Except we’ve trained our technology to overlook it.  (And maybe with it, ourselves.)

So we fake it.

We put dirt in that never existed, spots of light that never shone.  We shoot blurry film grain on high-capacity SD chips, fear a Cold War that ended twenty years ago.  Our technology has outpaced us–it’s an uncanny valley effect.  Except the valley we’re staring at is the one we live in and the uncanny is that it looks too perfect for us.

Sometimes Daniel thinks too long and too hard about simple things and then writes about them.  This is one of those times.