Here's an idea.
Maybe the "How I Met Your Mother" finale
wasn't entirely for the audience.
Maybe this goes without saying, but I'm
going to say it anyways.
This episode is about the finale of "How I Met Your Mother."
So if you don't want to know anything about that,
you are definitely in wrong place.
Um, there are probably some really good, like, cute goat
videos that need watching.
For nine years, "How I Met Your Mother"
was sitcom television's garden of forking paths,
a progression of tightly knit events,
where the riddle's answer-- who be this mother--
is built atop a mountain of clever, at the peak of which,
someone meets an untimely demise.
That's spoiler number one.
And even though it seemed at points
like it was going to go on forever and risk
becoming instead sitcom TVs library of Babel,
the show is finally over.
The mother we waited so long to meet dies.
And narrator Ted ends up with Robin,
a character with whom his relationship has most closely
resembled that of Antony and Cleopatra, without all the war.
Responses to the finale have been mixed, to put it lightly.
(BRITISH ACCENT) I was sitting there gobsmacked.
The corpus of critical reaction is much larger and more awesome
than we have time for here, links in doobly doo.
But it basically falls into two camps.
The first camp was into it.
Ted and Robin were never not going to be together.
Given its creative raison d'etre, "How I Met Your Mother"
ended not only exactly how it should have,
but given the circumstances how it probably
would have in real life.
And also, let's be honest, the chance
that Ted was ever going to end up with anybody other
than Robin are about as good as the chances of putting
a quarter in that toy thing at the supermarket
and turning the dealy and then getting
the toy you want the first try.
It's just not going to happen.
The other camp hated it.
Ted and Robin together?
What, bleh!
The mysterious mother, who wasn't with us
until this season, was but a narrative
contrivance for keeping audiences on board.
And once she served her purpose was offed to allow
for an ending aiming at unexpected,
but which landed squarely in silly TV-grasp-at-relevancy
in its final moments country.
This is all boiled down, I think,
into one central question seized and raised
by tons of the critical discourse.
Did "How I Met Your Mother" earn its ending
of having Ted and Robin be together?
Did the writers provide adequate context and justification
for their legend-- I'm not going to make
you wait for it-- dary show and its gargantuan audience?
Which, aha, is the 50-yard line you might draw down
the middle of the field, upon which
the game of "How I Met Your Mother" criticism is played.
On one side, the ending offends a portion of the audience's
sensibilities.
On the other side, the ending isn't even for the audience.
It is, rather, consistent with the motivations the characters,
whatever about the audience.
This is an important question in basically
any creative endeavor.
How much and how do you consider the audience?
It's especially important for art works that tell stories.
And yes, we are going to talk about television in the context
of artistic practice.
Because for the most part, stories
are successful only if the audience understands,
can follow, and is invested.
As far as the narrative arts are concerned, that is the dream.
[SCREAMING]
Film directors like David Lynch, Andre Tarkovsky, and even
Jacques Tati pushed the limits of how much a story can
rely on visuals alone or some mysterious internal logic.
How little can you give an audience,
before they become completely alienated from the thing?
Looking at you, "Vanilla Sky."
And even though I love you, also kind
of looking at you, "Primer."
We start the machine with the Weeble at the end.
It travels forward--
AARON: You've got to write this down.
Contemporary art has long struggled
with the ultimate utility of audiences well, getting it.
Artist Lawrence Weiner, whose work exists most visibly
as bold capital letter text, said in an interview
to Willoughby Sharp in 1971, "Think of art publications
much as you would medical journals.
Medical journals deal with problems common to all men.
Art deals with problems common to all men within a culture.
But most people sitting in a doctor's office
picking up medical journals can't make head or tail
of what's going on."
I think assuming that Joe and Joanne Everybody
know as much about art as they do about medical science is
a little elitist, which is a thing that Weiner
cops to right after this line.
But this does illustrate an acceptance,
and maybe a little bit of a celebration, of the fact
that sometimes art needs to art on its own terms,
in order to accomplish its goals.
Perhaps that's as true for "How I
Met Your Mother" and the rest of television
as it is for contemporary and fine art.
Of course, this is complicated with television,
which Emily Nussbaum, the TV critic for "The New Yorker"
recently called the red-haired stepchild of the art
world on NPR's "On the Media."
For one thing, if you challenge a TV audience too much,
they'll leave.
TV audiences are notoriously fickle.
Nussbaum also talks about how any artist making art
entirely for their audience and not at all for themselves
would probably go insane.
But television, especially now, bears
the marks of its viewers's expectations all over it.
And so TV rarely does-- and for dollar bill reason sometimes
just plain can't-- deny expectation, ignore convention,
or challenge its audiences's presumptions,
to instead progress with its own internal logic.
There are, of course, exceptions.
We just made an entire episode about them.
And maybe it was always unclear whether or not
"How I Met Your Mother" should be counted amongst them.
For some people, this show was going
to be the convention-buster, where the two romantic leads
didn't end up together.
For others, it was simply an honest look at adult romance.
And sometimes the expected does happen.
I mean, life is messy, but also sometimes it's
dreadfully simple.
Of all people, Film Crit Hulk put it really well.
Hulk wrote, "This show was actually
about learning to see love in a more realistic, less put-upon
way.
Look at it in terms of text, and you'll
see that every time Ted sought the ideal over the earned,
it didn't work out."
As far as the Hulk is concerned, neither Tracy nor Robin
are "the one," because for Ted, and maybe anyone,
there is no "the one."
And it's just that simple.
Hulk goes on to say that the portrayal of romantic love
in "How I Met Your Mother," especially the finale,
is laudably unpretentious.
And to get caught up in the question of what
the finale should have done is to miss its artfulness.
"The larger function of art," Hulk says,
"is to try and make some purposeful statement
about a complex idea of meaning or import,
often at the cost of conventional thought
or expectation itself."
The question is then, how much conventional thought
and expectation can be spent before the audience goes broke?
On his blog "Terrible Minds," novelist Chuck Wendig writes,
"I appreciate that they may be telling
the story I don't expect.
But you don't orchestrate an ending
so much as you have to earn it.
You build a foundation and then you create architecture
based on that foundation.
And the taller you go, the more married to that design you are.
You can't build some fancy skyscraper
and then put a giant ceramic clown
taking a dump on top of it.
You don't put a windmill on an igloo
because you really love windmills and hate igloos.
This is Ted Mosby 101, people."
Meaning-- for Chuck, at least-- the justification
given for the unexpected was unsatisfactory.
A work of art might have its own internal logic.
But even if that logic is bizarre,
it still has to be consistent, purposefully inconsistent,
or simply enjoyable in its own right.
And here we arrive at the buggiest of all the bugbears.
It's the simply enjoyable that's the most complicated.
We view the world and our lives as narrative.
And we view narrative, especially sitcom narrative,
as though it were a mirror for the world.
Composer and librettist Robert Ashley
wrote once about television's quote
"preoccupation with vicarious experience
that most sane people hope they will never have."
But television is also, like every other artwork, also
preoccupied with its context.
It's about the world, sure.
But it's also about other creative acts,
the conventions of those creative acts and itself.
Well, what's the show about?
It's about nothing.
Cramming all of that stuff into one package
that is consistent and/or simply enjoyable can be tough.
It can be downright stressful, even, thank you, Linus.
What do you guys think?
Was the "How I Met Your Mother" finale more for the characters
than for the audience?
And how much should an artist consider their audience?
Is it different for television?
Let us know in the comments.
And let me tell you about how I met your mother.
It was at the grocery store.
She was very nice.
She's very proud of you.
My UP Band died this morning and didn't count the steps
on the way to the train.
And that made me really sad.
And I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing.
Let's see what you guys had to say about the quantified self.
Daniel Hough and Mushroomman3rd seem
to have conflicting ideas of what
effective tracking and incentive virtualization looks like.
Daniel Hough seems to go the route of gentle encouragement,
whereas Mushroomman3rd talks about disincentivizing
and, like, when you fail a goal or something,
you are debited $5 to a service or a charity of something.
This is why this stuff is so complicated.
Because it's clearly not one size fits all.
And I think that's not really expressed in this technology
yet.
And when it is, it will be totally different.
Leah Sinclair, Keephur N, and JC Arieta
all leave a comment about how important
it is to interpret this data within the larger
context of your life story, your health history, your family
health history.
And that this is a thing that will
augment your understanding.
But it should never actually replace it.
I think that this is a really great insight.
And I wonder if this is part of the future of this technology,
to sort of appeal to some expert sense.
I don't know, but these are really insightful comments,
I think.
Craig Doucette, Hannah Kenny, and Eric Swayne
raise some questions about the privacy,
related to the quantified self.
And this also makes me think of-- I forget which
insurance company it is, but they have a little gizmo
you can put in your car.
And based upon the information that it gathers,
you can get a lower insurance premium.
But then you realize that you have a gadget from an insurance
company in your car, which I don't know,
that makes me really uncomfortable.
And so maybe this should also make me uncomfortable.
I don't know, I'm conflicted.
This is complicated.
VdevoV writes a really great comment about diabetes
and the danger of letting this quantified knowledge replace
your embodied knowledge.
And I think, yeah, like not letting
the technology dictate something that feels wrong in your body
is a danger.
I think it's a thing that lots of people
are concerned about, into the growing
technological current future.
I think the important thing to remember
is sort of like what VdevoV says,
it's about your agency with the technology.
And it's not the technology itself.
And you can choose, sometimes rightfully so,
to just abandon it.
8jb65 and mikewtp both right comments
expanding on the kind of Foucauldian subtext
of a lot of what I said.
And I think, like, in the event that this
does turn into a two or more episode series
about the quantified self, I think
this might be the next thing to talk about, to really talk
about, biopolitics.
But these comments are great.
Links to these and all the other comments in the doobly doo.
You should read them.
To Aaron Gross, I am in fact, left-handed
to unquestionable logic.
We are starting together links to assets in the doobly doo.
We're not great at it, but we're getting better.
And to the MKUProject, you just wait.
This week's episode was brought to you
by the hard work of these McLaren's regulars.
We have an IRC, a Facebook, and our subreddit links
in the doobly doo.
We also got nominated for some Webbys
with a bunch of my friends, who are all very talented.
So if you do go there and don't end up voting for us,
let's just say that I totally understand.
And this week's Tweet of the week
comes from Marie Soullier, who links us
to a video of a song about social media,
from a social media conference.
It is exactly how you imagine it.
Good Lord, yes.