Spelunking the Creative Mind
Creativity is the bedrock of culture. We know little about it.
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RECAP: Two days before Christmas, 2023, I underwent a neuropsychological evaluation that uncovered neurodivergence in the form of acute ADHD, which caused me to fail at school from first grade until my freshman year at college, when I reached my majority, dropped out, and turned my back on the torture of a standardized education system that made little room for diverse intelligences.
The diagnosis has been a constructive disruption of how my mind has always perceived the way it works. I’m no longer a willfully eccentric neurotypical, uncompromising in my narrow focus of career choice as a creative professional, but a typical divergent thinker who has never had a choice of career outside of the creative professions, and who must manage normal reactions shared by many of my fellow neurodivergents to a world not built for minds like ours.
In Part Three of this series, I discussed the Theory of Multiple Intelligences and explored divergent thinking via my experiences with director Marcus Nispel and my niece Uma, who has also been diagnosed with ADHD, as has my sister. Uma believes we’ve inherited it from my mother, meaning that 50% of my immediate family is neurodivergent.
“Shit is shit, but belief changes it into something else; it becomes something holy in this part of the world.”
— Subodh Gupta
UNSPOKEN CONVERSATIONS
I was talking to a small group of people at my sister and husband Vishal’s Christmas party in Delhi in 2014. Standing at the periphery scrutinizing me intently was Subodh Gupta, one of India’s preeminent fine artists.
Much as I hate to make references between my Indian friends and Westerners, it is a shorthand that creates instant context when I’m immersed in the sort of rambling, tangential monologue with which I was regaling the group. My go-to comparison for Subodh and his wife Bharti Kher’s status in the international art world is, “They’re the Diego Rivera and Frida Khalo of India.”
That comparison is particularly unfair to Bharti, whose work is far more complex and broader in intellectual scope than Khalo’s. I’ve always found Khalo’s work dull and repetitious, solipsistic outsider-art self-portraits that are equivalent of an unimaginative eccentric who only posts selfies of herself on Instagram. Madonna made Khalo famous and made her paintings worth more.
Subodh is a man of much thoughtfulness and few words, with zero capacity or tolerance for small talk, especially in social situations. Nonetheless, he took advantage of a natural pause in my ramble to drop a grenade into the core of my self-perception.
“James is a true artist,” he said.
He turned and wandered off to another conversation, leaving me so stunned by his unexpected evaluation that I had no choice but to ignore it and gallop off into another maze of barely related thoughts.
I took it the way I did all compliments I considered hyperbole before I finally had enough of torturing myself from within and began therapy two years later: Subodh had Artistic Personality Disorder; perhaps he was already drunk, even though it was still early; having learned English when he was in his 30s after he met Bharti, he mistook my freewheeling Anglo-Celtic glibness for creative substance.
It was also an embarrassing compliment for a professional in the commercial arts. There was a huge distinction between a screenwriter in the Blockbuster Era, who spent most of his time in development and whose sharpest skill was knowing how to compromise with and adapt to the many opinions of producers, executives and script analysts, and a world-renowned painter and sculptor, the first Indian artist to break the million-dollar mark at a Christie’s auction. His glorious and moving Dada, a steel banyan tree festooned with cooking utensils, stood outside the entrance of the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi.
The juxtaposition of that glorious, elegantly sinewy sculpture against Jaipur House, the museum’s imperial hybrid Art Deco-Mughal sandstone structure built in 1936, was its own work of conceptual art that might’ve been titled India Modern Now/Then.
The juxtaposition as well as the sculpture itself shot an arrow straight into the heart of my own aesthetic sensibilities: unapologetically beautiful, regal, slyly-wryly playful, redolent with layers of metaphor that reject meaningless modern philosophical constructs that are central to most conceptual art.
Most importantly, it spoke to my strong, inexpressible affinity for India, and explained and substantial part of it by reductively breaking it down into symbols. In the case of Dada, I read that while all plants have sacred meaning in Hinduism, the banyan tree is supreme as the stand-in for Lord Buddha’s enlightenment, just as the lotus represents enlightenment itself; the distinctly Indian utensils that are essential to the majority of lives on the Subcontinent are a stand-in for what makes India who she is, her people.
Like much of my seemingly contradictory worldview, or what I call “Orthodox Atheism,” Subodh’s work is atheistic in its rejection of sacred meanings applied to the elements that support Indian lives and livelihoods; I’m reminded of the many Hindu drivers I’ve had over the years praying to the fenders of their cars before they get in the front seat to start a day’s work, not just for protection, but because the car is the bread and butter that sustains them and their families, their family sacred cow.
Sheathing those elements in gleaming industrial stainless steel vests Dada with a spiritual quality of another, truer kind. I’m struck with the sort of awe for the divine that religious devotees normally experience in a place of worship.
Like all screenwriters, I didn’t even consider myself a real writer. I clarified that compulsively with people who didn’t put ‘screen’ in front of my title. It was disrespectful to the struggles and processes of prose writers to let myself be equal to them.
To wit, the lead character in Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers, played by Adam Scott, tells the ghosts of his parents, “I’m not a proper writer. I write films, and TV when I have to,” meaning he mostly writes TV because we always have to, and we’re lucky for the work.
Screenplays are technical blueprints for the structure of a film with dialogue. Just as an architect or engineer must follow strict rules, screenwriters are so limited by what can be included in a script that we must use a single typewriter font, Courier 12 pt., and keep to standard widths of margins; the mandatory three acts must begin and end within a narrow page range, and the length of the script itself should fall between 100 and 120 pages unless you’re an A-list auteur; we must conform the nature of the film itself to precedent that has proven box office potential, and adhere to the mandates of its genre; we should never describe for the director or heads of department how the film is to be shot or what the production looks like, unless the plot and character cannot advance without it, the director has requested you to specify it in a draft as it approaches production, or you’re directing it yourself; God help us if we instruct an actor on how to say a line — he will deliver the opposite as a “fuck you,” almost guaranteed.
Those restrictions are a major reason why we don’t consider it “proper” writing. That doesn’t mean screenwriting isn’t difficult to master and doesn’t require a high degree of innate creative talent, depending on the genre and platform.
At the risk of sounding unintentionally symbolic, I only began calling myself “a writer” without qualifying it after June 2022, when I published my exposé about Call Me By Your Name being based on my relationship with Oliver Stewart, Gore Vidal’s godson. I consider this newsletter, what you’re reading now, to be proper writing that reflects my true, unrestricted voice.
I’d published many articles and blog posts before the exposé that were proper prose, perhaps quite creative at times, but I’d always considered it practice. As I say to younger writers as backhanded encouragement, “You have a lot of shit to write out of you before you get any good, so don’t be too hard on yourself.”
When you’re an autodidact like me whose last English class was in my senior year at high school, forget having the MFA that is almost de rigueur in professional creative writing these days, you have three times the amount of shit to write out of you.
But thinking of myself as a “true artist”? That was a loaded one, especially coming from a fine artist: they spend an inordinate amount of time reflecting on what is art and what isn’t; what’s good and what isn’t; what it means to be an artist; what the meaning of their work is at a particular stage in their lives. Conceptual art in particular requires, well, a meaningful concept.
All of that is then translated into International Art Speak by art critics, whose reviews become an integral component in assigning value to the work, along with provenance and the importance of collectors who have purchased an artist’s work.
Considering yourself “an artist” when you aren’t a fine artist is fraught, especially in America; it’s declaring an elite status among the creative class. It conjures museums, the Sistine Chapel, record-breaking auctions of Caravaggios, Van Goghs, Picassos, the bipolar obsessive-compulsive Yayoi Kusama, the outrage-provoking, narcissistic pop art of Jeff Koons, and the many splendid martyrdoms of Saint Ai Weiwei.
Subodh himself has the distinction of being the first Indian contemporary artist to break the million-dollar mark at auction when a piece of his sold for $1.2 million at Christies, a critical measure of his work’s value.
Turbo-boosting my unease with Subodh’s statement was how in awe I’d been by his work since I first met him and Bharti in 2000 when I was living with my future brother-in-law at his bachelor pad in Jor Bagh, an enclave of elegantly decaying Art Deco low-rise apartment buildings in Central Delhi.
I’ve known a lot of fine artists in my life, especially when I was a fixture in the New York Downtown Arts Scene in the 80s. The only one who comes close to my appreciation of Subodh’s work is Eric Fischl; they are similar in their focus on the mundane, the simple, the human, even if Fischl’s work is mainly figurative and Subodh’s eschews human representation with the strictness of a fundamentalist Muslim.
Vishal was one of the founders with former artist Peter Nagy of Nature Morte, the seminal gallery that catapulted Indian contemporary art to where it is now, thanks in large part to the international standard of Bharti and Subodh’s work.
Our living room looked like an art gallery: ultra-white walls; speckled Terrazzo marble floors; a Deco mantlepiece in rose and subdued-green serpentine marble; a simple, battered wood coffee table between two sofas with white, loose-fitting slipcovers accented here and there with fading bruises of spilled red wine that the dhobi couldn’t completely wash out.
There was only one piece of art hanging on the far wall, the feature image of this piece, Subodh’s Gauri #2. When I first saw it and understood that it was splattered with real gobar cow patties, I uttered a curt, surprised guffaw followed by an impressed “Wow,” a rare masala of emotions.
I only read Subodh’s “Shit is shit…” quote at the beginning of this piece a few hours ago when I was searching for the image online. But it is more or less what I read when I first saw the painting.
Most people know that cows are sacred in India, but they might not know why: they’re worth more alive than dead, providing rural Indian families with milk and its byproducts, dahi curd and ghee; dried gobar dung patties are used for fuel in sparsely forested areas where trees are worth more alive than dead, too; gobar is mixed with soil, water and gomutra (cow urine) to make the mud of adobe dwellings; gomutra is used as a natural disinfectant and bug repellent; the heat of their bodies provide warmth for the household during freezing desert nights.
Cows also create their own replacements. When they die of old age or other natural causes, they’re treated as a deceased family member, and either buried or cremated with special funeral rites.
But shit is shit and cows are cows, nothing more. The attachment of sacred meaning to anything, when philosophically speaking there is no such thing as sacredness, is an imposition so arcane to the modernist mind that it’s quaint. In India and America alike sacredness creates sacrilege; often dangerous and lethal, it’s the Achilles heel of both societies.
Subodh was born and raised in rural Bihar, the equivalent of the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, except it never sees relief, a most people walked around barefoot, an uncommon origin story for any fine artist of his caliber; with few exceptions, it’s predominantly a middle-class vocation that requires a considerable amount of education and sophistication, especially when they have to contribute to articles in the willfully obfuscatory idiom of International Art Speak.
Subodh finds that aspect particularly taxing; if my Hindi is forever stuck at intermediate level because of its differentness from English, so too is his English.
Over the months at my brother-in-law’s in Delhi between 2000 and 2001, I often found myself transfixed by that painting, vibing with Subodh’s mind through our shared love for Indianness, its many wonderful absurdities and intellectual concepts.
Knowing it was on loan, I asked Vishal if we could buy it. “Can’t afford it anymore,” he said. “I should’ve snapped it up a year ago.”
Fifteen years later, his assessment that I was a “true artist” a few months before already forgotten, I was standing with Subodh at a boisterous arts party at the Swiss embassy.
He said, “I want to be like Chinese artist, just standing, say nothing, quiet like statue, no expressions. So people guessing what you are thinking.”
I understood that perfectly. I was raised surrounded by diplomats and their children. Making small talk with European civil servants and Delhi socialites we already saw several times a month was as enervating for me as it was for him.
So we stood together for a long while observing the crowd till Bharti was ready to leave, deep in conversation with each other without saying a word.
ALIEN FRUIT
In ‘Boy, Interrupted’ I described the experience of taking the neuropsychological evaluation that diagnosed my ADHD two days before Christmas last year. It was designed to mimic the stressors of struggling to pay attention to rapid-fire, perfunctory delivery of information from a teacher who repeated the same lessons year in, year out in an assembly line education system. 90% of the information didn’t engage my mind and consistently shut it down into what I now know is called “mental paralysis.”
The eval also concluded that I have an average IQ; most people I know would agree that’s absurd, including my therapist. He said, “If you’d taken Adderall before the test, your IQ score would’ve been off the charts.”
Except I was on Adderall, the maximum dosage allowed without needing a genetic test to determine if I can tolerate more (I can, easily). I’d stumbled on it during that sojourn in India in 2014 — my sister gave me some. It streamlined my “high-octane creative octopus,” as I call it, and made it far more efficient, less prone to scattering my hyper-focus and overwhelming me.
When I asked my sister for more, explaining that it was helping me manage six creative projects at once for a tech company I was consulting for, she said, “But you don’t have ADHD. You’re the opposite.” My condition wasn’t only being camouflaged by my abnormal linguistic abilities, the intensity of my hyperfocus — what I’d called until the evaluation “my eye of Sauron” — is such that it makes the notion I might have “attention deficit” ridiculous.
Back in L.A., I went through the process of being prescribed it by a psychiatrist — distinct from my psychotherapist — without actually considering that I had ADHD or understanding its symptoms.
As I was leaving my therapist’s office following the evaluation I said, “You didn’t measure for creative intelligence.”
In my neurodivergent way, during the evaluation I’d run an analysis in the back of my mind, so to speak, except that particular neural mechanism hovers over the front right side of my brain, not the back, for some utterly unscientific, impressionistic reason. I’d recognized while the test was unfolding, and with a complete lack of emotional judgment, that this was yet another standardized test geared specifically toward the vast majority of the population against whom all neurodivergent types are measured.
Later at home, ChatGPT told me they were called ‘neurotypicals.’
My reason for calling it “creative intelligence” was based on my longstanding belief in the woefully underdeveloped Theory of Multiple Intelligences that has never been taken into account in the measurement of intelligence and thus not folded into the rickety, patchwork Victorian education that had failed me, literally, from first grade till my freshman year at college.
What separated me from normal people, I long believed, was my creative thinking. Like every creative person I’d known or worked with, I didn’t know how I made creative decisions, how a camera angle should be a certain way, why a deeper shade of red was needed, the reason one image juxtaposed better with another, what was tacky and what was in good taste, which narrative flow to follow whether I was recounting a story or writing it, how I was able to replicate certain emotions with a combination of plot, description and dialogue.
“I don’t know how I know, I just know,” was my standard response, echoing most of mankind’s understanding of creative people. We have a single word for it: talent.
Skills come through training and experience, from “writing a lot of shit out of you.” I taught myself how to write screenplays through trial and error, from the notes of the development team. The normal ways people are taught, through a rigid education system followed by that job or service-provider culture that is the structure of all societies didn’t work with me. I had no choice but to teach myself to get by.
Until the neuropsychological evaluation, I believed the party line, that my failing in school and being unable to hold down a job for long was de facto proof that I was a deeply flawed neurotypical who just needed increasing amounts of Anglo-American tough love to whip me into shape.
I’ve never discussed the precise mechanisms of creative decision-making with my fellow creatives when we’re working together. We bat things back and forth impressionistically in a kind of shorthand, a bespoke micro-argot of references, preferences and reductions, until we arrive at an agreement.
Cinematographer-director Rain Li, my creative partner for the past 17 years, doesn’t even finish my sentences to ensure we’re on the same path — she breaks it off with “yeah, yeah, yeah” or “got it.” It’s more of a mind meld than a conversation.
Without having discussed it with him, that impressionistic, inexpressible sixth sense all creative people share is likely what caused Subodh to blurt, “James is a true artist” with an Indian-inflected emphasis on ‘true.’ If most native English speakers occasionally find it hard to follow my tangential ramblings when I’m relaxed and galloping in full ramble, it’s unlikely that he arrived at his conclusion because he was following the precise meaning of what I was saying to the small group at the Christmas party, and found the ramble so creative that he felt compelled to pay me the ultimate compliment someone constantly pondering and defining what being a true artist means can give.
I imagine he took in my whole persona, the nonconformist and uninhibited way I present my selfhood, in the same reductive way he breaks down the components of Indian lives. He might have folded into opinions about me accumulated over the years, including what little he might’ve seen of my innate visual-spatial abilities, which were on display in the next room in the form of an ornately framed, museum-sized, anachronistically formal portrait photograph I took of my nieces. He might’ve instantly recognized it as deliberately referencing Lala Din Dayal, the 19th-century Indian court photographer, and out popped his conclusion like a calculator displaying a sum total.
But why “true artist,” not “a truly creative person”? Was there a difference, and if so, what defines it?
The answer revealed itself when I sat down at my desk after the neuropsychological evaluation and began “spelunking,” as I call it, into the nature of creative intelligence with the guidance of ChatGTP. Did ADHD-spectrum neurodivergence have anything to do with it?
The overwhelming consensus is that it does.
It was at the entrance to the caverns of the creative mind that Subodh’s assessment emerged from my dustiest memory archives. I realized that not all creative people I’ve known and worked with are neurodivergent; on the contrary, with the notable exception of auteur art house directors, Hollywood filmmakers tend to be neurotypicals, not because they’re more creative or deliver a better product but because they’re more trusted by likeminded neurotypical executives to land projects that cost tens of millions, sometimes hundreds of millions, to produce and market.
The professional commercial photographers, illustrators, copywriters, graphic designers, editors, storyboard artists and creative directors I’ve worked with or observed have all been neurotypical, the more so, the more successful. I can think of quite a few fine artists who don’t present as neurodivergent, but I had most people fooled into thinking I was neurotypical, notably my family and myself, so who knows?
Subodh wasn’t fooled that I was neurotypical, perhaps because he was only registering an impression of my linguistic abilities as someone who lived his life immersed in creative abstractions. Nor was fellow neurodivergent Marcus Nispel, notably when he told me that he wouldn’t put me forward to his agent at CAA for representation because they wanted mainstream talent and I was “a maverick’s maverick, the ultimate outsider.”
As ChatGPT and Google guided my spelunking into what was known about creative cognition, one thing became clear: not a lot is understood about its nature and mechanisms. The articles and academic papers I have read so far either directly or obliquely support my belief that it’s because research is being carried out by neuroscientists using parameters and methodologies used to analyze neurotypical cognition.
Anna Abraham states as much in her article about creative thinking and semantic processing for Frontiers of Human Neuroscience:
… generalizations regarding creativity and brain function primarily arise from adopting a somewhat unitary approach in investigating creativity where it is assessed as an undifferentiated general construct, as opposed to a process-differentiated one.
It’s generally accepted that there are three components of creative intelligence, ranked in order of importance:
Divergent Thinking: The ability to generate multiple ideas or solutions.
Conceptual Expansion: The ability to widen one's conceptual structures to include unusual or novel associations.
Overcoming Knowledge Constraints: The ability to transcend existing boundaries and draw upon diverse knowledge and experiences to generate creative solutions.
There are two standard tests used to get a sense of conceptual expansion in people with ADHD-spectrum neurodivergence:
the product label invention task, which asks participants to come up with three new product brands with ingredients for an imaginary advertising agency, or specifically the commercial arts;
the alien fruit invention task, in which participants are asked to draw new species of fruit from an alien planet.
It’s hard not to laugh every time I read or think about the alien fruit task. To my mind, it’s ludicrously silly and utterly useless. However, it does shed light on how neurotypicals approach a huge, maze-like mystery and reveals a great deal about how a neurotypical mind works. I’m only beginning to grasp that it’s as much of a mystery to me as mine is to them.
I have to admit, it’s been a colossal mindfuck, so to speak.
These are the results of the alien fruit task published in a paper entitled “Thinking ‘Outside the Box’: Unconstrained Creative Generation in Adults with ADHD” in the Journal of Creative Behavior:
This test led researchers to conclude, “As predicted, the ADHD group created alien fruit that was rated more original and included more atypical features, relative to the non-ADHD group.”
From a neurodivergent creative’s perspective, that is so clueless it’s downright adorable.
Why? First, and probably last, the ADHD group can’t draw for shit; the non-ADHD group is more competent. How can this sample group be considered creative people with ADHD?
Putting eyes and a mouth on a piece of fruit shaped like a tobacco pipe is just wacky. They’re being asked to be as imaginative as possible, but they not only have the drawing skills of five-year-olds, they’re being willfully weird because they’re instructed to. That isn’t the same as “more original.”
It seems the researchers are unable to see the difference, or they don’t consider artistic skill relevant. But as the illustration shows, not all people with ADHD are creative in the artistic sense; similarly, not all creative professionals have ADHD, as I noted earlier.
If I force myself to explain why I interpret the results that way it’s because with ADHD creatives with selective hyperfocus skill and talent become inseparable by early adulthood. We will find a way to hone our skills in whatever our preferred medium — writing, painting, whatever, just pass me the pencil, please — from when we’re young.
Neurotypicals call it a “vocation,” shrouding it in spiritual mysticism; we don’t think of it at all — it’s involuntary, we have to do it and will find a way. Frida Khalo painted while she was bedridden, unable to stand.
As the mindfuck set in, the world rearranged itself into neurotypicals and neurodivergents as two distinct kinds of brain. Neurodivergents have been typically labeled as non-neurotypical — we lack something that they don’t have, despite the fact we see and create things they can’t, which is why they’re often so resistant to change.
ADHD in particular is egregiously unfair branding. We are not deficient just because we’re unable to focus on subjects and parts of curriculums that we instantly, subconsciously identify as being useless — we’re being sensible, true to ourselves and how our minds work.
Most significantly, having a different kind of brain — ‘divergent’ is a strongest-match synonym for ‘different’ — doesn’t mean we have a “disorder.” That word should be used exclusively for diagnoses of mental illnesses that are treatable, barring outright physical brain damage.
ADHD and Aspergers aren’t treatable, nor should they be thought of that way, and more than homosexuality should be thought of as a mental disorder. Rather, modern human societies must be restructured to accommodate us, but not at some “special education” school for kids with disabilities.
How can we be treated as deficient when mankind essentially depends on us, on our divergent thinking, conceptual expansion, and rejection of knowledge restrictions to progress and succeed?
Let me posit an inadequate analogy, but it’s the best my divergent mind can do: if we compare any given socio-cultural group to a beehive, the queen is the embodiment of the group’s overall being, the essence of its culture and social structure, its bee-ness and the hive collective as one. She’s the shared focus that keeps it thriving, succeeding, and evolving.
Worker bees are the neurotypical majority that builds and maintains the hive. Neurodivergents are the wingless, stingless drones that fertilize the socio-cultural queen and cannot look after themselves without support from neurotypical worker bees.
The day following my diagnosis, I perceived that both Aspergers and ADHD neurodivergency were two sides of the same coin; I’m a strict, natural binary-ist who can’t help breaking down human dynamics in yin-yang formations.
I saw Aspergers-spectrum people as having emotionally indifferent, unempathetic logical-mechanical minds, and those on the ADHD spectrum as being highly sensitive, emotive artistic-creative brains. Both are linked by the three criteria of creative cognition: divergent thinking, conceptual expansion, and rejection of (“overcoming”) knowledge constraints.
Applying this ultra-reductive analogy to the research methodologies conducted about ADHD creatives, the challenge is we can’t articulate how our minds work, so we rely on neurotypicals to define them for us. If we can’t explain how we do what we do, how can we come up with the sort of methodologies that we would consider appropriate to assess our particular cognition?
I can’t imagine that a neurodivergent creative person would be able to engage the worker-bee-mind skills necessary to conduct a rigorous peer-reviewed study and write the requisite dry, uncreative analysis of the results.
It would trigger instant “task paralysis” in me, for certain — my mind conjures Chinese water torture. Furthermore, why would I need to concoct methodologies to measure creativity when I can tell almost instantly who is artistically creative and who isn’t, like the Sorting Hat at Hogwarts?
To me, it makes no sense to put “Non-ADHD” worker bees in the same category as ADHD drones just because they’re both bees. However, the fact that specialists in creative behavior see it that way is valuable insight into the neurotypical mind: our brains are “deficient” versions of theirs.
While the future of humanity will constantly be fertilized and revolutionized by both Silicon Valley Aspergers and ADHD-spectrum divergent thinkers — a role we have always played both as inventors of technology and as artists so venerated that our contributions to culture are stored in museums, archives, libraries, and remembered and taught by academia — the greater world will always be dominated by and built for neurotypical worker bees, just as heterosexuals will always be the dominant sexuality.
A STRANGER IN HIS NATIVE LAND
My challenge lately has been understanding the nature and mechanisms of my different mind as well as constructing a whole new breakdown of the people I’ve assumed I was identical to since I gained self-awareness over half a century ago. I’m like Mowgli in The Jungle Book finding out he’s not a wolf like the pack he was raised by but an entirely different animal.
There’s a Library of Congress-worth of interpersonal experiences that need reframing. For instance, a call I had last summer, well before my diagnosis, with a producer I work with frequently to get his opinion about the application of AI to fix the film development process, which he agreed was broken but was unwilling to consider using AI to fix, when the only thing that AI is consistently great at is analysis.
He dropped a line into the conversation that so stunned me I was momentarily at a loss for words, which is saying a lot: “Even doing a budget is creative.”
I understood what he meant — finding clever ways to stretch a dollar to the max without compromising quality — but that’s not the same sort of intelligence that’s required to write the script that’s being broken into the “creative” budget. It’s accounting.
When asked what sort of intelligence that requires, ChatGPT responded, “Analytical, Strategic, Logical, Numerical, and Financial.” Not included is the level of divergent thinking, conceptual expansion, and rejection of knowledge constraints I’ve needed over the years to respond to his and the rest of a development team’s notes, draft after draft on half a dozen projects.
When Subodh used his own innate Sorting Hat abilities to sense that I was one of his own, I immediately understood “true artist” to be the stereotype of the wild, eccentric, impoverished outsider furiously painting in his garret. It terrified me.
A year or so ago, a very bright, observant childhood friend from Rome DMed me an excerpt from an episode of Doctor Who in which Vincent van Gogh is brought by the Tardis into the future to attend a retrospective of his work and overhears the curator saying that he is the “greatest artist of all time.” My friend write, “This reminds me of you.”
It was a stab in the stomach that unleashed pure terror. I was upset for weeks. “I can’t accept posthumous recognition,” I told my therapist.
“But at least it’s recognition.”
“I cannot live the rest of my life like this. I won’t do it. I refuse.”
As I crested the two-thirds mark of my life, I redoubled my efforts for acceptance and proper remuneration from the worker bees. I’ve never wanted to be the true artist; I’ve resisted it my entire career.
The reality is I’ve never been able to escape it — I am the wild, eccentric, impoverished outsider scribbling at his desk, living on the flip side of the world and lifestyle in which I was raised.
The whole reason I began therapy seven years ago was to fix whatever it was about me that was spooking execs and producers and keeping me back. I’ve tried with all my might to conform and adapt to what Blockbuster Era Hollywood wanted to the point of medicating myself.
I’ve adhered with fundamentalist fervor to the industry-standard margins, to the proper font, the three-act structure, the character beats and arcs to the point where I’m now a purist of correct form.
I was fooling nobody but myself: The truth is my best work is those pieces that drove me to the brink of death or into temporary insanity trying to get right.
Rather than help me be more like other worker-bee creatives harnessed to Hollywood’s Anglosphere-spanning manufacturing complex, I see now that therapy has brought me face-to-face with the “true artist” I can no longer avoid, to the realization and acceptance that I have no choice in the matter, no more than I had a choice of being gay and neurodivergent.
On a logical level, I know that it’s a good thing, nothing to be afraid of, quite the opposite. But emotionally I’m still adapting, still terrified, still disappointed that I’ve failed at conformity just as I failed at school.
I had a long talk with Marcus Nispel after I published part three of this series, ‘Doing Figure Eights With Dory,’ the first half of which is about our working relationship and shared type of creative cognition. He admonished me gently for betraying myself by trying to conform to Hollywood’s neurotic need for sameness.
I see his point, but in my view it’s not a bad thing trying to find a middle ground between original divergent thinking that is necessary to refresh and rejuvenate an influential and important American industry whose products the world still wants to buy and the rigidly structured groupthink that makes this town run.
At the end of our call, I said, “Imagine if you hadn’t been given the neuropsych eval when you were twelve so that you and your family were able to adjust your life’s path to the reality of how your mind works, that you’d spent your whole life believing it was a fundamental character flaw that needed to be suppressed.”
“I can’t imagine,” he whispered.
Not that it would ever happen, but I can’t imagine living in a world with neurodivergents in control — it would be anarchy, a childish fantasy that only witless ideologues on the extreme left and right find appealing.
My Aspergers cousins in Silicon Valley agree. When Zuckerberg, Altman, Musk et al. descended into Washington for a Senate hearing a few weeks ago, their pleas for government regulation of AI echoed my own misgivings. Help us, please, they said. We’ve invented this magnificent beast, but you need to help us tame it — it’s not something we have the faintest idea how to do.
I cannot think of a better example of the necessary symbiotic relationship between the divergent drones and the working bees who keep it all together. It’s a dynamic that courses throughout Oppenheimer between the Aspergers inventors and military and government officials. It’s likely something Christopher Nolan understands himself as a likely divergent-thinking creative, if I read his choice of personal projects like that properly, starting with his groundbreaking, genre-challenging Memento.
These days my niece Uma’s words from her text that informed me of our shared mind type resonate like a mantra, “I don't know how other kids do school without [Adderall], how their brains just naturally focus them.”
I don’t know how other kids… how their brains…
We are not like them, my darling, but this is their world built according to our ideas using our inventions — they run it, always will, and that’s a good thing. Sadly, they don’t understand us fully, just as we don’t understand them. So they medicate you with the hope of turning a sliver of your hyperfocus away from what you know is important to train it on what you instinctively know isn’t, in the hope that you’ll conform to be one of them.
At least you know who you are. If what has happened to me serves any purpose, let it be a constant reminder to let your mind be what it is — it is not deficient, not disordered, merely another kind of mind altogether. And what a splendid thing it is, indeed.
Thanks for reading. Please don’t hesitate to poke the little heart below or above.
FURTHER READING
A good general overview from Scientific American. I’m grateful to Holly White for putting “disorder” in quotation marks.
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Anna Abraham states from the beginning that the way the neuroscientific community investigates creative thinking “is insufficient.”
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The piece with the silly diagram of alien fruit that supports Anna Abraham’s point about the lack of proper methodologies to investigate creative thinking.
Read full story —>
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