Long Strange Trip - House of Leaves: Explored Post-Talk

All's well that ends well. And as far as I can see from what's happened, this does end well.

The House of Leaves series has been my least-successful in terms of views and my most-successful in terms of impact and execution of vision under the guidelines I saw as needed for the project.

Quality/Quantity highlighted in one single series, it seems--not for what I did with it, but for the reception I've seen to its conclusion and the steps along the path.

That being said, this was the riskiest, most out-there, and just plain dangerous thing I ever could've done on the channel out of all my ideas. When you open with something you know is inflammatory and designed to be inflammatory as part of the art, you run the risk of people just seeing the fire and not the light you're trying to make with it.

And wow, oh wow, did I cause a fire in a rough way, especially at the start.

"What even was all of that, Nick?" [Warning: Spoilers below for the series and House of Leaves]

So, by now, it's no secret (at least I think) that I try to immerse myself and the Night Mind channel as deeply as possible into the themes of the work being covered. That's why Nick Nocturne is a shapeshifter, that's why Don't Hug Me, I'm Scared took on a puppet set, that's why I do a saturated monthly theme every October for Halloween content, that's why the entire run of SCP videos are exactly the way they are, etc.

Every major video, to me, must be met with the respect and artistry of trying to present the theme in a full set dressing and performance atmosphere; I have to submerge myself and the channel into the universe covered. I've referred to the method for myself as "the theater of the mind"--that's the weird, abstract space all the Night Mind content takes place. And because it's mental, it can be dressed up and represented in as much theme work as the source material. I've always, always been all about doing things the Universal Studios way--bring the movie here, and put everyone and everything on location in it.

House of Leaves is such a monumentally important art project to me that I had to pull out all the stops , even if it meant running a few risks with how people saw it at the start.

House of Leaves is an labyrinthine echo-chamber story that changes the form of its presenting material and tries to relate to the audience with familiar bits and pieces according to Theory One. In Theory Two, we have the more major themes of an unreliable narrator butting in at inappropriate moments selling you self-celebrating garbage storytelling that interrupts and disrespects the real subject, because he's trying to make you see something beyond the first impression and thinks what he's doing is obvious, because he's making it obviously ridiculous and dropping hints he's full of it.

And all throughout House of Leaves, we have this very long, very exhaustive book full of references to academic materials about The Navidson Record that are even MORE ridiculously long, complicated, and unnecessary. 

If I was going to tackle House of Leaves, I had to find a way to present all of its themes in some form and create as deep and multi-layered an echo of the novel as I could in Night Mind format... all while trying to do a video series about a novel. 

It had to be exhausting, overly complicated, scary to even look at the length of, and sometimes infuriating to sit through, with reasons for the audience to take issue with me and my narration choices in this weirdly-long series, even by my standards.

Because that's House of Leaves.

The position I had to take to create the proper echo was Johnny Truant's, and that meant taking a lot of risks. I also still had to be Nick Nocturne, and in terms of "found media," there's only one type I constantly present and have historically presented as the main content of the channel:

Amateur "found footage" content with all the hallmarks of being amateur, wrapped up in lies and "playing pretend" online, even if people can tell it's fiction shot in a basement.

House of Leaves, as a story, is a form-changer; Night Mind is a channel specializing in "found footage" video content. Therefore, the presentation had to morph to echo the story and highlight the theme, presenting "found media" like The Navidson Record is in a way it would be normally seen on Night Mind.

And so, Pelican Black appears: amateur hour as hell, designed with (hopefully) enough clues littered throughout for viewers to sense it wasn't legitimate and, in this context, is so ridiculous and transparent that they'd know something was up and it had to be for a reason.

The appearance of Pelican Black Johnny throughout the first half also set up the echo  for the way Johnny Truant constantly interrupts with his asides all the way through The Navidson Record. It's only when Johnny begins to stop throwing garbage at us and lying that we start to care about him.

And, as consequence, that's the point in the series when Pelican Black went away. Until then, it was a continuous run of "me/Pelican-Johnny/me/Pelican-Johnny/me." This also created the Zampano dynamic for myself I had to take, the other side of the author coin.

And it all ended up being shockingly long. Three videos, each about 1.5 hours? That's absurd!

(But so are the academic references littered throughout House of Leaves about The Navidson Record, with some cited to be stupidly long, even down to spending ridiculous amounts of time about one aspect of the documentary.)

And that's really just some of the layers of echo I designed for the video series. 

There are more of them, right down to meta aspects, but there's no fun in it if I tell you all of them.

Point is, this was the most theme work I've ever put into a project and I risked so much to just go for it, because if I didn't give it everything I had, I didn't deserve to cover House of Leaves. I either had to pull a Johnny Truant and just go nuts doing this whole thing or I wasn't allowed to do it at all.

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Seriously, thank you to everyone who stuck it out through the series and participated, and everyone who's been patiently waiting for me to finish so I can continue regular content coverage. This was something I absolutely needed to do, and I'm thankful for all your support through it. 

I feel so completely reinvigorated and excited for what I can do, now, and I am absolutely craving being able to think about a topic that excites me, work on a script, and make a video and have it out all in just one week again. The idea of making more videos and shorter videos for awhile on a myriad of things feels liberating now! Haha, seriously, I'm rejuvenated for weekly hits, now, and my mind's been brewing for weeks with what I want to touch on next.