For those of you wishing to translate the content of Jeff Gomez’s TED Talk into other languages, it is transcribed here ––
JEFF GOMEZ
TEDxTRANSMEDIA
“Dare to Change”
09.30.10
I’m the one standing and I wasn’t like all the other guys. I was born in 1963. My mom was very, very young—only 15 years old—when she met a Puerto Rican dude on the streets of the Lower East Side. It was West Side Story, and the unfortunate end there was me, because her parents were not too crazy about the situation. I was born in a hospital on Staten Island, an adjunct to a home for women who didn’t have homes, and my troubles began to compound fairly rapidly. I was born with a facial paralysis that would wind up haunting me, there’d be bullying in my future (it was rough). I had to go into foster care—my mom couldn’t care for me, though she loved me a great deal—and my luck changed just a little bit because foster care was in upstate NY and actually, not so bad: white picket fence, a very loving foster family, brothers and sisters, a dog. Very nurturing and full of warmth, unconditional love.
Now Mom, she really liked me, she wanted to come back after me and collect me. She ran into José in front of the Baruch Houses in the Lower East Side, and together they figured, “You know what? Let’s make a go of this.” They came up and got me, but I had already been upstate for a couple of years so this was a very, very strange environment to get tugged out of. I hadn’t seen Mom all that much during that time, so I was with what I perceived to be strangers and placed into what was unfortunately a dark and chaotic environment. I was exposed to violence as a 3, 4, 5 year-old. I was exposed to abusers of drugs. It became a very dark world for me, a world that I didn’t understand and wanted to escape from.
I did this with—and mom helped out a little—fairy tales, mythology and this big guy. He was urban, he hung out in cities, and, in fact, he was kind of indestructible. Godzilla had this radioactive breath and nothing could harm him, and I kind of liked that. I held on to that fantasy, cutting out little pictures of him in the TV Guide and waiting for the 4:30 movie to cycle back every year so I could see Godzilla. Nonetheless, the world was still a spooky place and my Mom had to struggle to figure out how to get us out of that situation.
She had spirit, I’ll tell you, and she eventually figured that if we were going to be poor, we might as well be poor… in Hawaii! Six thousand miles, by the way, closer to Godzilla. That appealed to me!
The Hawaii of the mid 1970s was heavily influenced by Japanese popular culture, and I got into it right away. I had a friend named Sammy, and Sammy showed me a comic book that was read backwards. It was called Kikaider, and I looked at this thing (it was in Japanese and so he had to kind of translate for me) and I was just enthralled. Look at this dude! He has this incredible design. Remember, Yogi Bear, Bugs Bunny—this I knew… Kikaider? That was wild.
This dude was a person who originally believed that he was a human being and when he realized that he was artificial, he began a quest for his very soul. Unfortunately, there were dark organizations that were after him because he’s a bit of a weapon and they also, for some reason, liked to hurt children. Kikaider, he was righteous. He would not let that happen, and he was a protector of children.
Now the story line ended, concluded. I was used to reading Archie’s or Batman that went on forever in the United States. We Americans don’t like anything to end. The Japanese? It’s over.
I said, “Sammy, is this it? Where is the story?”
He said, “Actually, if you want to see the story continue, it’s gonna be a live action TV show airing on KIKU television in Honolulu. Next week it’s gonna start, come watch it!”
And there he was, in the flesh, Jiro, the man who turned into Kikaider! And when the chips were down, he’d leap on top of a mountain, strum that guitar a few cords and accuse the monsters of not being righteous, and then he would come down and kick their ass. This was the ’70s, they had no compunction about tearing each other’s limbs off and beating each other with them…and there he is in his Canadian tuxedo, kicking butt. Then when the chips were really down and the big bad monster came, Jiro would change, literally before our eyes into Kikaider. I was caught up in this!
Look, I’m gonna freely admit this, I didn’t want to think about the fact—I was 12—that there was a person in there. He was a robot, he was Jiro. I suspended my disbelief and I was with him all the way, immersing myself, watching him do battle with these monsters.
Now the series ended after 42 episodes and at the end of this, everybody died and the bad guy got away! Then it’s over. The story line was done.
I said, “Sammy, what’s with this? Is this really how it ends?”
He said, “Actually, no. You have to go to the movies. They’re gonna release Kikaider the Motion Picture where he will make a final stand against Professor Gill and that will be the true end of the show.”
I said, “Where’s this movie?”
He said, “Outside of town. You can’t go there. We’re not allowed.”
I said, “Oh yes I am!” I got on that bus by myself—I spent that dime—to this theater outside of Honolulu. It was so old it was kind of leaning over as if in an earthquake. Stuff was moving around on the floor. I paid my 99-cent admission, got my 3D glasses, cause it was in 3D, and watched Kikaider kick the ass of all 42 monsters from the show before getting to the bad guy. It got so bad he had to call his brother Kikaider 01 from a whole other TV series to come in and help him defeat the guy. He did, and in the end, they got on their crazy motorcycles and road off into the sunset with that sad Japanese music that they always put at the end.
I was hooked, hooked, hooked. I bought all the toys, read the magazines, bought the posters. This is what I wanted to do. I’d have to wait a while. I’d have to wait a while.
Well, you know, the vacation was over. Mom decided we’d go back to New York. It was the late ’70s, which was a dark time for New York City, and those rich texts that surrounded me in Honolulu began to gradually fall away. I fell into the mood of the city, and also the events of my past began to kind of crawl back and haunt me.
I became concerned about what was behind doors. I always had to make sure the door was closed. I locked the door, walked away, and then had to go back to check to make sure I locked the door—over, and over, and over again. It was as if every thought in my mind had become fractured a little bit, and fragmented, lighting up all over the place and rushing at the same time.
I would hear sounds almost that repeated, and repeated, and repeated—checking drawers, becoming concerned that nightmarish figures were going to appear. I began to look for fragments of those images in movies, and TV shows, and in novels.
I wound up haunting the theaters that showed those grind house horror films in Times Square. Those were not safe places for a 14 or 15 year old kid. I don’t even know how they let me in, but there I was searching through these horrific gory images, trying to have them match for some bizarre reason the things that were in my head.
Eventually, I had to try and express them. So I would write, endlessly, on sheets of paper, being so ashamed of what I was writing that I wrote them tiny, so tiny that if you picked up the paper, you wouldn’t even know what was going on there. Thousands of pages, which I then would destroy—always trying to express these things. There wasn’t even any narrative in there people, no story at all, just thousands and thousands of dark, dark fractured images. It led me to bad places and poor decisions. I really, really could not make this go away by myself. I was aware that something was wrong, but could not communicate it with anybody because it was awful.
I found myself on the floor literally in a bad location, and I thought that this would be it, that this would be over. And in those thoughts, it was weird, it was as if I started communicating with myself, and the thing that took shape was a darker form of Kikaider from my childhood, and he said to me, “What are you doing?” Accusing me…accusing me of not being righteous, accusing me of not protecting the children, and was that what I was? A monster?
I began to fantasize about that dialog—accusing him, “Who are you? How can you be in this realistic environment?” And I began to think about how that could be. What could a world be like with Kikaider alive in it? And I began to be amused by the thought, and construct this kind of fictional universe that could somehow allow for this strange juxtaposition. The act of doing this took this tangle in my mind, and everything sort of, kind of came into a form of order. It was as if all the lights that had been flickering constantly in my brain at least were given some kind of focus. There was still a little chaos there, but something was happening, and I enjoyed the feeling of every nook and cranny being filled in my mind. I had to express it.
Some of you may recognize this right off the bat, people. Yes, I took the geek way out. I could not play with my action figures any more. I certainly didn’t want to be in those dark places. I began to make up stories and convince people, with elaborate rule systems that Dungeons & Dragons supplied you, that we could tell stories together, and what I would do is, because some of the guys that played D&D with me were tough guys, I would find out about them from them their aspirations. I’d question them, they’d talk about what it is that they’d like to do in a story, and I would subtly integrate it into the narrative, and together we were collectively unfolding this incredible tale that would be fleshed out on this fantasy world called Corondor in enormously rich detail. It wasn’t so much about every blade of grass, it wasn’t so much about the kind of geeky atmospherics of science and biology on this world, it was about the characters and the journey that they made, and because I stuck with character, it allowed for me to sell my D&D world to Wizards of the Coast, and write comic books for Acclaim Comics based on this world.
Somehow, I’d figured out how to make a living telling these stories and projecting my imagination. With Magic: the Gathering, I told the story in a comic book, but it was based on a trading card game. I used something new in the mid ’90s called the “Internet” to supply the fans with supplementary information about this world, and the storyline would climax in the form of a video game. Somehow these companies let me do this. It was as if each instrument that I had access to could somehow, in maybe a little bit of an awkward way, be put together and made into kind of a narrative symphony.
Well, I got good at it. People began coming to me, companies, “Can you do this for Pirates of the Caribbean? For Transformers?” Even things that didn’t have stories attached to them: Coca-Cola), “Can you make a narrative with these characters from this commercial and sell more of our sugar water?” Sure, as long as the story is good.
Halo. Amazing year and a half spent working on Halo, helping Microsoft improve the narrative in the Halo mythology.
Tron and Avatar —fantastic! There I am standing with James Cameron, helping to extend the universe of Avatar across all these different media platforms. These were affective, tremendously so, because I took these worlds as seriously as I remember taking these worlds as a child. The culmination of this career in Transmedia Storytelling occurred when the Producers Guild of America ratified a credit called Transmedia Producer. Now we can be credited for pulling together these narratives and helping companies bridge the various platforms, as you’ve been hearing all day. It is truly fantastic watching this happen all over the world and being able to speak to people about this shift in paradigms with regard to storytelling.
But I want to shift gears for my final moments today to talk about something that I am taking very seriously, and I’m hoping that you will consider it. When we think about these meta-texts—these deep, deep narratives—we can think about something like religion.
The American anthropologist Clifford Geertz defined the criteria of religion as a system of symbols and texts which establish powerful, long-lasting moods in people, by telling us stories that make sense in our reality, stating these stories as absolute fact, which make these moods uniquely realistic.
What was I telling you about Kikaider? I bet some of you have fans of football or baseball, who really, really believe. There are lot of these “texts” that are currently in the world right now which are only going to be vastly, exponentially increased in terms of their power with transmedia. We, as Transmedia Storytellers, must be aware that there is a peril in this.
In Japan there is a group within the Otaku fandom. These are hundreds of thousands of young adults who are obsessed with something called Moe. This is the eroticization of little girls in animated segments. At best, it’s kind of like wallpaper—there are barely any narratives in Moe—and at worst it’s a kind of pornography. They’re getting off on these non-narratives. In fact, what they’re doing is breaking down these little girls according to their eye color, according to their headgear, according to how short or long their skirts are, the colors of their panties, in little databases that they share with one another. The narratives, if any, don’t count for anything.
On the far end, transmedia can be used to convey pseudo-facts, and to convey extremist worldviews that play to the base nature of people, and can stir up incredible and highly convincing movements that threaten to be very destructive.
So, in short, transmedia: it can be used to mislead. We can become isolated, we can become addicted, we can become lost in the mundane, the endless “everyday.” Trust me when I say this is possible because I’ve experienced it myself. Transmedia, within a few years, can be rigged to seem to listen to you, to offer you what you want. But really people, only human beings can give you what you need.
We are storytellers. We have to tap our audiences into what I’m calling—and you’ve been hearing references to this all day—the Grand Narrative. The Grand Narrative that formed those initial religions, that formed the epic poems and the great novels, the things that made us question who we are, and go out in search of our very souls. We have to teach people to question reality. If I didn’t know during those first couple of years what love was, what nurturing was, what warmth was, I would have accepted the chaos as the norm. I would have been lost in the endless everyday of the Baruch projects—do you understand?
I knew something was wrong and I was able to dislodge myself from it and become…well, successful in that I connected with a beautiful woman, and I have a beautiful child, and I make a bit of a living. We have to teach people to make those connections with other human beings, and we have to teach them to truly listen. We have to provide an architecture that allows for people to lift themselves from darkness and mundanity. That’s our job. I’m just imploring you…keep me human…keep me human with your work. Keep one another human.
Thank you.
