Introduction to Every Atom by project curator Brian Clements
I’m a poet who works in Hollywood. When I started out here, talking to producers or studio execs or directors or actors, I wondered: does anyone here read poetry? And then when I look at “Song of Myself” I think: well, they definitely got to the first line. I celebrate myself. It’s easy to connect self-mythologization to self-aggrandizement, narcissism, the general look-at-me-ism of entertainment and the age of social media.
But you have to get past the easy snark. The more one works in “the industry,” the more one sees that, underneath the desire to be seen or acknowledged, there are serious and essential questions that drive it. They are the questions we find in “Song of Myself”: Do you guess I have some intricate purpose? Do you take it I would astonish? What is a man anyhow? What am I? and what are you? You are reading this comment on a screen. In what many people call “the Golden Age of Television,” there is a vast competition for attention from screen-viewers. How do we get people to watch a thirteen-hour drama instead of playing Call of Duty? The answer that most networks have settled on—perhaps predictably, but also accurately—is to rely on characters. People watch tv episodes week after week, or even hour after hour, because they care about the characters. And the most common starting point for a dramatic television protagonist is: they’re someone who is simultaneously thoughtful but also in great doubt. Don Draper. Walter White. Daenerys Targaryen. (And yes, the latter started as a character in a book, but then you stretch that character out over several seasons of hour-long episodes… same deal.) The writers who develop these characters, and the actors who embody them, and the directors who guide the performances in a certain direction, and the editors who decide what lines to emphasize and what lines to cut, and the executives who sell the shows, all come back to these questions over and over and over.
One reason they do is because our most popular medium must appeal to many people, and it does so most effectively when the audience recognizes some aspect of itself on screen. The questions of “Song of Myself” are the questions of American aspiration and democracy—to simultaneously become great and yet to see oneself in all people… none more and not one a barleycorn less.
Bradley Paul is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Plasma (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018). He lives in Los Angeles, where he writes for television. His most recent credits include Lodge 49, Animal Kingdom, and Better Call Saul.
Cover art by Mike Tyer