While the series can be described as “genre-bending” I prefer to think of it as a work under the umbrella of Magical Realism. There are a few quotes I’d like to share that voice my natural thoughts on art, specifically relating to the synthesis and design of this series.

“My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you’re lucky.” - Alan Moore

Originally the idea was to create a moving sitcom. Coming from comedy this would be the most logical narrative entry from me that satisfies the show’s idea to show one character grow through many stories. But I think that calling the show a “sitcom” limits the idea of dramatic potential, and the idea is to show a dramatized representation of real life in an entertaining way. Per Moore’s quote, the idea that life is not always one thing, one genre, means stakes are coming from every-which-direction, and to simply call this a sitcom is to create toothless situations that would never really cause a person to dig deep and find out who they are in any meaningful way.

The foremost objective of this series is to balance recognizable reality, and relatable circumstances, with the purely fun and fantastical. To get a fun-house mirror version of things that are not necessarily fun. Or to put it in the words of, I believe, Alan Watts, to make something that’s “sincere, but not serious.” This is why we first deconstruct genre tropes, and then reconstruct others. We show seriousness in the logic of the show by deconstructing exaggerative and campy elements and we eventually release the grip on this serious logic and transcend away from reality and into sincerity. When the existential hurtle is humpled and the more self-affirming view is taken, realistic limitations dissipate.

“The magical realist does not try to copy the surrounding reality, or to wound it, but to seize the mystery that breathes behind things.” - Frederic Jameson, as quoted in Simpkins, Sources of Magical Realism.

This is where the sliding scale of surrealism comes in. Surrealism in its literal definition is “to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind.” In its subjective definition, personal to me, it’s a form of exaggeration. A surreal moment can be like if you were sitting at a red light, and you look into the car next to you, and you see two people who look like Bert & Ernie from Sesame Street, after you had a dream about them the previous night, a surreal coincidence. Something so unrealistic, yet it exists. Surrealism is also like standing at the base of a mountain and mentally realizing true perspective of its massive size and history. Something so realistic that it seems unreal. Surrealism is, then, to face a reality that is either “unreal” or “too real.” The inexplicable dissonance of scope, arena or other contextual barrier.

“The three major commonalities between the genre [different definitions of magical realism] are that they each sought to show ordinary subjects, in minute detail, with a sense of depth.” - Kelsey McKinney, Vox

The sliding scale of surrealism is on one level, a scale from exaggeration to intensity, a balance of illumination. On another level it’s a sliding scale from emotion to action, a balance of focus. And on another level it’s a sliding scale from camp to pulp, a balance of tone.

The elements of theater, and cinema in dynamic interplay with each other. Exaggerating emotion, and intensifying action to illuminate a consciousness (a character’s true self") in a complex interpolation of seemingly disparate parts. The variety of combinations constitute a range of contrasts in a free-flowing integration of tonal episodes. Tonal episodes are given in the simple “x meets y” notation.

We begin at one end of the scale: emotion, exaggeration, and camp. We do not abandon the established, but rather, build upon the established as we move toward the other end of the scale: action, intensity, and pulp. Illuminating a conscious sense of self as Alice’s character continually reflects qualities dependent on categorically independent incidents, given context with tonal episodes.

People-pleaser, Every-man, Hooligan, Child, Commando, Tramp, Victim, Villain, Hero; the way we see Alice in her surrounding context is developed through formative narrative elements: Performance, Mystery, Status, Poetry, Tragedy, Thriller, and Western.

“I love the West. I read a lot about the West, and I’m shocked, I’m ashamed that in pictures they have not made the true story of the winning of the West - comprising of 90 percent foreigners, 100 percent laborers, nothing to do with guns. Streets, mountains, roads, bridges, streams, forests - that’s the winning of the West to me. Hard! Tremendous, tremendous fight. But [instead] we have, as you know, cowboys and Indians and all that.” - Samuel Fuller

Select story genres: Society, Love, Adventure, Coming of Age, Horror, Crime, and Action build upon each other parallel to the narrative elements, culminating in the gestalt perception of their interpolation, the Western. The genres explored give us our story, the narratives examined give us our hero, and the tones expressed give us our genre-bending style.

Using tonal guides, the x’s meeting the y’s, we deconstruct the beginning genres and narratives to then reconstruct the latter genres and narratives. Starting with an ordinary character, with no sense of self in a relatively normal world, and resulting in the extraordinary circumstance of a Theatrical, Mysterious, Outsider, Tragic, Thrilling, Western Hero poetically facing off against a Performative, Shallow, Self-possessed, Tragic, Overwhelmed Villain. The tones of a Worldview Mosaic colored by the symphonic crescendo and diminish of waves in a rhapsody of The Pastel Blues.

We get a crack at a “true Western,” as Fuller would have put it, through our slow-burn world-building adventures through settings and genre , which takes us from city, to slums, to industry towns, farms, suburbs, brush, meadows, streams, backyards, warehouses, and municipal buildings. And we set up our “theme park Western” through variable character-building plots, experiences with dandy foils, strangers, rail yard bulls, criminal conspirators, mad-scientists, bandit bikers, black-hat fixers, law men with varying degrees of effect, and innocent bystanders caught in the midst.

Three levels of conflict: Intra-personal (conflict within the self), Inter-personal (conflict between persons), and Extra-personal (conflict with environment, be it setting, nature, society, or situation), are explored in each act through a major modality.

Act 1 is a comedy, episodes are 30 minutes long, (ideally) twelve 2.5 minute scenes.

Act 2 is a tragedy, episodes are 45 minutes long, (ideally) six 7.5 minute scenes.

Act 3 is a drama, episodes are 75 minutes long, (ideally) two 2.5 minute scenes and one 7.5 minute scene per half act.

Like the other elements these modalities build on each other as we slide on the scale from exaggeration to intensity. 

Comedy can be ever-present it’s an arising in every mood depending on how subject matter is handled. Tragedy however, is built, as we move on from exaggeration it’s through illumination we’re building the big fall. (Cleo is killed because Alice doesn’t fully embrace herself soon enough to take effective action against dangerous enemies.) Tragedy is built out of a comedy. Drama is the balanced and spontaneous dance between the two.

We tell these genre stories in campy ways, to distract from the fact that we're building a giant set piece. A Western showdown between mimetic picaresque hero and modern villain driven full circle by capitalistic greed back into the wildness of the western frontier.

The first season is all about tricking the audience into thinking it's just a serialized sitcom, or whatever the present day version of a sitcom looks like, something like the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. The absurdist humor of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt overlaps with our deconstructionist humor and event planning. So it's not really until episode 10 that we twist the knife in the deconstructionist threads - raising the stakes, changing the mood, revealing that this show isn't just a comedy. The material is thoughtful and elevated, just before the aforementioned tonal twist, we get a full circle moment on Alice's worldview journey. Since I think of the whole series as a piece, this is the end of act one, and episodes 11-13 at the end of season one are the start of act two.  

So we've got this thoughtful, sincere story, inside of this genre mosaic adventure. Humor comes from  the dissonance between campy and pulpy tones of this two-fisted tale. In Act 3 intensity climaxes as Alice’s examined emotions turn into expressed actions revealing her true self, championing her wounded nothing-ego, and defying her former victimized identity. Embracing her new persona Alice plays villain to her villains in an act of redemption for her former self, and for those who haven’t learned how to embrace their power and fight like her, obfuscated by manipulators - with the lens of revenge.

And now we come to a fourth structure-informing concept that has been, as of yet, implied, but unmentioned. You dear reader. Biology.

DNA consists of two phosphate strands attached to nucleotide bases which attach to complementary nucleotide bases of the other phosphate strand in a twisted ladder shape called a “double helix". From the Yourgeneome Youtube channel, a video titled “ From DNA to protein - 3D.”

"... Within the DNA are sections called genes. These genes contain the instructions for making proteins.  When a gene is "switched on" an enzyme called RNA polymerase attaches to the start of the gene and unzips the double helix.  It moves along, reading the d.n.a and making a strand of messenger RNA out of free bases in the nucleus.

The DNA code determines the order the free bases are added to the messenger RNA. This process is called transcription. The m.RNA is then processed, removing and adding sections. The m.RNA  then moves out of the nucleus into the cytoplasm.

Protein factories called ribosomes bind to the m.RNA. The ribosomE reads the code of the m.RNA to produce a chain made up of amino acids. There are 20 types of amino acids.

Transfer RNA molecules carry the amino acids to the ribosome.  The m.RNA is read 3 bases at a time. As the triplet is read, a t.RNA molecule delivers the corresponding amino acid. This is added to a growing chain of amino acids. Once the last amino acid has been added, the chain folds into a complex 3-D shape called a protein. "

Just like a complex strand of DNA is broken into genes, and then into triplets which are decoded as directions for the sequencing of amino acids, the concept map (above) is a double helix structure which can be broken into chapters and further broken into base triplets to be decoded as directions for the sequencing of episodic information. Like the chain of amino acids folds into the complex 3D shape of a protein, the chain of episodes folds into a complex 8D experience.

Think back to our exercise of imagination with dust - the little electrical pulsation’s journey doesn’t stop when the photon is destroyed upon intersecting the observer. Because when that little electrical pulsation hits the optical prism of your eye it’s refracted by the cornea, bent so that it hits the optical nerve. At which point that pulsation is translated into a further electrical pulsation in the brain. Your brain then processes this pulsation and constructs the perception of light. This is still not the end though.

Perception is to become aware of something directly through the senses, with the sensitive powers of sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell - deconstruction. However to conceive is to form an understanding in the mind - reconstruction. So while a protein has a height, width, and depth, it takes a conscious observer to perceive duration, and to conceive it in context.

And we don’t just observe one photon or one protein at a time. We observes groups of photons cascading in what we perceive as light-waves, and we use the sustained observation of light-waves interacting with the world around us to build a mutual understanding of both. As we come to understand light-waves, we also understand the things light-waves interact with.

Whether it’s an electrical pulsation traveling through a magnetic field, a pressure pulsation traveling through a gaseous field, a thought or feeling pulsation traveling through a consciousness field, or a magical pulsation traveling through a reality field, a conscious observer is required to deconstruct and reconstruct these perception pulsations through a conception field. In the same way an observer is required to conceive a character pulsation through a narrative field, learning more about the character through the shifting tones and conflicts they interact with.

All of this has been a round-about primer to understand the concept map. To see things closer to how I see them, and understand the work I’ve done in creating this series; by reading the legend to the symbols of the concept map: a quantum artifact, in the shape of a double helix. Like DNA it’s a code for creation, and like a light-wave it’s in constant motion. It’s constituent elements deconstructed into frequencies for individual observation.

Reconstruction is left up to prospective collaborators, you dear reader. Through your sustained observation of these pulsating vibrations, as you scan their path, like the RNA polymerase unzipping strands of DNA, or as if they were flowing through your consciousness, like little bits of dust passing through a sliver of light, you develop a deeper understanding of their moving image. A gestalt composition of varying differentials of worldview arc, story genre, conflict stage, conflict depth, narrative element, tone, major relationships, chapter, and episode. A continuum of continual reflection dependent on a spectrum of categorically independent incidents.