Ugly Babies, creativity and candour...

Ed Catmull, the cofounder of Pixar Animation, wrote a quite fascinating book in 2014 called “Creativity Inc: Overcoming the Unseen Forces that stand in the Way of Inspiration”. I leafed through it at Sydney Airport one day, and decided to purchase it for an overseas flight which I expected required some period of time spent away from blankly staring at a little TV screen. Not only did it turn out to be a fascinating take on movie making, Catmull provided a quite powerful general metaphor for the creative process - both large scale and personal. It had me musing about how growing a self might just involve similar dynamic tensions.

Catmull wrote about the period at Disney in the 1990s when management seemed to drop the process and art of “story development,” of taking the time to work with ideas, and of the necessary period of incubation that all ideas need before they are consumed through the hungry beast that is the corporation. It was a period in which content production ruled over the uncertain and delicate process of story creation…

Catmull states:

“The cost of that becomes clear when you think of how a movie starts out. It's a baby. It's like the fetus of a movie star; we all start out ugly. Every one of Pixar's stories starts out that way. A new thing is hard to define; it's not attractive, and it requires protection. When I was a researcher at DARPA, I had protection for what was ill-defined. Every new idea in any field needs protection. Pixar is set up to protect our director's ugly baby…Of course you can't protect the baby forever. At some point, the world calls and it has to grow up, show itself and speak to the audience in its own unique voice. That’s a positive thing.”

Turns out the best animated productions, like selves, need time to grow, time to goof off and play, time to find their own edges and unique perspective. But this creative play is occurring on a line that has at one end an available and protective home and a big, wide uncertain world at the other. It’s this tension; created by the understanding that each flourishing creative project may one day find its place in the audience’s mind, that brings with it a certain kind of imperative.

Catmull muses, “sometimes the ugly baby would rather play in the sandbox forever”, repeating an undeveloped story that has been left in a form which is too raw, too much, too little…unreflected upon. Babies need growth encouraging experiences - “It takes a village”, says Catmull, “A mechanism of sorts”…

At Pixar, they call this mechanism the Braintrust, a diverse group of people within the company who meet periodically to assess all of the projects underway. These groups of individuals operate with some detachment because the ugly babies are usually not theirs, and because of this, they can operate at a level of candour and directness that encourages perspectives about how each baby can develop.

Such groups are composed of strong personalities that are not governed by the conventions of excessive politeness. They give quick, honest, concrete, and substantive feedback, and they can take it, too. They converse with each other directly and intensely in ways that bring big ideas to the surface.

“Candour is the key to collaborating effectively,” writes Catmull. “Lack of candour leads to dysfunctional environments.”

Wait a minute…are we talking how a creative studio operates…or how a psychotherapeutic relationship might proceed?

Neuro-psychoanalysis researcher Allan Schore, whose work into emotional development and the growth of the self, identifies the particular benefit of candour in the psychotherapeutic relationship. He says “fresh and heartfelt metaphorical language, or direct, straightforward and even blunt language is often the most direct route to truth, richness and honesty”. For Schore, truth represents not some kind of verifiable fact that sits in some dusty encyclopaedia - but a sense of experience that captures who we are, prior to thinking, and outside of memory.

It is a truth that’s carried below and above language, and because of this, evades explicit capture by the reductive activity of the left brain: whose design brief, Schore suggests, may well be to seek out certainty at the cost of emotional truth. In the right brain, we may well find a different story, an implicit unfinished ugly baby in search of the kind of creative environment to express an unexpected truth.

Schore’s point is made to underscore what he calls, ‘the necessary communicative resources’ which function to engage with the right-brain’s creative and integrative elements, which are also speculated to house what he describes as the ‘implicit self’. Interestingly - Schore prefers to use the term, “communication therapy” rather than “talk therapy”, to encompass the different ways humans convey information other than ‘talk’, to capture and encourage these implicit senses.

Do we jump to Catmull’s notion of the ugly baby yet? Maybe not entirely, but perhaps there’s something to the sense that unformulated, implicit selves may well require a particular kind of creative engagement to find life, colour and definition. Schore’s notion of the kind of communication required to encourage this implicit self, rests in the idea that the right brain of the therapist is also involved in the work. The willingness to make use of material, not just arising from a memory of past interactions with the client, but from a world of diffuse, body-originating, gut-hunch, wide-environment perspectives may provide a source of much-needed implicit material.

As Catmull quips, “It is the nature of things—in order to create, you must internalise and almost become the project for a while, and that near-fusing with the project is an essential part of its emergence. But it is also confusing. Where once a movie's writer/director had perspective, he or she loses it. Where once he or she could see a forest, now there are only trees.” For an individual in psychic pain - this loss of perspective may lead to a cascade of painful aftereffects, confusion or stagnation.

It’s possible that Catmull’s Brainstrust provides the necessary context around which a kind of interplay of right-brains are at work teasing apart the threads making up the implicit narrative a Pixar classic-to-be; but they all start out as ugly babies. In this context, something novel that hints at the identity to come; something worth protecting and nurturing for a later audience to interact with. In Catmull’s metaphor, I can see not just a little further into the genius of a movie like Toy Story, but into the possible creative exchanges that may play a part in igniting growth in a fledgling self.