J.J. Abrams and His Box of Mystery

With the energy of a hopped-up hare, J.J. Abrams gives an enlightening eighteen minute lecture for TED on his passion for unseen mystery and his pronounced obsession with boxes. In it, he riffs on how printmaking, bookmaking, magic, Apple computers, writing, television, and films all capture (ahem, box) and showcase unseen mystery. Abrams, anyone who has seen Cloverfield or Lost knows, is obsessed with the power of withholding information.

So—in addition to referencing Lost, Mission Impossible 3, Alien, Star Wars, and E.T.—Abrams talks about and shows a couple scenes from Jaws, a great film that’s powered on withholding from the audience visual information on Jaws. Intriguingly, one of his favorite scenes of all time is a slice-of-life scene from Jaws in which Roy Scheider’s character and his character’s little boy are sitting at a dining room table with the little boy mimicking his father’s gestures. The whole scene culminates when Scheider’s character catches on and says, “Come on, give us a kiss.” The little boy asks why and his father says, “Because I need it.” Abrams love for really solid character development seems to be a pretty right on balance entertainment-wise for the unseen mystery in his creative projects.