The point of making it is to show that some sublime moments are earned, some sublime moments 'cheat' and get their uncanniness through exploitation.
How do you tell the difference?
Well, if you hear the swelling music, the golden light, the panoramic shots, the cinematic sucker punches to pump our adrenaline or our tears, that's not the real thing.
That's not sublimity, that's manipulation.
The sublime can be noisy, but it's often very quiet, but you know it's sublime because every time you see it, not only does it not lose any quality by noticing the gimmickry, the genuineness makes you that much more in awe. One is spectacle, one is revelation. One wows you, can make the hairs on your neck stand, can make you weep, the other completely reorders the walls of reality when you think of it again, it keeps reordering. One tells you exactly what to feel, one makes you feel something different every time.
Unfortunately, one's a drug, and one's a vegetable.
Maybe you're better off not experiencing it, because once you notice the real thing, you have trouble going back and it takes real effort not be cynical about the whole process. I've worked very hard to fall back in love with Hollywood magic and the Spielberg and Star Wars that gave me so much joy as a kid. To love what's good about Hollywood and Disney and genre fiction, you have to suspend your cynicism, but in order to truly understand it, you have to have skepticism. You have to realize that a large part of what it's doing is there to sell tickets and toys and t-shirts, which enables the lifestyles of executives and stars who use their power to exploit thousands: sometimes through low pay, sometimes emotional exploitation, sometimes sexual.
Once you really ponder the cost of that, it becomes much harder to appreciate it. I know a lot of people, as often as not political radicals, who leave their politics at the door when it comes to Disney and Marvel and Game of Thrones and Star Wars: knowing perfectly well that these things exist to exploit them and consuming them anyway like perfect late capitalists. I'm sorry to say it's a bit more difficult to take their politics seriously when you know they do that.
God knows, exploitation exists in art as well as entertainment, but it's not the exploitation of literal millions in every country. It doesn't exist to make perfectly docile consumers out of us so that a group of narcissists and psychopaths can live like lords of the universe.
Art doesn't exist to make money. Art COSTS money.
Of course, there's plenty of art that makes money, and many of the greatest artists are as much entertainers as artists, but the POINT of what they do is not entertainment, the point of what they do is to fit art within entertainment: be they Scorsese, Shakespeare, Dickens or Dylan, the point was to squeeze art into commercial demands.
But superstar artists are lucky enough that they don't have to choose, they can make art that's entertainment and konw they won't lose their clientele. The rest of us probably have to pick a lane, because there are lots of people with power over us who will penalize us if we don't make exactly what they want be they producers who demand a perfectly marketable product or academic supervisors who demand a piece of art that looks or sounds exactly like theirs. Most artists have hundreds of experiences like that, and we'll never know who might have been another Scorsese or Dylan had they better sponsorship. Genius is very rare, but it's not as rare as people think. For every genius who flowers, there are half a dozen who could have been with the right breaks. If you don't have understanding mentors, sponsorship, patrons, commissions, producers or publishers, you will not make a living from art, and you'll have to spend your days doing whatever you can to get those eight hours a week where you can work on what cwuld make you esteemed everywhere if you had forty.
The cost of art is something nobody wants to know in our generation, because art is not just pleasure, it's serious work. The people who make it slave away at it and most of them don't get much remuneration. They just keep buggering on about something that, if you look at it, may make your life more meaningful.
It's not just serious work to create it, it's serious work to understand it. Sometimes, you gotta plow through the boring parts to understand the whole, and the older I get, the more I realize that's just the way it is. Like everybody, I skip boring passages of novels and boring songs in albums, but I mean to come back to them. Art is a process, and at the end of it you understand something you didn't understand when you first encountered it. Furthermore, the way you know that the process will be worth it is because some people, some 'authorities' with lots of experience of this stuff, tell you this is what's worth your time.
Because what happens when we don't?
If we're that easily manipulated by entertainment, what else can we be manipulated by? Everybody seems to agree that the world is ripe for chaos and mass violence, but everybody wonders how.
Whether or not you choose to admit it, there are giant industries with vested interests in making you think a certain way with absolute certainty. That much is easy to admit for many, but it's not just the ones you think they are. It's not just the right wing propaganda rags:
- It's the universities that pump us full of critical theory about how everything in the world is a normative capitalist lie even as they steal our futures through student loans so they can put in enough amenities to let us live like capitalist kings for four years we'll pay for for the rest of our lives.
- It's entertainment industries that paradoxically anaesthetize us through noise, and realize that if a movie or music is loud enough, we won't be able to hear our own critical thoughts and make better consumers for overpriced music that's cheaper to make and simpler to hear. We become addicted to noise, simplicity, repetition, until we can't consume anything that might make us a little less hard to fool. It may be a paradox, but we become anesthetized through adrenaline.
- It's social media companies that make money by keeping us enraged, so they promote more and more ideologically polarizing content.
- Its political parties and their believers (yes, both), who deliberately manufacture memes designed to simplify issues so that we'll accept any action they take.
- It's games built to addict us through microrewards.
- It's streaming entertainment built to addict us with cliffhangers, no matter what slop they put in the middle of episodes.
- It's a fashion industry that dictates what clothes we need every year and send so many of the well-dressed among us into credit card debt.
- It's even the respectable news organizations who sell advertising eyes by making us permanently scared.
And that's the thing, manipulation can be very, very good quality. The quality of a lot of popular culture is exemplary, but it's not the full story, and the overwhelming majority of it is not fully art. Just like the speeches of politicians can be inspiring even as we know politicians have ulterior motives, so too can movies and TV that pumps up the cliches. Just like there are politicians who inspire us because they mean well, there are lots of entertainers who are so good that they take on properties of art. Cliches become cliches because they work, and there are all sorts of moments in movies that work on us even as we know that a little bit of the effect is bullshit.
What is art? Well, that is not going to be anything we agree on. But I do know this: art is only fully art if it is real. Art is a real individual response to the phenomena of the world: what it isn't is a response to love or loss that tells you something about them that you already know.
Real art is something that takes, as Master Yoda would say..., the deepest seriousness of purpose. In that way it is no different than science or medicine. Art is as much a leg on the table of how we keep society going as economics, humanities, science, medicine, politics and sports. I know that is just a personal truth. I also KNOW that truth is universal.
A couple paragraphs ago I said so much of entertainment was like a politician's bullshit, so what does 'bullshit' mean in this situation?
Perhaps there's a better word for it. Perhaps we should call it slop, perhaps we should call it 'ersatz' or 'kitsch', but ultimately, it's just 'fake.'
Fake can mean a lot of things, but in this case, the ultimate definition of fake is fake at the basest level: a false perception of reality, a utopian perception of reality, a perception of reality that lets us believe that we can achieve what we want without compromise, without lesser evils, without our hopes mercilessly dashed over and over again. The fakery that tells us we can get through life without a broken heart, without grief, shame, connivance, defeat, maybe even deprivation. The fakery of the happy ending, the fakery of the utopian pursuit, the fakery of the person who sees what they want, goes out and does it, and doesn't tell us enough about the cost of getting there.
The 'cost of getting there' is what art is about. It's not about the victory, it's about the struggle: not just the struggle, the loss, the compromise, the complicity, the division and tension between who we are and what we want.
If art exists to do anything at all: it tells us, again and again, that that is true: that life is full of all those terrible things.
And yet, at the same time, art exists to tell us life is beautiful, life is never worth giving up on: that there are consolations and dignities in failure, and that even if success never looks like what you thought it would: success may yet come.
The greatest art tells us this brutally bittersweet truth, and it tells us ecstatically. Great art is the pursuit of what Werner Herzog calls the 'elusive, ecstatic poetic truth.' Art is elusive because understanding situations on a deeper level than appearances requires an enormous amount of thought, and its ecstatic because there is a triumph inherent in encountering something that changes the way we perceive reality: both for the creator and the appreciator.
But in entertainment, we don't hear about the human cost. We don't hear in all those Marvel movies about the family of the guy who gets crushed for being in the wrong parking garage. We don't hear in Disney about all the bitchy things the princesses do to their servants and friends to keep themselves the center of everybody's attention. It took twenty-five years before Star Trek admitted in Deep Space Nine that its utopian vision may be a false bill of goods. It took nearly fifty years for Star Wars to tell any story in their universe about someone who doesn't have force powers.
Art is about what you give up, not what you gain. And if you believe so many radicalizing forces on so many sides telling you that we stand to gain so much as a society without giving up things we hold dearer than life, you're likely not to appreciate much art either.
Because if we're manipulated so easily into credulity that we cry at a Steven Spielberg ending but can't appreciate the ecstatic tragedy at the end of Citizen Kane, what else can we fall for?
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Ecstatically sublime moments in movies: the real thing...
The hunt, the music box, and the outdoor resolution of The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir)
The final shot of Erich von Stroheim in The Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir)
The casting of the bell in Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky)
The burning castle and the flute player at the cliff in Ran (Akira Kurosawa)
The final shot of Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa)
The wife's tale in Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa)
Monkeys facing the monolith and the bone in 2001 (Stanley Kubrick)
The bomb ride in Doctor Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick)
Ethan in the doorway at the beginning and the end of The Searchers (John Ford)
The baptismal massacre in The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola)
The assassination of Don Fanucci in Godfather II (Francis Ford Coppola)
Colonel Kurtz's camp in Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola)
The raft down the river in The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton)
Isak Jacobi's magic house in Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman)
The flagellants and the procession of the dead in The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman)
The merging of faces in Persona (Ingmar Bergman)
The emergence of Omar Sharif from the desert in Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean)
Cleo and the soldier walking the pavement at the end of Cleo 5 to 7 (Agnes Varda)
The grandparents watching the sea in Tokyo Story, the grandmother watching her grandson, the grandfather returning to the empty house (Yasijiro Ozu)
Lady Wakasa's revelation in Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi)
Anju singing at the river in Sansho the Bailiff (Kenji Mizoguchi)
The walk through Rome after liberation at the end of The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci)
The bows to the boy in The Last Emperor (Bernardo Bertolucci)
The burning of the Icon in Decalogue I (Krysztof Kieslowski)
The oil fire in There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson)
Aguirre among the monkeys in Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog)
Angela Lansbury's monologue in The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer)
Old Auntie rocking Apu's cradle as she sings to him in Pather Panchali, Apu discovers the train, Durga dances in the rain and becomes sick. (Satayajit Ray)
The mother standing in the doorway waiting for Apu in Aparijito. (Satayajit Ray)
Apu carrying his son on his shoulders in The World of Apu. (Satayajit Ray)
The Xanadu scenes in Citizen Kane (Orson Welles)
Madeleine bathed in green light and the appearance of the nun in Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock)
The fire and locust scenes in Days of Heaven (Terrance Malick)
Joan's Face in The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer)
The boxing ring scenes in Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese)
Don Fabrizio's palace in The Leopard (Lucchino Visconti)
Club Silencio in Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch)
The party scene in City of God (Fernando Mierelles)
Burt Lancaster looking out from his balcony in The Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrik)
Adrian Brody walking among the ruins of Warsaw in The Pianist (Roman Polanski)
The angel ministering to a dying man in Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders)
The reunion in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy)
Sam the Lion's monologue in The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich)
The coin toss in No Country for Old Men (The Coen Brothers)
The appearance of the baby in Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaron)
The diary entries in First Reformed (Paul Schrader)
Burt Lancaster overlooking New York from a balcony in The Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrik)
First contact in Arrival (Denis Villeneuve)
The Pale Man and final revelation of Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro)
The end of La Strada (Federico Fellini)
The procession at the end of 8 1/2 (Federico Fellini)
The trial audience in A Matter of Life and Death (Powell and Pressberger)
'Love is very simple.' in Children of Paradise (Marcel Carne)
The freezeframe at the end of The 400 Blows (Francois Truffaut)
The trip to Angkor Wat at the end of In the Mood for Love (Wong-Kar Wai)
The reburial of the son in Ida (Pawel Pawelikowski)
The riot, labor and water scenes in Roma (Alfonso Cuaron)
Radio Raheem and the riot in Do The Right Thing (Spike Lee)
