On Friday last week Jim Emerson posted a very good analysis of a Charles Krauthammer column from the same day called Oscars for Osama.
Krauthammer devoted his column to chastising Hollywood for offering “sympathetic portrayal[s]” of terrorism and terrorists. He also observes that
“...self-flagellation and self-loathing pass for complexity and moral seriousness in Hollywood.”
Hollywood is an easy target, largely because (as many people in the movie business would probably agree) many of the movies that emerge from the studio system are, to put it bluntly, pretty crappy. Films get rushed into the theaters, bad scripts get churned into bad movies, and there are plenty of flops. It’s not a safe assumption to make that all Hollywood movies are as carefully thought through and crafted as, for example, your average non-fiction book.
But this exchange highlights for me the danger of subjecting artistic expression to political analysis. As Elvis Costello put it in the early 1980s, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” I think the same dynamic is at play in this exchange. Art draws its meaning from the experience of the viewer, and as such, it is often very hard to identify the definitive meaning of any particular work.
As an example, Emerson spends most of his time in his article talking about the movie Syriana, which Krauthammer quotes from in his column:
"The movie's plot is so complex we're not really supposed to follow it, we're supposed to be surrounded by it. Since none of the characters understand the whole picture, why should we? If the movie shook down into good guys and bad guys, we'd be the good guys, of course. Or if it was a critique of American policy, we might be the bad guys. But what if everybody is a bad guy, because good guys don't even suit up to play this game? What if a CIA agent brings about two assassinations and tries to prevent another one, and is never sure precisely whose policies he is really carrying out?...
'Syriana' is a movie that suggests Congress can hold endless hearings about oil company profits and never discover the answer to anything, because the real story is so labyrinthine that no one -- not oil company executives, not Arab princes, not CIA spies, not traders in Geneva, understands the whole picture."
While much of the rest of Emerson's post (and, indeed, Krauthammer's column) takes on the tone of a polemic, I think this point is worthy of further discussion.
Reality is messy. It's complicated, and contradictory, and confusing. There are different visions of good and bad, and different visions of right and wrong. There are interlocking motives for individuals and groups, and, in fact, individuals and groups may act in ways that are inexplicable even to themselves.
This is the issue at the heart of the conflict described in most political dialogue. Is the United States good or evil? The only true answer, it seems to me, is both. The United States can be a force for good and a force for evil at the same time, and in fact, it has been throughout history. Is Iraq good or evil? Are the Republicans and Democrats good or evil? These questions are so general as to be meaningless. Yet millions of trees are sacrificed each year to print the endless books batting these questions back and forth.
The beauty of art is that it matches the complexity and contradiction of reality with its own complexity. Music, or painting, or theater, or (yes) movies can be confusing, contradictory, and confounding. The viewer or listener must experience the art from their own perspective and make up their mind as to what it means. So, for example, a symphony can be both jarring and beautiful at the same time, or a painting can be simultaneously ugly and captivating.
One of the most frustrating aspects of modern American society is an excessive literalism that attempts to tamp down this omnipresent complexity into easy categories. I agree with Emerson that Krauthammer is guilty of this kind of oversimplification in his column. Is merely making a movie about suicide bombers tantamount to celebrating them? Is making a movie that presents the United States as a force for both good and evil the same thing as (as Krauthammer puts it) "malign anti-Americanism?"
One of the most provocative teachers I ever had spent much of his class time highlighting the difference between "maps" and "territories." His point was that the map of a place is not the same thing as the place itself, and by extension (he was a linguist) a word is not the same thing as its meaning. In your mind when I type the word "maggot" you may experience an unpleasant vision, but the experience of that thought is not the same thing as the reality of seeing a squirming larva in front of you. The inability to make this basic cognitive distinction haunts much of what passes for considered analysis in our society.
For example, violence in movies. There are websites devoted to inventorying and criticizing violent acts on film, as if each episode was glorifying violence in the abstract. In fact, all violence in movies is simulated, and much of it is presented critically. Even Shakespeare used violence extensively throughout his plays. As Amanda Mabillard explains it, "Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences reveled in shocking drama... some of Shakespeare's most violent plays were by far his most popular during his lifetime... Hamlet's father is poisoned with a potion so potent that it immediately causes bubbling scabs on his body; King Duncan is lured to Macbeth's castle to be slaughtered in his bed, and so on." But Shakespeare was not out to glorify violence. His plays are far more subtle and nuanced than that literal interpretation might indicate.
Writers use simulated and staged scenarios like a painter uses different hues of paint to draw out emotions from the viewer. Violence, or dishonesty, or cruelty are like different colors from the painter's palette, or different notes on an instrument. The goal more often is to evoke an emotional response from the audience, not to blindly advocate the particular act being displayed. To view works of art on only this surface level, in my opinion, is to miss much of the meaning and beauty within.
Which brings us back to the particular exchange at hand. It may be that these films beg an attack along the lines of Krauthammer's, because the individuals that made them waded into the realm of the political of their own volition. But by ineptly "crossing the streams" of art and politics, in my opinion, Krauthammer's column does a disservice to both.