Two ways of reading

One way of reading something is to ask what’s wrong with it: what’s missing, what’s out of place. Another way of reading something is to ask what one might learn or benefit from it.

It’s a mistake to see the first as “critical” reading. This is the perennial academic error. Finding fault with a piece of text—whether an op-ed, an essay, a journal article, a monograph, a novel, or a poem—for being imperfect (i.e., human) or finite (i.e., limited) is absurd. We know in advance that every text we ever read will be both finite and imperfect. This is not news. Nor is “critical” reading the smirking discovery of whatever a given text’s limits or imperfections are. Who cares?

Roger Ebert liked to admonish Gene Siskel for being parsimonious in his joy. The principle applies to reading and indeed to all intellectual activity. Why should what is flawed take priority over what is good? Why not approach any text—any cultural artifact whatsoever—and ask, What do I stand to receive from this? What beauty or goodness or truth does it convey? How does it challenge, provoke, silence, instruct, or otherwise reach out to me? How might I stand under it, as an apprentice, rather than over it, as a master? What does it evoke in me, and how might I respond in kind?

Such a posture is not uncritical. It is a necessary component of any humane criticism. It is the first step in the direction of genuine (rather than superficial) criticism, for it is an admission of need: of the limits and imperfections of the reader, prior to mention of those of the text.

In a word, humility is the condition for joy, in reading as in all art. And without joy, the whole business is a sad and rotten affair.

Artists for friends

Should the artists you love love you back? I confess that this question never occurred to me when I was growing up or , as an adult, when I developed a taste for whatever art I happen to take pleasure in. As this question, or rather assertive expectation, hovers like a gibbering ghoul over all our aesthetic and pop-cultural conversations these days, and has done so in increasing emotional intensity with each passing year (or at least it seems so to me), I have found myself asking why it would never occur to me—apart from what I take to be later, more informed and reflective conviction.

I suppose much of the reason comes down to this: Growing up as a Christian in the U.S. means that if you like anything outside the sub-cultural bubble of kitsch and in-house “Christian” entertainment, you are forced to reckon pretty quickly with the fact that not only are the artists whose work you enjoy neither religious nor Christian; they are often actively hostile to the sort of Christian you are. More to the point, their words or images or themes make your faith and/or your community (i.e., your family) an object of critique, ridicule, or dismissal. Which means that, pretty quickly, you either accept this state of affairs and go on enjoying their work, or reject it in toto and return to the warm confines of the bubble. I opted for the former.

I think of Tool and Rage Against the Machine, two bands I adored in high school. I saw them live. I owned all their albums, including the Napster-sourced live and hard-to-find stuff. I learned their songs on guitar and bass. I was willy-nilly radicalized politically. (RATM was my first real introduction to leftist thought. They were the reason I was skeptical, as a self-involved suburban high schooler, of the Iraq war.) And guess what? I knew they hated my guts. They hated where I lived, where I went to church, my house, my friends, my parents, my beliefs—all of it. They told me so, in no uncertain terms. And what did I do? I kept on listening. Not only did I not let their contempt for much of what made me me determine whether or not I could enjoy their art. It actually proved a significant moment, or development, in my intellectual and theological formation. It snatched me out of the bubble and put me face to face with the voices of people who’d been harmed by religion, or who found it repulsive, or who thought it an emotional and political sedative, or who saw through the lies of hucksters and frauds. That was (and remains) an important education. For much of what they had to say was true; and even when it wasn’t, it was worth listening to.

I think also of Christopher Hitchens, whose writing I found myself falling in love with in my twenties. Not his politics—though the fact that I feel compelled to say that is itself an indictment of those readers who loved Hitch right up to the point when he crossed an invisible line, whereupon his writing somehow proved no longer good—but his prose. I still marvel at the man’s ability to write interesting sentences, combined with or underwritten by masterly knowledge of Anglophone literature and global politics and history. Seeing his nearly-posthumous bullet-stopper Arguably show up in the mail was Christmas come early: every essay a feast.

As you well know, Hitchens, too, hated my guts. He thought religion poisoned everything, specifically my religion: Israel and Jesus and Paul and Rome and all that. To which I thought: So be it. Who cares? I returned his hate with affection. I thought he was wrong, naturally, and that he ought to turn down the volume every once in a while. But if his hatred was earned—if he truly believed that what I believe is toxic to human flourishing—then he ought to have said so, and with all the passion he could muster. It would never occur to me to be angry at him, certainly not for saying what he judged to be true in the most compelling manner possible. I would, and still do, keep on reading and loving him back.

To be clear, I don’t mean to universalize my own experience. I would never prescribe reading or viewing or listening to artistic content filled with genuine hatred for oneself or one’s community. Nor would I suggest that one ought to do so on principle.

But the general point stands. Artists aren’t our friends. Good art is not art that affirms me or who I am; good art is not art that is made by people who affirm me or who I am. The art stands on its own. It is good or bad in itself, on its own terms. And if you, or I, find joy in it, see the truth in it, delight in its beauty or wit or pleasure, then each of us is free to ignore whatever wise or foolish beliefs its creators hold. The joke’s on them if they would withhold their work for only the “right” sort of people. But if we withhold it from ourselves, for no other reason than an arbitrary (and, given the implications, ultimately indefensible and self-defeating) sense that artists ought both to like us and to say so, then the joke’s on us.

The catholicity of art

In Jamie Smith’s latest monthly newsletter—to which I recommend you subscribe—he has a reflection on the relationship between art and faith. In particular he has a bone to pick with those well-meaning Christian writers and artists whose approach to art is (in my words) variations on, or elevated versions of, the God’s Not Dead approach. They are “BCFC”: religious art by Christians and for Christians. The result is parochial, hokey, dull, blinkered, constricted, in a word, un-catholic. Go big or go home: don’t retreat to nostalgia or to enclaves of the sub-sub-sub-group; make art for the world. It’s God’s world, after all.

With all of this, given a certain interpretation, I think we should all agree—even if we allow, as Paul Griffiths rightly reminds us, that we ought not thereby to denigrate kitsch or its audience, though we don’t mistake it for high art. But there’s also an interpretation of this approach, and perhaps an intended meaning behind it, that I want to place a question mark next to.

Here’s the way of speaking I’m wondering about: Avoiding, rejecting, or downgrading art made for “the enclave,” for “the sub-culture,” for the collective, for the “us” by contradistinction to the “them.” Such art, on Smith’s view, doesn’t have the kosmos as its subject or audience. It’s concerned only with our little corner of it. And invariably those limits restrict to the point of strangulation. They lead to myopia of the worst and most boring kind.

It’s clear who and what Smith has in mind. But I don’t think his description quite matches his object. What he’s so repulsed by is nostalgia, sectarianism, rigidity, kitsch; art that is ornamental or didactic or self-validating (or all of the above). Hallmark art. Shallow and faux inspirational “content” that fails to live up to the venerable name of art. “Art,” therefore, whose meaning and purpose are written in shining neon letters on the first page, forestalling and alleviating the challenge—the adventure—of endless and untamed interpretation.

To that I say: Amen!

But is that best described as “sub-cultural” art by and for “the enclave”? I don’t think so. Why not? Because some of the best art we have, past and present, was and is made by and for the enclave. In fact, that’s what makes the most beautiful or moving art so endlessly compelling. Better, it’s what makes it so catholic: its very particularity. The universality of a great work of art is directly, not inversely, related to its specificity, its granularity of detail. And often as not, that granularity is a function of the artist’s parochial upbringing, identity, formation, and even initial audience. It’s only once that audience expands—in the lifetime of the artist or across the generations—that it becomes clear, perhaps even to the artist and his or her sub-group, that other people are interested in this odd little corner of the world. Sometimes such artists and groups are at a loss for words why anyone else would take an interest in them!

This goes for more recent artistic endeavors (just think of the spiritual, musical, literary, and artistic contributions of African Americans, for example, or of Catholic or Jewish American immigrants) as well as long-established canonical works. Contemporary people don’t in general care about long-dead Greeks and their wars, or about the petty rivalries of fourteenth century Italy, or about medieval Japanese ladies-in-waiting. But they (we) keep reading them, and inadvertently learning about all the background details necessary to understand them, because we believe, or we have come to see, that they continue to have something to say to us—different though we may be from them.

My only point is that the criterion of “not by and for an enclave; having the whole world as an imagined audience” does not well fit these, or plenty of other, examples of lasting, “catholic” art. The proper catholicity is located in the artifact’s mysterious capacity to speak to the world, not in its maker’s worldliness, whether real or aspirational. There is no question that Christians in American today do appear to lack that catholicity; that that lack is a feature, not a bug; that it hampers serious Christian art from getting off the ground or being appreciated by fellow Christians, much less “the world”; and that it is well worth rooting out the causes, whatever they may be.

But in a sense, I want to go further and suggest that the problem is we aren’t enclaved enough. That is to say, our sub-culture isn’t some magnificent thing worth limning in everlasting vernacular lines. It’s largely defensive in posture, lacking the courage of its convictions. It’s squirmy and unsure of itself, anxious of others’ judgments. Grand sub-cultural art is born not of insecurity but of the crystal clarity bestowed by a firm identity, deeply held beliefs, and an integrated dense network of fellow members of the selfsame community. For whatever reason (and we could enumerate many reasons), Christians in America do not fit this description. Their anxiety is revealed most pitiably in the shrill spreadsheet-hollowness of their proselytizing efforts, not to mention the pure commercial parasitism of their aesthetic products.

If I were formulating a critique of the state of “faith and art” in the contemporary American scene, that’s where I’d begin.

On “anti" films that succeed, and why

More than one friend has pointed out an exception or addendum to my last post on "anti" films, which makes the claim that no "anti" films are successful on their own terms, for they ineluctably glorify the very thing they are wanting to hold up for critique: war, violence, misogyny, wealth, whatever.

The exception is this: There are successful "anti" films—meaning dramatic-narrative films, not documentaries—whose subject matter is intrinsically negative, and not ambiguous or plausibly attractive. Consider severe poverty, drug addiction, or profound depression. Though it is possible to make any of these a fetish, or to implicate the audience as a voyeur in relation to them, there is nothing appealing about being depressed, addicted, or impoverished, and so the effect of the cinematic form does nothing to make them appealing: for the form magnifies, and here there is nothing positive to magnify, only suffering or lack.

So, for example, The Florida Project and Requiem for a Dream and Melancholia are successful on their own terms; my critique of "anti" films does not apply to them.

But note well a few relevant features that distinguish these kinds of movies.

First, no one would mistake such films for celebrations of poverty, drug abuse, or depression. But that isn't because they're overly didactic; nor is it because other "anti" films aren't clear about their perspective. It's because no one could plausibly celebrate such things. But people do mistake films about cowboys, soldiers, assassins, vigilantes, gangsters, womanizers, adulterers, and hedge fund managers(!) as celebrations of them and their actions.

Second, this clear distinction helps us to see that films "against" poverty et al are not really "anti" films at all. Requiem is not "anti-hard drugs": it is about people caught up in drug abuse. It's not a D.A.R.E. ad for middle schoolers—though, as many have said, it certainly can have that effect. In that film Aranofsky glamorizes nothing about hard drugs or the consequences of being addicted to them. But that is more a critique of the way most films ordinarily bypass such consequences and focus on superficial appurtenances of the rich and famous, including the high of drugs but little more.

Third, this clarification helps to specify what I mean by "anti" films. I don't mean any film that features a negative subject matter. I mean a film whose narrative and thematic modus operandi is meant to be subversive. "Anti" films take a topic or figure that the surrounding culture celebrates, enjoys, or prefers left unexamined and subjects it to just that undesired examination. It deconstructs the cowboy and the general and the captain of industry. Or it does the same to the purported underbelly of society, giving sustained and sympathetic attention to the Italian mafia or drug-runners or pimps or what have you. In the first case, the lingering, affectionate gaze of the camera cannot but draw viewers into the life of the heretofore iconic figure, deepening instead of complicating their prior love. In the second, the camera's gaze does the same for previously misunderstood or despised figures. Michael Corleone and Tony Montana and Tommy DeVito become memorialized and adored through repeated dialogue, scenes, posters, and GIFs. Who could resist the charms of such men?

Fourth, the foregoing raises the question: Why are bad things like crime and violence and illicit sex plausibly "attractive" to filmmakers and audiences in a way that other bad things are not? I think the answer lies, on the one hand, with the visual nature of the medium: sex and violence, not to mention the excitement and/or luxury bound up with the life of organized crime, are visual and visually thrilling actions; in the hands of gifted directors, their rendering in film is often gorgeous and alluring to behold. Bodies in motion, kinetic choreography, beautiful people doing physically demanding or intriguing or seductive deeds: the camera was made for such things. Depression and deprivation? Not so much. (A reminder that film is not a medium of interiority; psychology is for print.)

On the other hand, the perennial topics of "anti" films are, as I said in my first post, not wholly bad things. War, needless to say, is a deeply complex phenomenon: just causes and wicked intentions, wise leaders and foolish generals, acts of heroism and indiscriminate killing, remarkable discipline and wanton destruction. War is a force that gives us meaning for a reason. But sex and westerns and extravagant wealth and even organized crime are similarly ambivalent, which is to say, they contain good and bad; or put differently, what is bad in them is a distortion of what is good. The Godfather is a classic for many reasons, but a principal one is its recognizable depiction of an institution in which we all share: family.

One friend observed that, perhaps, films cannot finally succeed in subverting vices of excess, but they can succeed in negative portrayals of vices of privation. I'll have to continue to ruminate on that, though it may be true. Note again, however, the comment above: vices of privation are not generally celebrated, admired, or envied; there is no temptation to be seduced by homelessness, nor is the medium of film prone to glorify it. Which means there is nothing subversive, formally speaking, about depicting homelessness as a bad thing that no one should desire and everyone should seek to alleviate. Whereas an "anti" film, at least in my understanding of it, is subversive by definition.

Fifth, another friend remarked that the best anti-war films are not about war at all: the most persuasive case against a vice is a faithful yet artful portrait of virtue. Broadly speaking, I think that is true. Of Gods and Men and A Hidden Life are "anti-war" films whose cameras do not linger on the battlefield or set the audience inside the tents and offices of field generals and masters of war. Arrival is a "pro-life" film that has nothing to do with abortion. So on and so forth. I take this to be a complimentary point, inasmuch as it confirms the difficulty (impossibility?) of cinematic "anti" films, according to my definition, and calls to mind other mediums that can succeed as subversive art: literature, poetry, music, photography, etc. I think the phenomenon I am discussing, in other words, while not limited to film, is unique in the range and style of its expression—or restriction—in film.

A simple way to put the matter: no other art form is so disposed to the pornographic as film is. The medium by its nature wants you to like, to love, to be awoken and shaken and shocked and moved by what you see. It longs to titillate. That is its special power, and therefore its special danger. That doesn't make it all bad. Film is a great art form, and individual films ought to be considered the way we do any discrete cultural artifact. But it helps to explain why self-consciously "subversive" films continually fail to achieve their aims, inexorably magnifying, glamorizing, and glorifying that which they seek to hold up to a critical eye. And that is why truly subversive literary art so rarely translates to the screen; why, for example, Cormac McCarthy's "anti-western" Blood Meridian is so regularly called "unfilmable." What that novel induces in its readers, not in spite of but precisely in virtue of its brilliance, is nothing so much as revulsion. One does not "like" or identify with the Kid or the Judge or their fellows. One does not wish one were there. One is sickened, overwhelmed with the sheer godforsaken evil and suffering on display. No "cowboys and Indians" cosplay here. Just violence, madness, and death.

Can cinema produce an anti-western along the same lines? One that features cowboys and gorgeous vistas and heart-pounding action and violence? Filmmakers have tried, including worthy efforts by Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, and Kelly Reichardt. I'd say the verdict is still out. But even if their are exceptions, the rule stands.

Two thoughts on Adam Nayman on A Clockwork Orange

You should be reading the film criticism of Adam Nayman. Last week he wrote at The Ringer about Stanley Kubrick's adaption of A Clockwork Orange "in the age of cancellation," i.e., in a time when works of art deemed "problematic" are censored, edited, or banned. Or at least when such a fate is wished upon them by screaming hordes online.

I have two thoughts in response to his piece on ACO, which as usual is an excellent, thoughtful engagement with a difficult and culturally influential film.

First, toward the end of the essay he writes the following:

"It’s hard to say what’s more boring: The idea that a good movie is one made by a good person and/or contains content that could be considered progressive for its time and place, or the shouting-down of that position from those whose investment in rejecting it can seem condescending or creepy."

This is a genuinely strange dichotomy to pose, and there is only one plausible source for it: Twitter, or social media more generally. Surely Nayman knows there are—no joke—real-life, actual arguments, in print, in reputable journals and magazines, going back decades (and more), about the reception of art whose content or creator is morally questionable? Whereas the first item in his dichotomy is a culturally powerful, and growing, one, the second item he opposes to it is limited to a minuscule chorus of internet trolls who represent nothing and no one. Framing it in the way that he does, however, presents a faux false choice between two apparently equally bad options. Yet the falseness of the false choice is in the set-up, not in the actual positions available on the issue.

So either Nayman really thinks these are the options before us, or he is taking the easy way out and presenting a fake dilemma he knows is built on straw. Or, I suppose—what's best for him and worst for us—he, like so many who write about film and the arts today, spends too much online. Twitter distorts the mind, y'all. Get off it.

Second, he concludes the essay with the following paragraph:

"A Clockwork Orange is worth defending and decrying, although it’s not like coming down one way or the other is going to have much effect on a movie that’s already been elevated into the canon, and whose influence—from countless dorm rooms and laptop desktops adorned with posters and screenshots—is already massive. In truth, we don’t need another essay on A Clockwork Orange. But I do think we need the movie itself, not just because its problematic aspects are so bound up in its power, but because of what it says about the psychology of cancellation itself, and the unnaturalness of censorship and the comforting lie of 'bad apples,' which reassures us that it is other people who are rotten to the core. To paraphrase Kael, we become clockwork oranges if we reject difficult art without asking what’s inside us first. And it’s better to watch A Clockwork Orange than to be one."

This is a brilliant ending, and a point I largely endorse, since it's implicitly Augustinian: original sin means that, under fallen conditions, every artist and every work of art is implicated in evil—there's no way out. Which need not lead to either license or excuse or flattening of complicity in evil; but at a minimum it makes the correct diagnosis and eliminates the vacuous hope of "pure" art.

A minor addendum, however, from this unrecovered moralist: in point of fact, we don't "need" A Clockwork Orange, and for most of us, it would be better not to watch it at all. ACO and films like it—that is, works of visual art that depict or engage in gratuitous sex, violence, or vulgarity in such a way as to indict the viewer's own imlication or pleasure in them—fall prey to Truffaut's critique of anti-war films: the medium undermines the message. All anti-war films ultimately end up glorifying war; mutatis mutandis, the same goes for films that attempt to critique decadence by enacting it. Martin Scorsese is postmodernism's guilty auteur de jour here: Goodfellas, Casino, and The Wolf of Wall Street fail at exactly this point.

Which isn't to render a quick and easy No against these movies, or to argue that no one should see them, or to suggest that they don't have subtle things to say worth attending to in critical essays like the one Nayman's just written. Only to say that, all things being equal, A Clockwork Orange might do more harm than good, either in one's own life or in the broader culture; and that can be true at the same time that everything approbative Nayman says about the film is true, too.

Art's complicated. Cliché though it is, nevertheless it's one more reason, among many others, to resist cancellation culture, however "problematic" the work in question.