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A sort of review of the year
I had a bit of an identity crisis this year – for a while I started to think that I don’t actually like the arts. Given that I earn the bulk of my living writing about the arts, this was a worry.
It began with two Hollywood movies. Almost any film critic will tell you, triumphantly, that 2008 was the year when smart succeeded. With WALL-E and The Dark Knight, in particular, visionary artists working within the Hollywood system demonstrated that cinema with big, intelligent ideas could have big mainstream appeal, exposing the makers of lazier, more “populist” superhero, sci-fi or children’s fare as the cynics they are.
Critics want this to be true, because they like the idea of the public at large enthusiastically responding to the same lovingly crafted stuff they enthuse about for a living, and that this might happen more in future. So you’ll hear this kind of thing in music, art and theatre journalism too, every time something that critics mostly love unexpectedly becomes a huge popular success too.
And it feels like a delusion. This year, people flocked to Mamma Mia and Beverly Hills Chihuahua too. People, as gets proved again and again, like stupid films just as much as clever ones (and by extension, stupid culture generally). It doesn’t make these people stupid; it just means culture is not of central importance to their lives, so they don’t mind stuff that is basically rubbish, just as lots of people don’t mind eating what any chef would consider bad food. This can make arts critics, mostly passionate and serious about their particular subject area, feel terribly small and insignificant, but that’s tough.
So I’m used to this kind of thing. Except that I found watching The Dark Knight or WALL-E to be dispiriting experiences. I came out of both films thinking: these are probably the best mainstream films being made right now, everyone says so, and I just don’t like them. Do I just not like cinema?
This has been happening to me a lot lately. I didn’t particularly like Black Watch, the National Theatre of Scotland’s great commercial triumph, the most important piece of Scottish theatre in decades blah blah, which still seems manipulative and bombastic to me. I remain mostly baffled by the widespread appeal of Glasvegas, both this year’s biggest and most praised new British rock band, who seem one-dimensional and overly sentimental to me (although I still love their song It’s My Own Cheating Heart That Makes Me Cry).
I could go on, but let’s stick to WALL-E and The Dark Knight for now. There’s a lot to love about both films, obviously. Like Star Wars, both are art films that work as mainstream movies partly because they’re such passionate love letters to cinema – in WALL-E’s case, referencing 2001, Hello Dolly, ET and Charlie Chaplin most explicitly, but also Brave New World, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Alien, Planet of the Apes, Sleeper, and Star Wars itself; in The Dark Knight’s case, referencing The French Connection, Heat, The Godfather and various other crime movies. Both pay respectful tribute while boldly staking out their own aesthetic territory. They work in the same way that fantastic pop songs work – something reassuringly familiar mixed with something thrillingly new. But their artistic ambitions go beyond that. Both films also want to deal with The State Of The World, and both, for my money, do it so clunkily as to make the enterprise almost worthless.
Let’s start with WALL-E. It’s been praised for taking a stance on climate change, but it’s toothless, a children’s film dabbling clumsily in grown-up politics. Throughout, as I argued in a previous blog, it dodges difficult questions with sentimental, simplistic answers (How, exactly, did ALL the earth’s resources all get used up, and how was it decided who would get to go on the escape ship? Who got left behind? Were people left to die? What difficult decisions were made? When and how exactly did Buy and Large get to be in charge of everything? Etc). And it does all this, ultimately, because it’s a children’s film. If it is daring and innovative, it is only because the general standards for American children’s cinema are so depressingly low that anything which aims even slightly higher artistically stands out a mile. While waiting to see WALL-E, I sat through trailers for about six children’s films, all of which looked staggeringly idiotic and soulless in comparison. When films like Madagascar and Fly Me To The Moon are the competition, of course WALL-E looks like a work of genius.
The Dark Knight, although a more sophisticated film, has the same problem. It wants to be about the big, complicated moral and political dilemmas of the modern world – how do people in power defeat people who have absolutely no respect for that power, without undermining democracy in the process? But try as it might it cannot reconcile this with the the fact that it’s also a commercial superhero film, requiring dramatic, credibility-stretching fantasy setpieces. The end sequence featuring two boats, each with a bomb on board, is idiotic (how could the Joker’s men, who we have already been told are all mental patients, possibly rig up two entire boats with explosives, and an intercom, in a high security situation?). The rest of the film is mostly preposterous too, as all superhero films ultimately are, because in real life there are no such things as superheros. It’s a fantasy. Yet The Dark Knight has been lavished with praise, again, because the standard of the competition is so low.
I finally caught Iron Man recently, for example, and thought it was jawdroppingly bad, shamefully racist in the portrayal of its villainous Middle-Eastern terrorists, and mind-numbingly gung-ho in the way it deals with them (indulging, once again, the American fantasy that you can storm into a foreign country, kill a few bad guys, walk away, and the problems of the pathetic, oppressed locals will be solved – exactly the kind of arrogant macho fantasy that made the Iraq war possible). The rest of the film is little more than a string of shameless technoporn and product placement, ending in yet another tedious Hollywood fist fight, a fall from a great height, and an ending that isn’t an ending at all but a cynical set-up for a sequel. It’s a horrible and exploitative film, Hollywood at its worst, lent spurious credibility by Robert Downey JR, who gives a very good performance that the film doesn’t deserve. Neither does he deserve the money that was presumably his main motive for doing it.
Compared with Iron Man, then, The Dark Knight is a masterpiece, but that doesn’t mean it merits the praise that’s been lavished on it, much of which is the noise of people flattering themselves at how clever they are (it’s still a superhero movie; get over yourselves). Fundamentally, the problem with both The Dark Knight and WALL-E is that, in trying and failing to do something genuinely thoughtful, radical and political even, with a populist art form, they expose how ill-equipped that art form is to do anything other than distract us. I found myself wishing both films were stupider and less ambitious than they were, just so I could get happily lost in their stupidity rather than spend the whole of both films lamenting the limitations of mainstream cinema. In other words, it’s not that I don’t like cinema. It’s just that I’m becoming more and more distrustful of anything mainstream, and its lack of ability to do or say anything genuinely profound or challenging.
Some would call this snobbery, and maybe it is. This week I found myself re-reading a piece by Joyce McMillan, theatre critic of the Scotsman, in which she lamented the way theatre seemed to be retreating into a kind of experimental cul-de-sac (she was writing specifically about the Edinburgh International Festival, but making a broader point). “In order to survive, any art form needs a heartland as well as a cutting edge,” she wrote. At the Festival, she said, “I began to wonder whether I was watching the idea of theatre being reborn; or whether I was seeing it finally disappear into that great gulf between outworn traditional forms on one hand and self-conscious modernist experimentalism on the other.”
All art-forms, you could argue, have an equivalent gulf and, arguably, with the appearance of films like WALL-E or The Dark Knight, or plays like Black Watch, the gulf is narrowed. For an art-form to thrive and move forward, you need something that is both boundary-pushing (even if not as boundary-pushing as purists/snobs would want it to be) and popular enough to grab the public imagination. In the process, the work in question inspires other artists to create groundbreaking but popular work as well, shifting the boundaries of what is considered ‘mainstream’ in the process, and redefining the relationship between art and commerce in a way that, however subtly, gives the artists a little more power, influence and, crucially, confidence to stand up to the money men and cynics who knowingly peddle rubbish while claiming they’re giving the audience ‘what they want’.
Well, maybe, but you could also argue that the era of the mass audience is coming to an end, and that this might just be good for everybody. Thanks to multiple channels TV is not the communal experience it once was, the cost of “mainstream” movies feels increasingly decadent and wasteful, and music is so easily accessible now that there is no excuse to listen to exactly the same music as everyone else – stadium rock feels, to these ears at least, blander and emptier than ever. And the ongoing global economic catastrophe is going to make any kind of large-scale live event with artistic ambition more of a risk than ever before. Small might just be the way of the future. And small can always push the boundaries in a way that big cannot, meaning it can always connect with audiences in a deeper way - even if the audiences are tiny (as wise old Momus once predicted, in the future everyone will be famous for 15 people).
So fuck the mainstream, I say. With ideas travelling so fast, an innovative idea can become a tired cliche within the space of a few weeks anyway. And is an experience really better if you share it with 1000 other people rather than 20? More and more this year, I’ve found myself gravitating towards anything that is not mainstream, to things with a small but enthusiastic audience and without blanket media coverage. Not because I like to think of myself as cool or a trendsetter; I just want to experience things in a smaller, more intimate, and deeper way.
I had a whale of a time this year at the Instal festival in Glasgow, especially when sound artists John and Mark Bain “played” the building using oscillators and seismographs, an exhilarating experience which somehow turned the air around you into a thick, warm blanket, pressing in on your skin. At the same festival I loved Acid/Nylon, a tribute to the auto-destructive art of Gustav Metzger, in which slides made out of nylon were projected on to a huge a screen and then destroyed by hydrochloric acid, creating fantastic, unforgettable images and sounds in the process. I went to the National Review of Live Art at Tramway in Glasgow for the first time, and loved its atmosphere and sense of discovery, even if I found some of it pretentious and impenetrable. I had a great time at the Kill Your Timid Notion festival in Dundee. I went to see a Forced Entertainment show for the first time and liked it very much. Most of all, I loved making an art installation, Quantum Physical, for the Arches Live festival in Glasgow and, later, for a festival called Eccentrico in Turin. In 2009 I plan to seek out similar experiences as often as possible.
Ironically, I am also in the middle of making an album of what most people would call pop songs. I’m ambivalent about this just now. In the past few months I have started and then abandoned dozens of songs, because they sounded too much like conventional songs. I’ve lost interest in writing choruses. I think I might even have lost interest in writing lyrics. I just can’t think of a way of doing either that hasn’t been done a million times before. Why add to the mediocre, predictable clutter filling up the radio and the internet?
I’ll possibly change my mind about all this shortly (do I really want to spend my whole life making leftfield work for a niche audience?), but then again, maybe not. Trying to write pop songs hasn’t exactly made me much money, so maybe I should cut my losses and make experimental noise music instead.
Andrew
