Dude, Who is that Pretentious Director Trying to Make Me Think?

I have been absent from my blog for too long, but decided to start it up again today and try to get to it at least five days a week from now on. I wanted to discuss an interesting article from the New York Times, published back in early June: In Defense of Slow and Boring.

The article discusses a new train of thought emerging among movie critics that there is really no place for the slow, artistic film anymore. Their problem is that these films are too boring and really don't understand the medium itself, which is apparently aimed merely at entertaining us these days. The article emerged in response to a piece by Dan Kois, who admitted that he had grown tired of "eating his cultural vegetables" and would rather just be entertained at the movies. He felt that the tedium and abstractions of the popular artistic films undermined any deeper intellectual or artistic aspirations they might hold.

While I certainly understand his point and believe that many films in the cannon of great are almost unwatchable, it is troubling to consider that many critics would rather watch Hangover II than Tree of Life. Is this the latest parry in our collective nod to the yellow brick road of anti-intellectualism? Is it the result of a world where focusing on anything for more than 10 minutes seems unproductive or dull? Or is it a nod to our collective need to be amused most of the time, undermining time for unnecessarily exhausting activities like actually thinking? I think however we explain the phenomenon, we must acknowledge that while mainstream movies will probably rarely aim at deeper, more profound ideas or aesthetic heights, there should always be a space for the small, ambitious film -- whether it be the beautifully rendered Blue Valentine, the slow, prodding brilliance of Paris, Texas or the long epic grandeur of a Che or Shoah.

As one intellectual or artistic space after another is attacked for its intellectualism (which is essentially an attack on making us think too hard about anything), we lose the outlets that can actually challenge us to think more deeply about the world around us. My fear is that we are entering the world that McLuhan foretold in 1962, where mysticism and surface replace rationalism and depth. I am not arguing that there is nothing to be gained in this new world, just that deep thought and rumination are the very foundation of not only democracy, but social progress itself. One cannot help but draw a connecting line between the anti-intellectualism of popular culture and even universities today and the ascendency of the Tea Party and absurdism as the general tenor of political discourse today.

A few thoughts on three specific quotes from the article:

"Of course, what I think is boring,” Warhol wrote in his memoir “Popism,” “must not be the same as what other people think is, since I could never stand to watch all the most popular action shows on TV, because they’re essentially the same plots and the same shots and the same cuts over and over again. Apparently, most people love watching the same basic thing, as long as the details are different.” - After taking a tour of the Tate Modern in London several years ago, I gained a new respect for Andy Warhol and his work. More than just his famously prescient notion of 15-minutes of fame that now seems to be the raison d'etre of far too many youth today, he captured the changing nature of our reality -- not only the ascendancy of consumer culture as culture itself, but the reproducibility of images and text until they were rendered truly meaningless. His thoughts on boredom makes me consider a deeper idea -- that what we seek in the formulaic is an escape from that which surrounds us: namely the reproduction in slightly varied narrative forms of formulas that give us comfort merely because they are ascribed with meaning and garnished with false emotional commitment that invests them with an impact we otherwise don't feel in our daily lives.

MOVIES may be the only art form whose core audience is widely believed to be actively hostile to ambition, difficulty or anything that seems to demand too much work on their part. In other words, there is, at every level of the culture — among studio executives, entertainment reporters, fans and quite a few critics — a lingering bias against the notion that movies should aspire to the highest levels of artistic accomplishment. - This might be the most troubling quote of the entire article. It is expectations of the audience that are so important to how messages are formulated and delivered. Whether it be the shrinking size of the soundbite, the shorter news and magazine article size, the fact that advertisers assume that men are stupid and make advertising targeted at them meet that expectation or this idea that movies and all popular culture should serve the lowest common denominator, we are left in a world where stupidity is sold back to us on a relatively perpetual basis, affirming and even eliciting stupidity as a normative form of human existence. Me thinks that is not so good a idea!

Movies, Mr. Schickel writes, “are an essentially worldly medium, playful and romantic, particularly in America, where, on the whole our best directors have stated whatever serious intentions they may harbor as ignorable asides. There are other ways of making movies, naturally, and there’s always a small audience available for these noble strivings — and good for them, I guess.” - Is this really true? Have we moved so far away from the ambitions of the 60s and 70s (that reemerged with some directors in the 90s) that our "best directors" no longer think that they have anything terribly important to say beyond the filmic techniques and narrative structure they employ? If that is true, I believe it is a harbinger of a very troubling future. One could say a very similar thing about many popular artists today, who have deferred any deeper political meaning in their works in deference to deconstructing the formalist elements of art, focusing on their production and reception. There are certainly exceptions, with Banksy coming immediately to mind, but together with the more comedic and less politically invested novel and the pushing out of political music from the mainstream, there appears to be a growing consensus that there is no real place for politics in the arts (at least in the mainstream). When we add to this the push to make education "apolitical" and my aforementioned notion that the same is occurring in the mainstream media (who some believe should report the news without offering their opinion or perspective, or even checking the validity of the claims being made), we are left with few spaces where politics can actually be discussed cogently. So if we eliminate politics from the arts, from mainstream media, in K-12 education and even the university, then where can we turn? Washington DC? Hmm ...