On hating and not hating art
I just watched Schindler’s List again. It’s a film that tutors you in subtle response. I first saw it in 2002, when I was 26; I thought it good but too discreetly brutal, not quite as blood-spattered as I’d expected. My next viewing, in 2007, was very different: I’d seen enough cinema to be stunned by Spielberg’s craft, but I must also have grown subtler in my moral reckonings: the film seemed very brutal, visceral. I wrote a post about it on my notorious blog. A reader sneered:
Schindler’s List was ruined by Spielberg’s embarrassing attempt to be the next David Lean.
Spielberg’s films are unrelentingly sentimental and lame. He burned out in the 1970’s.
This was in my mind as i watched the film again. The cinematic technique is still stunning. The content of the film, which I had at first thought fairly simple (Nazis=bad; Schindler=good) is actually very complex — in being both very simple and very complex, a hard trick to pull off. It is heart-on-sleeve; but there is a lot going on under the surface, so Schindler isn’t a straightforward saint, nor is even Amon Goeth straightforwardedly evil, though evil he is; he is humanly evil.
I can understand a viewer not liking the film; it would be strange if there was a universal film, which everyone had to like. But to despise the film, as did my commentator, seems obscene. I hesitated over ‘obscene’; it smacks of an easy outrage, and yet I wondered at a man who could watch, for example, Goeth mouthing “I…forgive…you” into the mirror, seconds before shooting a boy, and respond with a glib sneer: “unrelentingly sentimental and lame”.
There are works of art which seem centrally human; to reject them suggests a crippling deficiency of soul. In music, I would tend to distrust anyone who hated Mozart, as I would a man who hated trees or the colour blue. Literature is trickier. Shakespeare springs to mind, but I can see how a certain cast of mind would feel uncomfortable before his power, and the living muddle and chaos of his plays (notably Tolstoy and Wittgenstein). Other great writers — Dante, Milton, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Proust — have their foibles; one would not be surprised to find a literate man who couldn’t stand Stevens’ obscurities or Milton’s creed.
I think my literary Mozart — the writer one may not hate — would be Chekhov. Humane, sensible, ironic, appalled, compassionate, skilful Chekhov; and the more skilful the more he is moved by human life, in all its horror, and its little hope. If an alien landed on my lawn and demanded a supremely human artifact, I would keep my various sacred scriptures out of sight, I would certainly not let him near Dante or Proust or Wittgenstein; I would rather hand over a volume of Chekhov’s short stories and say, “this is what human life is like.”
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Ah. The short stories, not the plays. Yes, indeed.
For more subtly complex Spielberg than he is in Shindler’s List, did you see Munich?
i love ‘Munich’. It also has excellent use of ‘Papa was a Rolling Stone’.
I get your general point, but you must also concede that it is easier to “hate” a current producer of art (in whatever form – literature, film, music, etc) because invariably their personality influences their audiences’ reaction to their output.
Spielberg, for example, is a celebrity, and we know as much about his private life as we do any other public figure. We know what he likes, what he does, the views he holds; we form opinions based on these factoids, and it therefore becomes difficult to regard his output in isolation. Hating the person inevitably leads to hating the output, and your quote from the sneering reader reads like a prime example of this peculiarly modern form of critique.
It is easier not to hate artists such as you have mentioned, because we can appreciate their work without their personality distorting our opinion. We tend to bestow older artists (dead ones) with an instinctive austerity and gravity; we may know nothing of their private life, and assume their output is the result of good old-fashioned diligence and quiet contemplation.
Even though we may know that Mozart was not exactly the quiet type, we are still able to isolate his excesses in a way that we cannot do with a current producer or art.
Yes, i think that’s true, but we should resist the urge to dirty an artist’s oeuvre with his private life. i keep coming across people who think Tom Cruise is a bad actor because of his weird private life, good looks, and Top Gun. In fact he’s one of the greatest actors alive. When i ask these people if they’ve seen Magnolia, Collateral, Born on the 4th of July, no – all they’ve seen is Mission Impossible and the gossip magazines, and that’s enough for them.
Elberry, what happened to your blog? It shows a message that ‘this blog has been deleted by the author’. Is that correct?
yes, i deleted it. i feel it’s wrong for me to have a ‘public’ persona.
however, if you want some vague idea of where i am you can be my Facebook ‘friend’ – search for Walter Aske – but it won’t be like blogging.
i’ve created a new kind-of blog:
http://www.ghostofelberry.wordpress.com
It’s more a means of authenticating my comments than a blog, but i may update it occasionally.