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 ^[1] 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.”