All the Same to Me
An hors d’oeuvre for Lars.
The artist…
‘ – and don’t forget Stalker and Blade Runner,’ adds von Trier. ‘The film is definitely part of a fashion trend. I don’t analyse the origins of my images. It’s simply not up to me. The pursuit of not being influenced by others is something I think has defined much of the Nordic cinema. Paradoxically this has made it totally conform, a little like the new car models where all the different brands all look alike. Of course I hope that my stolen material has been processed into something new. I don’t strive to reproduce my sources of inspiration mechanically.’
The academic…
The Element of Crime is a typical postmodern 1980s product with its mix of genres and its countless references to others directors, films, and clichés. One could, in brief, describe it as black-and-yellow film noir, modernised into a low-budget exploitation film à la Roger Corman and directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. The post-apocalyptic scenery has a lot in common with a number of films made during the same period: the Mad Max trilogy, Escape from New York, The Last Battle… (Michael Tapper in BFI Notes)
Academics are trainspotters; sitting in the front row, they wait for the train to enter the station: the credits at film’s end. Anticipating those last few minutes, they jot down the passing references; the posters, passengers, trolleys and attendants that adorn the platform. Squeamish at the notebook’s nakedness? Spot every likeness; pin down every reference, but alas…butterflies lose all colour in these glass cases. Entering the field net in hand the expedition promises much, and they are often satisfied. And here we are, waiting for Nabokov.1 We are to be disappointed, our Tapper catching a “typical…product…[of the] postmodern 1980s”; the common garden moth.
In film after film, what we recall may be a gesture or a bit of dialogue, a suggestion, an imaginative moment of acting, even the use of a prop. Suddenly something - almost anything - may bring a movie to life. It is art and imagination that bring the medium to life; not as Kracauer would have it, the “recording” of reality. I can’t remember much of the streets and crowds and the life-like milieu even from the neo-realist films - who does? But who can forget the cry of the boy at the end of Shoeshine, or the face of Umberto D, or Anna Magnani’s death in Open City? (Pauline Kael, Is There A Cure For Film Criticism?, in I Lost It at the Movies)
The interest of a film is the details; they are shots of vitality. These do not concern Michael Tapper, being too trivial for academic study. Amalgamating The Element of Crime with films it has little in common, outside some images and a general cyberpunk feel, he reduces it to a line in a catalogue. This Tapper, who hasn't noticed that the first Mad Max is a different species to the third, gets all excited when spotting a common attribute, the basis for his generalisation, the purpose of his trip. What he says may be true, though we smile as Lars undermines it, yet we wonder at the effort; years spent working the cinema seats to tell us that The Element of Crime is a product of its time. We want better than this: ”a low-budget exploitation film à la Roger Corman and directed by Andrei Tarkovsky.” Which anyway overlooks the Strugatsky Brothers influence on Stalker; their low-fi fiction transformed into a work of art. Let’s return to Lars: “my stolen material has been processed into something new.” Marvellous.
An odd documentary reveals this critical obtuseness, though the director claims only to be a reader. Once in August shows a man, replete with pipe and pomposity, trying to uncover the solution to a puzzle he has created for himself: the source of the darkness in Margaret Atwood’s fiction. Her work a quarry he is to mine for the facts to support his thesis that they are the product of a damaged psychology; some accident in the past wrecking her mental health, which she tries to repair through her novels and poems.2 Atwood is aloof from such scrambling confusion. Standing atop the quarry’s cliff she throws rocks down onto its floor: each book, she insists, and rightly demands, must be treated on its own; every novel a unique take on society. An artist is talking. A work of art is a living entity, alone, alive, free. The Pipe ignores this obvious truth. Puff, puff, The Pipe puffs away, and stumbling through the scree; a little dazed, befuddled in smoke, he doesn't see those rocks coming down….
Stretchered out of the film, he is taken away from the island on a canoe; confused, bruised and irreparably beaten. Michael Rubbo had been educated too well.
Academics prefer the general rule to the concrete particular. Academic criticism, guided by theory and fashion, finding it almost impossible to engage with a movie as an individual entity.3 It lacks the emotional equipment to respond to a film’s atmosphere; the sensitive antennae, picking up a movie’s ‘feel’ and ‘touch’, damaged by the routines of the academy; the tiresome tomes,4 the peer-reviewed papers, the dull lectures, those committee meetings, the rituals of administration…. Most damaging of all is the self-importance; the belief one is manufacturing knowledge. Knowledge, a vampire sucking the blood out of art and life. Knowledge. It turns living things into facts, theories and laws; which are then crushed into the jargon of university criticism, academics lacking the virtuosity to turn the nuances of art - its emotions, its gestures, the spirit, those atmospheres - into intelligible and lively prose.5 The humanities - praise be to god! - are short on laws.6 Alas, in their place is put a shoddy substitute: The Concept, the academy’s great organising force.7 Yet in the hands of the unskilled concepts are no more than clichés.8
In his documentary Michael Rubbo uses the idea of damage to explain all of Atwood’s novels. Their life, with their myriad characters, is turned into a reservoir of information, where he fishes for sprats to feed his scrawny ideas. The Pipe doesn’t even have to read the books: he asks his assistant to scan the oeuvre for passages that he’ll use as bait. Fortunately, the film is made for a mass audience, and thus Atwood dominates, making both thesis and the investigator ridiculous.
Academics, protected by the apparatus of the university, are rarely so exposed. Buying their off-the-peg jargon from the local discount store they can be sure that nobody off campus will read them, their stuff safe from sceptical eyes.9 When we have V.S. Pritchett or Mary McCarthy why waste our time translating the bad prose of provincial profs? We know you. Pennies hide inside those ten dollar words.10 The best thinkers - there are exceptions - usually write well; for to write clearly is to think with clarity.
…criticism is written by the use of intelligence, talent, taste, emotion, education, imagination and discrimination…. I regard criticism as an art, and if in this country and in this age it is practiced with honesty, it is no more remunerative than the work of an avant-garde film artist. (Pauline Kael)
Once upon a time critics were artists, or very close to them in sensibility. Such writers resonating with both the intellectual and the emotional core of the work they reviewed.11 This was a conversation between friends. And what nights there were, the shouting, the screaming, the derision; I remember one with Mr B, what a hammering he gave Lars (they made up in the morning, though Lars never forgets: he made The House That Jack Built to torture his old mate). How we laughed and laughed, in the days that followed.12
Every novel argues out its own truth, exhibits its own meaning, creates its own unique effects, which the reader first feels and tastes; analysis coming afterwards.13 I do not deny that art creates generalisations, and that artists will develop these over a number of books.14 But these generalisations are from the ground up; the artist looking for the big truth in the tiny detail, the quality of the work wholly dependent upon the depth of the original inspiration, the richness of its presentation, the craft that develops and perfects it.15 Lars knows this. It is why influences do not concern him. What matters is that first insight, and its transformation into something that profoundly moves the audience. A great work of art to have all the depth and uniqueness of a single human being. It is these moments of transformation, that injection of aesthetic vitality through intuition, imagination and skill, that generates the energy in the viewer; the quality of the artistic input separating out the mediocre from the talented, and from the genius, Lars von Trier himself.
Quality is a word that makes today’s academics uneasy. Quality suggests essentialism, discrimination, elitism. This unease one reason why academics are such poor guides to the arts.16 The essence of art criticism is to discriminate between the shallow and the deep; a critic able to differentiate between a masterpiece and the meretricious, The Element of Crime from Mad Max 3.17
The artist too is a judge, in floppy hat and paint-splattered overalls. A single canvas a courtroom of fine decisions and delicate judgements.
Since the 1960s, but picking-up speed from the 1980s, the source material for art has become itself and popular entertainment, as mediated through television, music and cinema. The media-saturated living room is our environment; artists making works of art about it, cartoons and day-time TV replacing Corot’s countryside as inspiration. The aesthetic interest, as opposed to the academic one, not to identify the references - imagine looking at Corot only to label the trees - but to respond to how they are used, in Europa or in Nymphomaniac. To come back to the film at hand, The Element of Crime is on a different level of achievement and seriousness to Escape from New York and Blade Runner; the job of the critic to gauge the level of that achievement.18 None of your lists Tapper; we want insight and analysis, and we want to be excited by what we read. Movie crit should not be dull; dullness the prevailing academic sin.19
Don’t hang me guv’nor! Not all academics are bad, nor ideas worthless. This critic has important things to say.
The Element of Crime heralded a new voice in film – a voice obsessed with themes more familiar from Central European literature than from Scandinavian cinema, and reminiscent of the early work of Andrei Tarkovsky. As Michael Elphick’s coarse, perspiring detective Fisher pursues his suspect through the small towns of Germany, a Wagnerian aura of fate overwhelms him. The very buildings themselves appear infected by some mysterious higher power that calls to mind Hermann Hesse. This theme of disease and pollution colours the director’s second feature, Epidemic, while his cult TV series, The Kingdom, unfolds in a hospital, and his most ambitious movie, Breaking the Waves, deals with physical trauma. Even The Idiots examines society’s attitudes to the insane. (Peter Cowie, BFI Notes)
A film’s theme is more important than its references, which are always transcended if the film is any good. Cowie suggests the sensibility that creates these movies, making us see Lars in a new way. Ideas are not enough for art, which is concerned with human beings, whose thoughts, rarely analysed, are felt rather than articulated, and which constantly shift and change, when engaged with life and its resistances. You meet a stranger in the street, is the first thing you say: you look like someone I know? It is! Poor sod, you must have a PhD.
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1. A wonderful display of lepidoptera can be found in his Gogol.
1. A wonderful display of lepidoptera can be found in his Gogol.
2. We suspect that Rubbo, like many academics of that time, was seduced by Freudian theory. A more obvious explanation for the darkness in Atwood’s fiction, which she herself says, is that a child growing up in an eccentric environment is going to find ordinary society not only a strange but a difficult and even nasty place; this explored in Cat’s Eye. One of the illusions that arose out of psychoanalysis, when it become popular, is that childhood is a psychological battlefield, leaving the adult permanently scarred, until she meets the analyst. This is not so. Most of the clientele of psychoanalysis were the bourgeoisie, who, from the evidence of my reading, tended to have rather wonderful childhoods (until the fashion became to have horrible ones). Their problems start in adolescence and continue into adulthood when they find a society resistant to their wishes and desires. Psychoanalysis the way of dealing with the psychological strain of this conflict, its massive frustrations, its terrible disappointments. It became a technique of supporting sane people through the pains of social interaction; the therapist the one person who would continue to treat the client as a child (Gellner’s mistake in his ingenious The Psychoanalytic Movement is to overlook the recreation of the mother/child relationship - he over-intellectualises the relations between therapist and client).
Psychoanalysis was no technique for the insane, the reason its influence collapsed from the 1970s. Drugs not analysis then became the magic solution (when both are in fact palliatives for quite different conditions). In place of the therapist comes the checklist, which has led to mass diagnosis, leading to the belief that most people today suffer from mentally illness. The same problem having arisen as with psychoanalysis; it is the propensity for theories and movements to redefine themselves, each redefinition becoming looser and wider until it applies to everyone. Reading Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test we see how self interest, the drug companies, the pressure to conform, together with academic stupidity, has created this belief system. Specially academic stupidity, where a checklist - the DSM - is used not as a guide but as a dictionary, its definitions taken literally. Knowledge, which requires experience and interpretation, is turned into information, which is believed to explain itself.*1 An elite of psychotherapists has become a massed army of amateurs; both generating the same long-term effect: a ubiquitous insanity.
We remember R.D. Laing, in The Politics of Experience: it is society that is insane. How wrong he was! No, according to today’s professionals, it is us who are are mad; society quite normal.*2 Atwood, like Laing, belongs to a generation that was sceptical of the claims of the professionals; she is also at a distance from the beliefs of her time, which she uses her fiction to investigate. Rubbo is a character who always belongs to his time and place, and so is suspicious of those who stand outside it. Surfacing, if only he could see it, is really about him and his kind.
*1 For a brilliant study of this emptying out of knowledge see Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part Ways, by Olivier Roy.
*2 We have returned to the beliefs of the 1950s, when not to fit with the group was seen as a major social problem. This belief led to some very odd ideas. Here, everybody is a dictator:
‘There are…a great many carriers of mental ill-health in society. These individuals are not insane or likely to be. Frequently they are persons holding important positions and places of advantage in society. Because of their position they can play with the self-respect of their subordinates. They help to create psychopathic personalities, problem individuals, persons with feelings of insecurity, attitudes of self-pity, fears, doubts, obsessions, delusions, and serious compensatory distortions. These include parents, teachers, executives, ministers, lawyers, doctors, statesmen, relatives, social workers, nursemaids, and a whole host of others in positions of authority.’ (Dr L.G. Brown, quoted in J.A.C. Brown’s The Social Psychology of Industry)
Today we think it is our biology that causes these problems, not other people. Today, the monster exists in our genetic make-up, not out there in the wilds of suburbia and the jungle of corporate HQ. (For good commentary see Steven Rose, another Sixties sceptic, in The 21st Century Brain: Explaining, Mending and Manipulating the Mind)
3. Richard Sennett makes a similar point about city planners in The Uses of Disorder; noting how the individual parts of a city, their life and interest, are subsumed inside a master plan that thinks of them as merely relations within a whole; the metropolis conceived as a single huge machine. He usefully connects this attitude to a trait in adolescents, who, in order to navigate a new world of experiences and opportunities, which they lack the psychological history to manage, close it down into simple mental images, ideological formulas, self-conscious identities and lifestyles, which then generate strong but crude myths, that are vigorously maintained. He argues that maturity comes from constructively breaking down these frozen identities, a conflict that modern life increasingly insulates us against (the book was written in 1970). A highly stimulating work, it misses a core reason for this fixing of adulthood into adolescence: the University. Universities freeze the young adult mind, by spreading the belief in the beneficence of The Idea; while also forming the bureaucratic mentality that seeks to order and control not just the cityscape but life itself.
The great critic of the idea, and its propensity to fix reality, so removing its freshness and vitality, is Bakunin. He himself suffering from a particularly virulent strain of this conceptual disease: he caught the terminal German Idealism in his late adolescence. See Aileen Kelly’s acute but unsympathetic Mikhail Bakunin: A Study in the Psychology and Politics of Utopianism.
The early work of Nicola Barker is a fascinating exploration of the adolescent mind coming into conflict with the world. In Wide Open we watch what unfolds when adolescence continues into the mid-twenties.
4. I am afraid even to mention one, in case my words catch the disease. Ok, ok, I know you want examples. Here it is, quick quick, before you too are infected: The Oxford Guide To Film Studies.
5. For an example of this pretension and its demolition see Pauline Kael’s review of Kracauer's Theory of Film (in I Lost It at the Movies).
6. Jon Elster’s Explaining Social Behaviour explains why this is so. Another stimulating work, though it must be treated with care - a number of its arguments and conclusions are weak.
7. See The Tyranny of the Concept.
8. For a demonstration of what happens if we try to apply these clichés to life there is the sad fate of Obi Okonkwo, in Chinua Achebe’s No Longer At Ease. We are lucky that most academics never leave the campus and that the majority of their students soon forget what they have been taught.
9. See Will Self’s hilarious review of Avital Ronell for what happens when they are read by an intelligent outsider (Reeling and Writhing in Junk Mail). Self’s piece is unnervingly prophetic….
10. See Bertrand Russell’s wonderful parody in How I Write, in Portraits From Memory. There are two devastating exposés of academic prose: Michael Billig’s Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences and Stanisław Andreski’s The Social Sciences as Sorcery.
11. For an artist ideas are more felt than thought.
12. The best book on this life - that of literary bohemia - is Jonathan Raban’s For Love and Money.
13. Virginia Woolf - who was both a creative artist and a critic - believed in reading a book twice. The first time she abandoned herself to the author unreservedly. The second time she treated him with severity and allowed him to get away with nothing he could not justify. After these two readings she felt qualified to discuss the book. Here is good rule of thumb advice. (E.M. Forster, The Raison d’ Être of Criticism in the Arts, in Two Cheers for Democracy)
14. Surfacing and Cat’s Eye explore the experience of going back into the past; which, with its quotidian otherness, overwhelms the present, causing either breakdown or an enervating fear that comes close to a total collapse. Yet the differences between the two novels obliterate their similarities, of which there are many. In Cat’s Eye the heroine survives the experience, her present persona just strong enough to cope with that return to her home city. In Surfacing it is the fragility of the character, and the battering it takes from the present - the violence of America, the new sexual politics of the hip bourgeoisie - that forces her not so much to regress to the past as to give in to its elemental, its animal essence. In both novels the author - as she herself tells The Pipe - is exploring a society she finds mostly horrible. In these two novels the subject is the artist’s relationship with a culture from which she is alienated; the artist a natural outsider who, as D.H. Lawrence once wrote, is always in conflict with the prevailing moral code.
One of the odd things about Surfacing, and something we are apt to forget, is that the morality it attacks was seen as radical at the time this book was written. When today we criticise the moral codes of the past we are actually attacking the progressives of the 1960s and 70s. For analysis of a writer who embraced the transgressive promises of sexual liberation see my Strange Dreams, a piece on Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9.
15. Kael rightly qualifies this: there are artists whose faults we accept, because they are transcended by the depth and originality of the work; think of the early Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
16. Train Them Good describes their baleful influence.
18. The rising respectability of genre inside academia is, I suspect, due to its correspondence to the academic mentality. Genre tropes, which predominate over the specific qualities of each book or film, are very close to the kinds of crude generalisations favoured by low-level lecturers. Genre, bureaucracy and the academic mind share many qualities; siblings of the same family.
19. Geoff Dyer sums it up nicely: “mind the gap”. The gap between literature and the academic commentary is huge, is the argument.
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