so high and mighty am I!

This past weekend, my delectable friend, Mathina, and I held a little dinner party. We cooked our li'l tushies off and it was worth it. Well, in particular, Mathina's Persian love cake was worth it. Even though it's full of stuff I try real hard not to eat (dairy, sugar, wheat... puh!), I have no doubt that it'll visit me in my dreams for some nights to come. And it will probably replenish the previously cooked-off tushy. Ah, well.

As is wont to happen, a discussion arose over said LUUUUV cake about the film Crash. The prevailing attitudes about said movie were primarily positive, with a few pip-squeak-y disavowals of such favor from a couple of us. I, for example, am not crazy about that film, and yet I think I was less than articulate when given the floor to extemporaneously explain why. Fortunately for me, I have my very own forum in which I can more thoughtfully elucidate my concerns about this movie and its behemoth-proportioned acclaim and popularity. Dear fellow party guests, please forgive me for the spouting off I am about to do:

First and foremost among my concerns about this film is that it's not much more than a bunch of easily digested, difficult-to-disagree-with moralizing. It's message is so monolithic that it verges on propaganda. I mean, who's really going to argue with the stance that making assumptions about people based on their skin color, religion, and/or ethnic heritage is wrong? And this is the stance with which the film unremittingly bashes us over the head. It's the sort of film that we good little liberals go see and congratulate ourselves for our choice in movie-viewing as it affirms all our best intentions toward social consciousness. We can watch all of its goings on from a safe distance of our stadium seating and judge the characters' respective levels of nobility and deplorability exactly as the filmmakers would have us judge them.

But the thing is, I don't much care for an aesthetic experience in which I'm coached to think one thing over another. But more on this later.

In our discussion, Matt Dillon's racist cop character was cited as a multi-dimensional man who defied judgment. With this notion, I could not disagree more. This character is nothing more than King Kong. He's less than Frankenstein's monster. And his monstrosity is handily established early in the film so that we in the audience are able to, simultaneously, establish our psychological safe distance from him. He's a racist. He's a molester and a sexual predator. He is a bad man. We do not like him. We think, Oh, I would NEVER behave like that. He is the opposite of me. And then, of course, because he is King Kong, we learn that there's a little gold in his heart. He can be heroic when the moment so calls for it. And yet, because we've already safely distanced ourselves from him, we can acknowledge that he's just a human without really forgiving him for being the asshole he was in the beginning. He's so trope-ic that he's quite possibly the least interesting character in the film.

For my money, however, his foil, Ryan Phillipe's rookie-with-a-conscience character is the one to watch. He is aware of the pervasive racism around him. It niggles him and he protests, a little whinily, against it. He thinks racism blows, man, and he wants to do something about it. The audience identifies with him. At last! Here's a man we can like. Here's a man who shares our liberal guilt. And he is posited so clearly in relief against Dillon's character that, really, we are given little choice but to noddingly adore him. With his little blond curls and big blue eyes and smoothly protruding lower lip, has Ryan Phillipe ever been convincing in any role other than that of an over-grown cherub?

But here's the one thing the film really does almost right: it uses this character to implicate the audience. Though this film is, by and large, earnestly committed to force-feeding its willing audience, with all its heavily-shouldered weight of ethical responsibility with regard to race relations in America, a very straight-forward message about how much racism sucks, it kinda sticks it to us in the end by reminding us that even the guiltiest among us can still cave to the basest of fears. Because we've identified with Phillipe's character's goodness throughout, how can we not feel as though we, too, just might submit to our sub-surface race-sourced fears when faced with a honest-to-god stressful moment? When in the car, alone with a black kid digging in his pocket (for a stick of gum? for a gun? for a religious fetish? ), Phillippe's Officer Tom Hansen doubts his convictions just long enough to shoot an innocent man to death. And what would we, good little liberal audience that we are, do in a similar situation? Oh, right. The film's message: we're all a little racist deep down. I'd forgotten. Also, just for a second, I'd gotten fairly numb from the head-bashing obviousness of it all.

So, that's my argument against the particulars of that movie. I think it's heavy-handed. I think it leaves no room to for profound questioning and deeper engagement. And I think other films have done it better. And here, I'd cite Grand Canyon, maybe. Grand Canyon isn't a perfect movie, either. It's a little overly optimistic and perhaps a smidge sentimental. And it's not even a perfect comparison, as Grand Canyon has more on its mind than bigotry alone. But it's an ensemble film about how, in spite of racially-tinged anxiety, we're still a community! And while gaps in need of bridging abound, the bridging can--and does--happen. Mushfest though it may be, that damn movie still warms me ol' heart cockles.

And now, allow me to move on to some bigger issues. During the course of the discussion about Crash, while I was being interrogated about why I don't think it's just the greatest effin' movie since Titanic (cue laugh-track, please!), I think I heard someone say something about how I didn't like it just because I'm a snob (read: elitist). To be fair, I believe that person was quoting me, and not being an ass. True enough, in a convolutedly self-deprecating way, I will sometimes refer to myself as a snob. I do not actually think I'm a snob, but really more a seeker. A hungry, insatiable seeker who recognizes that minimal nutritional value is to be got from the likes of most Hollywood schlock. I have no stomach for watching kid's movies or romantic comedies. I think I've written, a few times probably, about how that which is supposed to entertain simply does not entertain me. I want more out of a film-going experience than entertainment. I want to be both stirred and shaken. I want my assumptions questioned. I like the age-old sparring match between artist and audience and, if I'm going to commit my $10.50 to being an audience member, you better believe I feel as though I owe the experience the deepest engagement I can muster. And so, what's so wrong with asking that the filmmakers hold up their end of the bargain?

Does the fact that I'm a demanding audience make me an elitist? I go 'round and 'round about this in my head. It just so happens that, this weekend, I happened to pluck Jeanette Winterson's book, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery, from the shelf on which I'd set it when I first bought it a couple months ago. And this was a providential reading selection, indeed, as she has much to say about the artist/audience relationship and elitism. Here's a little pithy something she says in the essay, "Art Objects":

"The media ransacks the arts, in its images, in its adverts, in its copy, in its jingles [I almost transcribed this word as "jungles." How funny!], in its tunes and journalist's jargon, it continually offers up faint shadows of the form and invention of real music, real paintings, real words. All of us are subject to this bombardment, which both deadens our sensibilities and makes us fear what is not instant, approachable, consumable [!!!!]. The solid presence of art demands from us significant effort, an effort anathema to popular culture. Effort of time, effort of money, effort of study, effort of humility, effort of imagination have each been packed by the artist into the art. Is it so unreasonable to expect a percentage of that from us in return? I worry that to ask for effort is to imply elitism, and the charge against art, that it is elitist, is too often the accuser's defence against his or her own bafflement. It is quite close to the remark, 'Why can't they all speak English?', which may be why elitist is the favourite insult of the British and the Americans."

Even ignoring the ingenious association she makes between an audience's desire to have art conform to their expectations and the racist notion that all other culture should assimilate into the predominate one, I can't help but feel she lets me off the hook a little for my perceived elitism. And then, a little more pointedly, she writes in another essay, "Writer, Reader Words":

"As a member of the proletariat myself, I can confirm that there is nothing drearier than the embrace of a bunch of Oxbridge intellectuals who want to tell you that art (theirs) is for you. the express view of the highbrow Moderns was cleaner: take it or leave it. What they knew, and what the eager young men of the Thirties reluctantly came to know was that is is not possible to produce a living literature that includes everyone unless everyone wants to be included. Art leaves nobody out, but it cannot condescend, we have to climb up if we want the extraordinary view."

So, here's the thing: it's not that accessibility makes art bad. Or that inaccessibility makes art good. It's just that propaganda isn't art any more than the pop culture Winterson describes is. If it takes a stance, rather than forcing its audience to think through its own stance, I question the artistic integrity of the work. Although art is democratic and open to all, art requires attention, engagement and EFFORT from its audience, as Winterson admonishes us. Because I not only seek out art that is difficult (the more difficult, the greater the reward for the effort, I find), but also strive to meet the more stringent work on its own plateau, I'm an elitist? This disheartens me. I don't want it to be easy. I don't get anything out of easy. And I want something. I heartily yearn for...something. Something incisive and shivering. Something that throws me for a loop. Hence I keep this blog-- this journal of my trial-and-error engagements with the world outside of myself. And hence, I am unimpressed with the likes of Crash, that did little more than applaud me for thinking racism one of the world's greater evils.

And on a side note, my reading of Winterson actually made my day yesterday. Art Objects contains an essay about one of my top five favorite novels of all time: Virginia Woolf's Orlando. Heaven help me, I heart that book. It's bizarre and subversive and galvanically taut and funny. Good god, is it ever funny. In this essay, she describes assorted historical depictions of the persona of Virginia Woolf before eschewing such descriptions, claiming authorial personality should have minimal effect on one's reading of any given text. But she makes a lovely little economic assessment of one such persona: "To some, [Woolf's] madness was a weakness, to others, it has been a confirmation of her genius and a sign of her spiritual health (to be ill-adjusted to a deranged world is not breakdown)."

I am sheepish to admit I might have identified with this sentiment just a touch. Oh, my sweet sister Virginia! I, too, feel ill-adjusted to a deranged world! If only I could write a line that could balance on dental floss like she could. If only I, too, could be so exact. But don't worry, fair reader(s)--- you shan't find pebbles in my pockets just yet.

So, thank you, dear friends, for inspiring the first real exercise in critical writing I've mustered in some weeks! I should have thought to have fed you all ages ago!