Movies, books, music, blogs, TV, and even video games are authoritarian media, and that’s part of their magic as David Foster Wallace explained in “David Lynch Keeps His Head”:
They vulnerabilize you and then dominate you. Part of the magic of going to a movie is surrendering to it, letting it dominate you. The sitting in the dark, the looking up, the tranced distance from the screen, the being able to see the people on the screen without being seen by the people on the screen, the people on the screen being so much bigger than you, prettier than you, more compelling than you, etc.
But different movies/books/music/blogs/TV/video games have different intentions. And seeing how I, like the average American, spend about 76 days per year consuming this stuff, I’d kind of like to know what the stuff I’m consuming wants from me (which is kind of inseparable from asking what I want from it), and how exactly it is affecting me.
I think we need a taxonomy. The simplest possible division would be high-brow/low-brow or arthouse/commercial. Here’s DFW again:
Art film is essentially teleological: it tries in various ways to “wake the audience up” or render us more “conscious.” (This kind of agenda can easily degenerate into pretentiousness and self-righteousness and condescending horsetwaddle, but the agenda itself is large-hearted and fine.)
Commercial film doesn’t seem like it cares very much about an audience’s instruction or enlightenment. Commercial film’s goal is to “entertain,” which usually means enabling various fantasies that allow the moviegoer to pretend he’s somebody else and that life is somehow bigger and more coherent and more compelling and attractive and in general just more entertaining than a moviegoer’s life really is. You could say that a commercial movie doesn’t try to wake people up but rather to make their sleep so comfortable and their dreams so pleasant that they will fork over money to experience it – the seduction, a fantasy-for-money transaction, is a commercial movie’s basic point.
An art film’s point is usually more intellectual or aesthetic, and you usually have to do some interpretive work to get it, so that when you pay to see an art film you’re actually paying to do work (whereas the only work you have to do with most commercial films is whatever work you did to afford the price of the ticket).
OK, so at the broadest level maybe we can say that certain media are just trying to entertain us (which DFW brilliantly defines as “enabling fantasies”), while others aren’t so much. The best analogy I’ve heard (also from DFW) for this type of fantasy-enabling media is candy: It’s more pleasurable and easier than real food but it also doesn’t have any of the nourishment of real food, which is all right in low doses but problematic if it is the basic main staple of your diet. (See: Virtual Reality Pornography.)
On the other hand, the point I was trying to get at in this post is that the commercial stuff, from a bit of a detached perspective, can be just as beautiful and profound as the stuff that is oozing with intended depth and meaning (“nourishment”). I’ve been listening to commercial radio for weeks now, and I’m prepared to offer evidence:
Usher: Dance like it’s the last night of your life.
Britney: Keep on dancing till the world ends.
Rihanna: Life's too short to be sittin' round miserable.
Pitbull: Give me everything tonight. For all we know, we might not get tomorrow.
In other words, you’ll be dead soon, so hit the club, drink up, find a cutie, dance the night away, and then go have lots of sloppy sex. Anything else would be kind of ridiculous, all-considering.
To a 12 year old, these might seem like profound insights, but to anyone who has checked an actuarial table for death probabilities, they seem a little silly, or shortsighted at least. What’s profound is not the message in the hit music but the fact that this message – what I will call the Hit Music Philosophy of Life – has such mass resonance.
Upon discovering this, I considered, briefly, becoming a DJ for a hit music station. I feel that the kids need a philosophical chaperone. They need to hear about time horizons and actuarial tables and compounding interest and historical investment returns.
“Up next is a song from Usher espousing the values of hedonism. Before I play this, I just want to warn you, kiddos, that, statistically-speaking, you have at least 40 years left.”
But then I realized that the Hit Music Philosophy of Life seems to be serving a very particular purpose, and not so much to guide the day-to-day activities of 12 year olds like I feared. Not just the lyrics but the soul of the music – a lot of it, at least – really seems based in a kind of flirtatious awareness of the fact that we will one day die. It approaches it very indirectly and probably unintentionally but I hear it essentially saying that life is scary, unpredictable, and inevitably finite – conclusion: better get some sloppy sex in while we still have a chance. In other words, it is a version of the same stuff that DFW is always trying to tell us, just replaced with a characteristically adolescent conclusion. (I’m aware of how pretentious that sounds, and I’m okay with it.)
I highly doubt that 99% of the hit music artists or 99% the hit music listeners are actually looking for any kind of existential depth, but that’s precisely the point! Despite their lack of intention, it’s still there in plain sight, like a child sitting carelessly on a casket. This creeps me out in a very David Lynchian way, which I will get to in a moment.
If I may get even snootier, I would say that even seemingly very “adult” media like the evening news or public radio or political blogs very often fall squarely into the entertainment (fantasy enabling) bucket. We easily rationalize our consumption of them by saying that we are informing ourselves so that we can make important, rational decisions with our votes, or something. But let’s be serious: How often have you walked away from these media feeling intellectually challenged or that you’ve learned anything other than the latest gossip? Here is that DFW quote again, with “the evening news” replacing “commercial film”:
The evening news’s goal is to “entertain,” which usually means enabling various fantasies that allow the audience to pretend that life is somehow bigger and more coherent and more compelling and attractive and in general just more entertaining than it really is.
I’d add, again, that, just like with hit music, there is something profound not in the evening news’s intention but in its mass resonance.
Back to the taxonomy. We are still dealing in very broad strokes, but here is DFW describing David Lynch’s category, which doesn’t seem to fall neatly into either commercial or arthouse:
David Lynch’s movies are often described as occupying a kind of middle ground between art film and commercial film. But what they really occupy is a whole third different kind of territory. Most of Lynch’s best films don’t really have much of a point, and in lots of ways they seem to resist the film-interpretive process by which movies’ (certainly avant-garde movies’) central points are understood. This is something the British critic Paul Taylor seems to get when he says that Lynch’s movies are “to be experienced rather than explained.” Lynch’s movies are indeed susceptible to a variety of sophisticated interpretations, but it would be a serious mistake to conclude from this that his movies’ point is “film interpretation is necessarily multivalent” or something – they’re just not that kind of movie.
Nor are they seductive, though, at least in the commercial senses of being comfortable or linear or High-Concept or “feel-good.” You almost never in a Lynch movie get the sense that the point is to “entertain” you, and never that the point is to get you to fork over money to see it. This is one of the unsettling things about a Lynch movie: you don’t feel like you’re entering into any of the standing unspoken/unconscious contracts you normally enter into with other kinds of movies.
This may, in fact, be Lynch’s true and only agenda: just to get inside your head. He sure seems to care more about penetrating your head than about what he does once he’s in there. Is this “good” art? It’s hard to say. It seems – once again – either ingenious or psychopathic.
So now we have three broad categories: Entertain (candy-like pleasure), Enlighten (“nourishment”), and Just Nihilistically Get In Your Head (david lynch).
These do not have to be mutually exclusive categories, of course, and in fact I tend to think that the most compelling media are at the intersection of the three categories. To make the food analogy even lamer, the most compelling media are kind of like a nice pumpkin soufflé (nourishment) with whipped cream on top (candy) and spiked with an intoxicating substance (surrealism). I can’t think of many good examples of this, but one stands out clearly: Werner Herzog. His documentaries/movies make me laugh for 10 minutes and then think for 10 days, and he always tosses in these amazing surrealist scenes, such as zooming in on an iguana’s head and playing weird industrial music that in some mysterious way… I won’t say it quite “makes sense,” but the film would be sorely lacking without it.
In conclusion: I am in love with Werner Herzog. Sorry that I needed 1,634 words to say that.
