The film Tár fascinates me because it seems to deal with a lot of important issues and questions. Unfortunately, because of where I am, I'm not sure I will be able to see the film anytime soon. There is a lengthy review in The New Yorker that is frustrating because after reading it (or most of it) I still have no idea of the truth of the film, whether it is moral crap or not, whether it captures any reality or not. The writer seems to go to great lengths to prevent any such evaluations.
Is the movie saying that if we cancel the greats, we’ll be left only with mass, technology-driven culture? That there is only a superficial difference between a cosplaying fan and a self-mythologizing artist? That Lydia is already in Hell, playing to an audience of demons? That she possesses true artistic purity, because she loves conducting enough to do it at such a debased level? That she has no financial choice? That in being forced to really sublimate her ego, she might find renewal in music, instead of in power? These questions came to me later. In the moment, I registered only an enormous gulf. Lydia is still engaging in the act of making art. But the artist—that is, the person who knows she is connected to others—has separated herself with great success. She’s never been so untouchable.
Uh-huh, well I imagine watching the film might answer a few of those questions! The New Yorker is so attuned to the cultural moment that their writers regard with horror the idea of any kind of plausible evaluation of artistic quality. Waaayy too many other considerations to interpolate. A long while back I commented that Alex Ross would probably rather stab himself in the ears with knitting needles than actually criticize a piece of contemporary music. That principle still seems operative at The New Yorker. Or, heck, in most media and popular culture.
Have any of my readers seen the film and would like to comment?
12 comments:
The New Yorker publishes negative film reviews all the time, and can sometimes be brutal about them.
Thanks, Ethan. Got any good examples?
Oh, I can come up with examples.
Sometimes the negative reviews seem to be more the idiosyncracies of the reviewers than persuasive reviews. Richard Brody blathering on about the "authoritarian populism" Brad Bird supposedly brought to The Incredibles 2 was ludicrous. Brody deciding, against the entire filmography of Brad Bird, that he was promoting "authoritarian populism" is an example of a brutal,
A funnier example of a brutal review was Anthony Lane reviewing Spirit; Stallion of Cimmaron, another animated film. He wrote something about how this movie was about a wild stallion who just wanted to be free and that after ninety minutes of Matt Damon voice-over and Bryan Adams singing and Hans Zimmer giving cut-rate music the parents will want to be free, too!
I like animation so I try to keep tabs on which critics write harsh reviews that show they know the genre and which reviews show they don't.
But there's often a lot of "Scott Pilgrim vs. the unfortunate tendency to review the target audience" in the brutal reviews, whether at The New Yorker or elsewhere.
I rather suspected that would be the case, which is why I asked for some examples. A really bad film is one that goes against the Narrative.
I like your blog but your belief in a grand unified Narrative that the woke media elite is pushing is not supported by evidence. The main fact of progressive life is that we are a bunch of squabbling factions that can't agree on anything.
Granted, there may be lots of squabbling on the progressive left, just as there is on the conservative right, still, there is some sort of consistent belief system in each case. As a kind of shorthand I capitalize the Narrative to refer to the overwhelming number of examples of ideological consistency that we see in the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and a host of other places. I skim through the NYT most mornings and I see countless examples which I could humorously summarize by quoting an imaginary headline Republicans: Threat or Menace? There is a kind of monoculture amongst the woke media elite for which we have innumerable examples.
Just to add to what is an embarrassement de richesse of evidence, here is a link to a survey showing how enormous the disparity is in university professors: https://www.thecollegefix.com/zero-republican-professors/
In this and other areas like media and education, the vast majority (80 to 90%) of personnel are both registered Democrats and donors to the Democrat party. This is what a monoculture is.
I have considerable issues with politicians on the right as well. But it is disingenuous to say that there is no evidence of a political monoculture in media, education and the arts.
If it were as simple as professors, journalists or editors that would be one thing, but publishers, advertisers and university governing boards and major donors are the other side of the equation in many cases. Back when I was a journalism student the question of how, and in what way, the press is often said to be liberal is its own whole field of theory, practice and research and the practical answers have often been that it's not as uniform across the entire industry as it is, admittedly, often observably the case at the level of reporters and editors.
At the risk of getting into a very specific regional example, I've occasionally described myself as a "Mark Hatfield Republican" and some of my Portland, OR friends have remarked that if the GOP had room for that sort of figure people in Portland might vote for GOP candidates again. For clarity, Hatfield was against abortion, the death penalty, military intervention into Vietnam, and urged Oregonians to not build their entire economic base from cutting down trees for reasons of conservationism and economic diversification. I've lamented in other settings that the GOP hasn't been so keen on giving space to that kind of figure since the end of the Cold War.
Why ramble through all that? To suggest, as a self-identified moderate conservative on religion and politics, that the power base of the GOP "may" have lurched to the right in the last forty or so years since the Berlin Wall came down. There may be a corresponding liberalizing tendency away from what used to be the center (not counting Clintonian triangulation).
But it's another way of saying from a conservative side what Ethan pointed out about things not being as monolithic as first appear. It is necessary, per what I mentioned earlier in this comment, that we don't just look at one level of an industry or discipline when appraising where it lands on the political spectrum. The monocultural stuff has become a problem all over, which is one of the things Leonard Meyer warned about in, I think, Music, the Arts, and Ideas in a reprint edition.
The College Fix is... not a reliable source. It's a propaganda organ funded by Betsy Devos and founded by one of her sons. I have had the "pleasure" of being featured in one of their columns a few years back, which led to quite an extraordinarily avalanche of anti-Semitic and racist hate mail and responses across various downstream aggregators (e.g. the Reddit gamergater forum.) Rich experiential data for my dissertation, if nothing else.
More to the point, to the extent that there is an ideological consensus in the major media, it's that racism and homophobia are bad. I guess if you need to misuse the word "woke" as a pejorative for that consensus, you are free to do so, but it's a bad look. On economic issues the NY Times is resolutely centrist, as are most mainstream news organizations. The Times' op-ed page features Ross Douthat, David Brooks and various other conservatives, who sometimes seem to be beneficiaries of ideological affirmative action, because their writing is rarely very good.
I suppose one person's propaganda organ is another person's objective reporting. But I don't think you denied the actual point, which was that there is a vast difference between the number of professors who are democrat-supporters and those who are republican supporters? As for the rest, we can agree to disagree. One of the most blatantly partisan columnists in the NYT is Paul Krugman who has rarely been correct on anything in years, but is resolutely anti-Republican. Don't get me wrong, I am very far from being a Republican supporter, but the bias in the mass media is pretty obvious.
Isn't it hilarious that we agree on so much in musical matters but disagree on political matters? I just wish that politics occupied a smaller part of our universe.
Okay, let's engage on the substance. Here in the US, at least, education as a field does tend to lean Democratic, especially in public institutions, though this seems to me to mainly be a pipeline issue rather than anything that hiring committees are doing systemically. The Republican party has demonized public education, especially higher public education, for decades. So you can see why it might not occur to many Republicans to want to enter the profession. That said, it depends on the departments you are studying. Law, business and medicine don't seem to be lacking for Republicans. I don't know how my music colleagues vote, but there sure are a lot of cultural conservatives among them. The main political bias seems to be in the humanities world. I don't know where the causation lies here. Is it that these fields started leaning left, and then Republicans started using them as rhetorical punching bags in the 80s? Or did the tilt happen after the 80s? I don't have the stats in front of me.
I can tell you that party affiliation is a poor proxy for what's happening in the classroom. When I teach roomfuls of liberal kids (as is usually the case at NYU and the New School) I advocate for (culturally) conservative positions just to keep the kids thinking critically. Any responsible educator would do the same.
But seriously, The College Fix is terrible. I have been featured in various different publications over the years and that one is the only one whose readership subjected me to a months-long wave of racist and anti-Semitic attacks. The Chronicle of Higher Education is a more reliable source if you want to keep tabs on the US university system.
Thanks, Ethan. If it is worth discussing, then it is worth doing so without rancor! It seems clear to me that over the last fifty years there has been a campaign by the left to infiltrate important institutions like the humanities, teacher education, the media and so on. This is called the "long march through the institutions" (see the Wikipedia article) proposed by the German student activist Rudi Dutschke in 1967. The inspiration seems to have been Antonio Gramsci. This strategy has been remarkably successful. If you agree with the means and aims, then you should be happy. I'm not so much in agreement as I think that identity politics--a modernization of the idea of class warfare--tends to turn the populace into warring tribes. Also, socialist economics tends to drain away prosperity as it reduces everyone to a grey mediocrity. I married an East German who grew up under communism so I am familiar with the results at first hand.
But the Republicans, since the great success of Ronald Reagan, seem to have been struggling with their own mediocrity. There are occasional outstanding scholars like Victor Davis Hanson and Thomas Sowell, but they seem to be swimming against the tide. I suspect you don't care much for Jordan Peterson, but he might be the most prominent conservative intellectual of the day--even though I'm not sure he is even conservative. He isn't left wing, though!
The bottom line seems to me to be that the left, the Democrats, have an enormously successful strategy, but I just don't like where they are going. The right, the Republicans, have better policies, especially in economics, but are hopeless at selling them to the voters. And in Canada, something very similar applies, except our conservatives are so meek that they hardly qualify as conservatives.
I think that Jordan Peterson made the observation somewhere that a healthy body politic requires two very different political parties, a conservative one and a progressive one. Their function is, by alternating in power, they cure one another's excesses and extremes. This seems to me to be true. But in order for this to work, the right will have to stop being idiots, strategically speaking.
Post a Comment