Passionate Realism
Friday, February 28, 2003
Thursday, February 27, 2003
I have no problem with the idea of reality television. When it is done well, it can be one of television's greatest gifts. We are faced, however, with a glut of reality television, much of it bad, that still doesn't seem to be enough to satisfy the appetites of the audience. Reality television's popularity can be traced to the audience's wanting to connect to something real which I see as being caused by the symptoms of the nihilistic society in which we live. With layers of irony seperating movies and television from the audience, reality television has seemed to be the ideal antidote. Instead it is the over-the-counter version of the prescription-strength solution. Consider the movie, In The Bedroom. Shot naturalistically, the movie attempts to extract the real human emotions from the lives of a family whose only son has been murdered. By approaching the subject directly, the filmmakers are able to evoke emotion rarely seen in today's films. The filmmakers don't eschew cinematic technique in their quest for the naturalism needed to tell their story. They just act only when appropriate. When their work was finished, the filmmakers had a film that possessed the emotion for which audiences have been starved. The problem was that this was one film in a field of hundreds. With a more diverse menu of films, including more like In The Bedroom, the audience might need less reality television.
Wednesday, February 26, 2003
Article on reality television I have ideas on how passionate realism will counteract the infatuation with reality television, but I still need to finish what I've started with the previous posts.
Friday, February 21, 2003
When irony is the norm, the unexpected is always expected. When the unexpected is always expected, then you no longer have reason. When you lack reason, you lose the ability for rational thought and reaction. When you lose rational thought, you are left with nothing but nonsense.
Passionate Realism works to counter that by insisting that the world is a rational place, governed by natural laws. While nothing happens for a reason, reason is behind things happening. Sunsets are pretty because dust particles scatter light slowing it down, transforming it from blue to shades of red. We like kissing people because our lips are sensitive places, filled with nerve endings. Even flight can be accomplished through application of nothing more mystical than the Bernoulli Principle. Such simplicity would seem to make our lives no more romantic than linoleum. I believe that's only true if you accept the idea that without greater meaning life is pointless. If you move your locus of control from an external location to an internal point, then you begin assigning meaning to your own life, and, all of a sudden, that you're nothing more than a collection of cells become unimportant. Yes, you're nothing more than a collection of cells, but that doesn't mean that you can't enjoy being a collection of cells; it doesn't mean that you can't influence other people who are also nothing more than collections of cells. It is all up to you to enjoy existence, no matter how simple its foundations, no matter how ultimately pointless it is.
Of course, now that everyone has subscribed to the doctrine of equal coolness, adventuring through the personal pleasures and pain has become seemingly impossible because such an excursion requires removing the veneer of irony that we have built up. Such an adventure, however, is the key to our progress. Finally we could untangle "cool" and good. Finally we could admit that we like things that have been manufactured to fit our tastes (taste being no more mysterious than sunsets), and we could do that without having to suggest that those things are brilliant (though sometimes they are). When we finally untangle cool and good, we can begin to rebuild an understand of what good means. All of this will require a great deal of bravery and self-confidence, but just as those things will help us an audience, they will a;so benefit artists and art.
Once we have moved the world back into this world where reason rules, irony has been abated, and political correctness has been trashed, we will see art flourish because we will no longer think it a mysterious manifestation that we can't begin to understand or comprehend. We will see the popular arts get the credit they deserve also.
Next: How does this affect the artist?
Thursday, February 20, 2003
Preface:
As the close of the last century, I lived in a world that I could hardly stomach. Movies, especially comedies, weren't good, television was boring, observational humor had been stripped of droll observation and reclothed with boring rambles about things that had happened to the "comedian," theater was assailed by the one-person-show, which in another setting would have been a stand-up routine but would still not have been very funny. The visual art world had been in shambles since the eighties. In fact, the only medium which seemed to be making any real progress, in retrospect, was the novel.
I was determined to understand what had caused such stagnation. The answer came through the speakers of the car as Alanis Morisette sang "Isn't it ironic..." Of course, now everyone knows the joke about the song being about coincidences and not ironies, but she didn't understand that when she wrote the song, and the audience didn't when it heard the song. Everyone accepted the song because few people actually understood what irony was (most people confuse sarcasm and sardony with irony) but, raised on Letterman, reared by MTV, everyone knew and expected that "irony" should be everywhere. Thus irony had become the mold covering the art. Skillfully crafted irony is an art; "Wouldn't it be cool if this happened instead... just because it would cool" is hack ethic.
While Mike Judge's Beavis and Butthead would skillfully employ irony to great comedic effect, a million imitators would soon pull down the masterful construct that had been so carefully built. They wanted to be in on the joke, too.
Irony wasn't the only culprit. By the end of the 90's almost everyone could be heard cracking jokes about political correctness, but few people understood just how pervasive and destructive it had become. Political correctness was not simply the reassignation of names to sound less hurtful. It was the machination of an agenda aimed at enforcing equivalence, not from making the weaker stronger, but by making the stronger weaker. That someone who, for instance, couldn't walk should be considered handicapped was anathema, and it was anathema to the PC Brigade because it assumed that walking should be a norm for people. Someone who was paralyzed, though, became "physically challenged." Where was the challenge? It didn't exist because the goal was moot. Why admit, though, that a paralyzed person exists in a state beyond the norm? This same attitude infected our intellectual lives. We began to accept unconditionally everyone's views because everyone was supposed to be on equal footing. In short, "I'll accept your views, if you'll accept mine; I'll overlook your shortcomings, if you'll overlook mine".
When Irony and political correctness worked together, they ruined art. For something to be ironic, it had to be the opposite of the expected, which meant that someone had to be an outsider in the equation. There had to be someone who wasn't expecting the unexpected. Unfortuantely, that would put that person at a disadvantage as far as the joke was concerned, so everyone became the person on the inside of the joke, leaving no one to be amazed by the irony. Unfortuantely, that meant that everyone knew what the "unexpected" side of the equation was, rendering the real irony dead. Slowly, everyone showed their cards to everyone else, and everyone knew what everyone had up their sleeves, and the game was no longer fun and exciting. Consider the ESPN show "Pardon the Interruption." The show is framed on the right by a graphical rundown of the show with a clock showing the elapsed time for each segment. The rundown, the clock- these are things that every tv show uses put together the production, but having them displayed on the screen doesn't actually help the viewer at home enjoy or understand the show any better. It's just the "wouldn't it be cool" brand of irony replacing real creativity. After all, it is ironic that the show should feature its rundown as a selling point for the audience, but only glancingly so, and it doesn't serve to make the show any better. The process should be the art, but the process has become the product.
Irony and political correctness also ruined the audience. "Everyone's entitled to their own opinion" became the popular mantra, and people stopped questioning other people's opinions. We also stopped asking anything of artists, accepting the idea that all art was valid because all art was a personal expression, and who were we to question someone's else's personal expression? That was Political correctness holding the door open for irony to creep into the audience. Audiences stopped appreciating things for what they were but for what they could grasp. If a comedy weren't funny, they would laugh at it for not being funny. If an artist hung his or her dog feces in a gallery, the masses would mutter "but it's so different" without wondering why that made it good. In fact, the entire collusion of irony and political correctness could be summed up in one word: cool. If it isn't good, at least it's cool.
The problem is that we all get to proclaim what is or isn't cool. If it isn't good, it's "cool to me." As the enforced equality ruins from the top down, we discredited knowledgeable people because if all opinions are equal, then theirs were no more valid than ours. Thus our understanding of what's cool intertwined with our knowledge of what's good, making both ideas worthless.
Ladies and Gentlemen, we are living in the "My Generation." Everything is tailored for us and, in fact, made easier for us. I've stolen the "my" idiom from the world of computers. Who isn't familiar with "my desktop," "my computer," or "my documents"? Anyone who uses windows sees them daily. We now have "My VH-1" and million other mys on the internet. We believe in the preeminence of the self unless it comes at the cost of anyone else's self. Along the way we've lost sight of something.
While all poeple are created equally, all people grow to be different. As such, all opinions are not equal. Phyical maturity is not equal. Ability is not equal. We may spring forth from the same basic materials, but many of us stumble out of the starting blocks while other leap off, leaving others behind. We must recognize that and try to move forward. In a passionate realist world, stragglers would ask for help, forerunners would race to the finish line. Middle-of-the-packers would give it their best shot.
We would not only respect but appreciate the opinions of others who are more experienced and learned. We would be unafraid to denounce other people's opinions if they deserved it (after all, who believes that people should be free to kill indiscriminantly?). We would attempt to understand and appreciate art for what it is. We would be unafraid to try to produce the best possible work because we wouldn't be worried about not letting everyone in. Sometimes study is required to understand something fully.
I will explain how and why passionate realism is the answer to the problems I've marked.
NEXT: WHAT IS PASSIONATE REALISM AND HOW CAN IT HELP SOLVE THIS PROBLEM?
Wednesday, February 19, 2003
This isn't the post I wanted to make, but I don't feel like writing about Passionate Realism as the antidote to the pervasiveness of "reality" entertainment. Instead, here's a quickie...I wish I could remember where I read the first strains of this thought, but here it is... We need to do away with the idea of art as being synonymous with religious experience. Art is not a divine message handed to an artist. Not in the least. You may feel extremely moved by art, but it is not an inherently transcendental experience. Art is something that is created by people, can be studied by people, and can be understood and appreciated by people. When we understand that, then we can rid the world of hacks posing as artists, people who use the mask "presonal artistic expression" to veil poorly-constructed work. After all, art's cousin, science, would be ridiculed if we allowed the personality of the scientist to eclipse the quality of the work. Instead, it's just the opposite, the character of the scientist is based on the quality of the work.
Saturday, February 08, 2003
Edutainment----as in tap-dancing molars telling kids about the joys of flossing? You know how I feel about tap-dancing. If they shuffle well, I'd say they're Passionately Realist. But are you talking about a different angle here? This is your brain on drugs?? Is that even education or is it propaganda? When we walked to LACC today, we talked about quality teachers in our past. It wasn't a long list. Maybe because most teachers take a propagandist bent? But I think in my experience there have been educators so devoted to their mission that they spent their insides getting kids interested in learning. We've never discussed Passionate Realism beyond the creation of "art," but in it's own way, I'd argue that getting kids interested in history is a commendable art of its own. I had a science teacher once in catholic school named Mr. Gordon Scales. He was 40s, never married, still lived with his mom and spent hours every night building crazy experiments to bring to class the next day. He'd stand in front of everyone with a whirligig or giant magnetic car just bursting with the possibilities of atoms. What seperates him from a performance artist besides a healthy lack of pretension?
ps---PT Anderson is a hack!!
Friday, February 07, 2003
Amy is right. Realism, in the classical sense, isn't a tenet of Passionate Realism. By realism, we have never referred to it as an aesthetic; we only use it to define the world in which the film (or story, or whatever) operates. The realist aspect, then, is a defense against arbitrariness- the idea that "I just did that because it looked cool."
You can't credibly call his movie an ode to himself because that comes from a deeply subjective platform. You would have to assume that Anderson sees himself as Barry Egan. If that were true, I'd agree with you wholeheartedly. The problem is that Barry Egan is simply the latest in Anderson's line of characters who have to come to understand the importance of love, and, dare I say it, passion. When Dirk Diggler thinks he's doing something good for the world, no matter how reprehensible his work is, it is strangely validated, and only when he shrinks away from love of himself and his craft does his work lose its legitimacy and beauty which also results in further unhappiness for him. Characters you would assume to be awful are shown to be just through their actions. Consider Julianne Moore's character in Magnolia. Our cultural baggage leads us to assume that she's a gold-digger. We want the Patricia Arquette's druggie to fall in love with the police officer. Accordingly, we know that Sandler's character has serious problems, but we want him to pull himself out of the quagmire that is his life, and we understand that love will be his ladder.
The brilliance of PT Anderson is that he allows us to understand that awful circumstances drive his characters to their depraved conditions; at the same time, he doesn't let them off the hook. He shows us, for instance, in Boogie Nights, that the porn industry is not beautiful. It is a dirty industry filled with people with empty lives. He also shows us that beauty can be culled from that world, but the great thing is how he simultaneously makes us hate the characters who call his characters "perverts" and whatnot (remember the bartender from Magnolia?) while he is in fact doing the exact same thing. The difference is that he is attempting to create work which reverses that condition and shows a path toward being "good human beings" while those characters are doing nothing. PT Anderson has a moral agenda that he is unafraid of pursuing, and that is part of what makes his work Passionate Realist. The other part is that his movies are unashamed of being cinematic art.
If PT Anderson isn't working to his full capacity, it is because he has a film in him that will be so grand as to change our peception of the limits of film.
Though Realist is the second half of our name, realism isn't a necessary tenet of our movement. I would never suggest that PTA is not a PR because of his frog shower. After all, Gabriel Garcia Marquez has a Passionately Realist bent and frogs, fruit and butterflies fall from the heavens in his world all the damn time. However, in E's PTA-For-God post, his "natural laws" crack was an Acheilles left leg that I couldn't resist pulling. To be honest, I have no respect for that no-bit "auteur" PTA, but I can concede that Boogie Nights has some Passionately Realist elements, specifically its three-dimensional love for his characters. Each person in that film from the major characters to the minor was delicately and tenderly fleshed out with care like he was some giant watch-maker deity. I respect that. Magnolia, however, has none of that affection and Punch Drunk Love only has his twisted self love for himself in the form of Adam Sandler's misunderstood genius naif. His later works show none of the care he poured into Boogie Nights by the bucket load. The quality and craftsmanship of his work has dimished. He is no longer working to his capacity. PTA shot his load (no pun intended), made his name, and quit striving for the character-driven quality that marked his career. Passionate Realists advance in talent. They move forward because they care about growth. PT isn't just wading in place, he's back on the beach under an umbrella, laughing at his audience.
Shai in '92: I hated "If I ever fall in love" by Shai in 1992, but nostalgia has caused the song's importance to grow in my history. It isn't important in any universal sense; it's just important to my memory of '92, one of the favorite years of my life, the year I began High School at Booker T. Washington in Tulsa. I felt invincible and unstoppable but I also felt vulnerable and fragile. Puberty will do that to you. I loved learning, back then, even more than I love learning now, and I was surrounded by creative people who all felt the same way. That was amazing- you felt as if you were part of a force of intelligence at Booker T. Washington. At the same time, I couldn't figure out women at all. I felt absolutely dumb in that regard.
Arriving early in the morning, the televisions in the cafeteria would have music videos on-usually BET's videos. I was always seeing End of the Road and If I Ever Fall In Love. Just recentlyI have realized how ubiquitous the latter was. How many times had I heard it, been touched by it, but refused to like it for fear of losing my R.E.M. cred? I was too cool to admit that I liked it, and, really, I was too "cool" to admit that I liked girls. It was a battle I was losing on two fronts because I wanted girls to like me, which they seemed not to be doing, and I didn't want to admit that I liked them, which was easy, but unfortunately the more I said I didn't like them, the more I wanted to say that I did. I was imploding! And that song,If I Ever Fall In Love, was playing nonstop. My attitude toward that song was the perfect metaphor for my world! I didn't want to admit that I liked it- what would my friends think? That forced the song to become a guilty pleasure for me, and now when I think back on that year, I remember that song and the heartache associated with it.
A lot of really great things happened that year. I was in a great orchestra, had a lot of fun with my friends, began writing comedy with my friends, Jerry and Josh, but more than anything, now, that song and those feelings are how I remember '92. Strangely, it's almost comforting! I look back on that year with as much fondness as my other great years: 96 and 2001. It's fun to look back and realize what a dolt I had been. At least I have the luxury of being able to learn from my past errors.
Wednesday, February 05, 2003
You would be absolutely right if showers of frogs were not something that actually occurs, has occured, and will occur again in the Southern United States. I felt the way you feel until I learned that. Learning that fact crystallized the beauty of the scene for me. With all that was going on for those characters, as insane as their lives may have seemed to them, it would, unfortunately, take a bigger, more insane, more improbable action to correct the characters' perspectives on their lives.
Okay, Pettie, I knew it was just a matter of time before you lit the fuse on our friendly little blog. What I didn't expect was that you'd post an argument full of holes. I'll take your biggest one first cause I'm a slacker. "His universes are not given to random acts which deny and even flout explanation but are governed by natural laws." Frogs. Magnolia. The defense rests. Actually, I'm going to rest for now. I'll finish you off in the morning.
Tuesday, February 04, 2003
The question I would ask is whether the music of The Ramones was more significant than Ratt's music.
But that's not why I'm posting! I want to post to make a case for PT Anderson's work as Passionately Realist work: First, PT Anderson adheres to the most basic tenets of the PR credo. His universes are not given to random acts which deny and even flout explanation but are governed by natural laws. Next he is not afraid to use his enormous talent to create impressive movies. He knows how to fill a frame, how to piece together a film- he even has a solid understanding of storytelling that many visual-heavy filmmakers lack (Julie Taymor). Thematically he pursues his passions and wrestles with ideas, unafraid to make a movies about pornography and love. Only four films into his career he has already amassed a portfolio of films which have struck popular chords without compromising his own skills and curiosity. That makes his work unabashedly passionately realist.
What the parallel deaths of Ramone and Crosby prove is that it really doesn't matter what you do artistically, nor does it matter how many people like what you create; what matters is who likes what you do artistically and what liking that art is supposed to say about who you are. Ratt was profoundly uncool (read: populist) and the Ramones were profoundly significant (read: interesting to rock critics). Consequently, it has become totally acceptable to say that the Ramones' ''I Wanna Be Sedated'' changed your life; in fact, saying that would define you as part of a generation that became disenfranchised with the soullessness of suburbia, only to rediscover salvation through the integrity of simplicity. However, it is laughable to admit (without irony) that Ratt's ''I Want a Woman'' was your favorite song in 1989; that would mean you were stupid, and that your teenage experience meant nothing, and that you probably had a tragic haircut.
