Portrait of an Invisible Line: on Portrayal, Art, and Personal Choice
Vincent Price in Dragonwyck, an underrated Gothic classic; image from here.
Did you watch Hannibal?
No? Okay, have you seen like, any horror movie?
Not even Vincent Price or like, Hammer Horror? One of those schlocky classics?
No?
Well, fuck.
Let’s dial it all the way back.
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Stories get told. They occur to someone, and that person tells someone else about this wild shit they made up, and the other person either tells someone else the same story, or they tell their friends to go to the first person to get the story from the source. And I’m not talking about gossip, here: I’m talking about making shit up entire, cutting it from whole cloth, the gleaming shear of the mind slicing through yardage like it’s nothing. And the textile itself, in this analogy, is just… made up! Spun from dreams and nightmares, spit out from the lips and tongue and teeth like gristle or bone, pulled out of the teller’s ass like a spider spins silk.
I’m not saying that absolutely everyone does this, but I am saying that we don’t have the data to suggest that other animals do it. Humans specifically are able to imagine things and string those imaginings into words and sentences and recount them to others for the purposes of eliciting literally anything. Want someone to feel good? Story! Want someone to feel bad? Guess what — story! Want someone to feel [REDACTED/UNKNOWN/UNCLEAR]? Bad news: story time, motherfucker.
Do we, I, anyone making shit up for fun — do you mean it? Probably not, but that’s the whole point. The whole point was to make some shit up and tell it to someone else to make them have feelings. There are, potentially, ethical issues here: you, me, one of us, lies to someone to make them feel something, or think something, or believe something, or all three, and if it works, they do it. Maybe that’s bad? Maybe, but if it is, it’s bad like salt and grease; it’s bad like the softest shirt; it’s bad like a blazing hot shower and bar soap: it’s bad in a way that feels irresistibly good.
So we keep doing it. And we’ve kept doing it, and now we’ve got multiple fields of study devoted, on a fundamental level, to how to make shit up better, or why made up shit is important actually, or what made up shit says about us such that we keep making shit up and making the same shit up and telling it to each other anyway.
But that’s all the way back in the back. This is the internet.
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As an aside, if I talk about the internet like it’s a place, it’s because, to an extent, it is, and it certainly is for me. I literally went to high school here; it’s where I met my beautiful husband and where I’ve made most of my friends over the course of my life. Look hard enough and you can find my I was here graffiti all over the damn place, probably.
And the same way you feel when you hear weird gossip or wild shit from your home town, I feel when I run across Very Online nonsense. I know people in real life now — like people I actually want to hang out with — but that wasn’t always the case.
Needless to say, I get pretty het up.
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Image from Know Your Meme, but also: oh shit wats art?
I hesitate to say that ethics have no bearing on art: that’s some Decadent shit, and while I love that Decadent shit, I also I do think that having an ethic in how you approach your artwork (a generalizing you; you specifically, dear reader, can do what you want) is important. What and how gets portrayed in artworks is important, in that people take in works of art, and communicate with them in ways that don’t really track on the way humans talk to each other. We attempt to communicate something, to elicit some feeling, from the people who perceive our art, and we, perceiving, respond somehow — or don’t, which suggests that perhaps that artwork does not speak to us or for us or in our language. (This will come back to haunt us.)
The first-person plural there was very, very intentional: everyone perceives and interacts with artwork; many of the people, I suspect, who read this blog engage in creating it in some way, as well. To some extent, all of us engage in and with art works. Did you think about how a PowerPoint will look and feel before you showed it to your coworkers? Did you take several photos before posting the selfie you were actually angling for on social media? Did you arrange the stuff on your table so it looked nice before someone came over? Bad news, buds: you were thinking like an artist. You brought a little bit of art into your life, because even if composition or rhetoric or proportion aren’t necessarily top of the internal stack all the time, they’re still there, and you know them even if you don’t know them, like you know how to order adjectives. Are all of these things necessarily art? No, but it’s 2021: it’s Dada, boy.
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So, we all do art a little bit all the time. I would contend that that’s a very good thing. There’s probably stuff to talk about with respect to why certain compositions of things or certain ratios of negative and positive space “look nice,” but they’re beyond the scope of this piece. What I’m talking about now — believe it or not, we’ve been going somewhere — is what art should do.
The italics on the word should here indicate not emphasis so much as a certain sneering, sing-song tone. On a fundamental level, art should do one thing and one thing only: elicit feeling. There’s no caveat on that last word — any feeling is fine. Even Erik Satie, in his most ambient moments, sought to elicit a feeling from the listener, albeit only pleasant indifference. After all, we’re trying to communicate here, and words often fail, and we don’t think as fast as we need to in order to communicate the feelings that we’re having. A picture’s worth a thousand words and verbs, alas, decline; sometimes, telling someone something you made up gets the job done faster.
But if all art has to do is make feel — is that or can that possibly be all it is? Personally, I’d say yes — but where does that leave us when we use our art to represent things that we think are bad, and what do we do with artworks that do that? What if the art makes us feel bad? What if it leaves us with a cascade of questions and withholds every answer?
Well — so what?
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I feel fairly confident in saying, we’re all adults here, at least statistically (and if you’re not an adult, foster your own education as best you can and don’t swear in front of authority figures; they don’t like it). This means, delightfully, that no one can make you do shit. Personally — and maybe I’m a minority opinion here, but I think maybe not — I love being an adult. I’ll buy or take my own toilet paper and pay bills all goddamn day if it means no one can tell me what to do and I’m the authority on my own experience. It’s fucking great.
But this also comes with a certain amount of responsibility. You — I, we, every adult human being — have to decide for yourself what the right thing is in a given situation, and you have to do it all the time. And it doesn’t just extend to what you yourself do, what actions you take here in the (sweaty, horrible) meatspace; it extends also to choosing what you do with your time: what you clean or don’t, with whom you spend that time (on the physical or virtual planes), what food or drink or drugs or media you consume or avoid. It’s a lot to handle, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed. And when the chips are down, we often turn to media — no, wait. It’s not just “media”; it’s not just “content”; it’s art, goddamn it.
US theatrical release poster for F for Fake, via Wikipedia.
We, as people, turn to works of art to elicit feelings in ourselves. Whether it’s throwing on Parks and Recreation (again) to feel comfort, or F for Fake to contemplate what we’re doing when we do art, we self-stimulate, if nothing else — self-improve, sometimes, or seek catharsis where we can find it, or seek to feel as if someone else feels what we feel (the mollifying embrace of accepting kindred? No, that doesn’t work).
But what happens when what we seek, for catharsis or for comfort or whatever, proves at odds with what we believe is right?
I mean, given that there’s been theories of tragedy — no one actually wants to watch someone else die, or rather, really actually wanting to watch someone else perish away from this earth is also beyond the scope of this piece — since the ancient Greeks, and we all tell sad or horrifying stories for fun and profit, I’d say that it’s something pretty interesting. Or at least, worth considering.
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Among some of the art school kids of my acquaintance, there’s a little bit of a running joke about furries, which is basically that, if you offer to do art commissions on the internet, eventually you’ll end up drawing furry-themed art of an erotic, if not pornographic, nature — and the danger is that if you do enough of it, you might also end up being a furry.
For clarity, I am not in the business of shaming furries: it’s 2021; time is fake and we’re all going to die; do what you want. But while I joke with my art school friends about furry porn, the point seems material. If you engage with a particular medium frequently enough, does it become part of you?
Fucking, I don’t know: maybe. But that does seem to be a sticking point when it comes to the issues of portrayal, endorsement, and action.
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So, these stories, from lying about how big the mammoth your great-to-the-nth-grandparent killed to, I don’t know, Hannibal or Manhunt or whatever: what do they do to us?
The poster for The Fall, via IMDB.
The short answer is, they can do a lot, there is something to be said about the interaction between the teller of a story and the hearer; please watch The Fall (2006) for more on this topic. But for the purposes of this piece, I’m curious about the interaction between portraying things happening, and what the artist owes the people perceiving the art work (if anything) with respect to ethical behavior.
Not to spoil anything, but for my money, the answer is, fucking nothing.
Because portraying an action, describing a behavior, even claiming to understand why someone might do something reprehensible, is very, very different from endorsing that behavior, let alone wishing to perform it. If this seems like grade-school shit, it’s because it is, and fucking yet.
And fucking yet — and what I’m about to say is, on a fundamental level, influenced by the horrible fact that Disney holds a near-monopoly on entertainment media, especially film and television — it’s so easy to want to be fed. Spoon a chewed-over fiction, filtered of any toxins, into my bleeding lips; the world we live in is terrible and has ripped my intestines from me, so I cannot digest it for myself. And I understand that impulse; I wouldn’t have reread the Enchanted Forest Chronicles if I didn’t also feel that, and I certainly wouldn’t have watched the same goddamn shows so many times. But it can’t last you forever and I know this because I have done it.
On a fundamental level, art is stepping on the heels of food, water, and shelter in the list of essentials to human life. (Note, here, that I’m not saying it has to be good, to whatever value of good you, dear reader, assign, but it does have to be something created to elicit feeling, which I think encompasses most of what I’m talking about here.) We need it, for a variety of reasons, and sometimes those reasons do not align with the reasons that the Christofascist-poisoned American-influenced social sphere deems appropriate.
But we do it anyway!
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My little sister has this amazing trick where, when she relates an opinion with which she disagrees, she crosses one eye. It’s roughly an in-person equivalent to tYpInG lIkE tHiS, or the French onomatopoeia ouin ouin: a truly perfect way to quickly communicate utter disrespect for whatever is reported in connection with it.
And man, I’ve seen a lot of bad opinions on the internet. So I’m going to spell out what I’ve been talking around this whole time.
Not everything is for everyone.
No one (statistically) will make you perceive an art work you do not wish to perceive.
Portrayal is not the same as endorsement, nor is it the same as desire to commit an action.
There’s plenty of stuff that’s just not for me (cf. the above discussion of furry porn — not my shit). Some of it just doesn’t speak my language, like stories about being in high school. But there’s just as much that is actively not for me. Much as I love “The Enigma of Amigara Fault,” I literally cannot read any other Junji Ito without substantial content warnings, because his shit frequently strays into territory I cannot handle. Does that mean it shouldn’t exist, or that it should never have been published? No! It’s just not for me! And furthermore, I can acknowledge his (fucking considerable) talents as an artist without having to like any of his stuff. And while it can feel as if an artwork is being forced on you because of the algorithms that control so much of our online experience, that’s what browser extensions and block buttons are for. Obviously, this works less well with advertisements and publicity in the real world, but being made aware of a work of art does not oblige you to engage with it. And I would think that the difference between portrayal and endorsement is fairly clear — but every now and then I’ll run across something that’s just the Hays Code with extra steps, and I have to wonder.
And what if it seems clear that the portrayal of brutal acts seems to be celebrated by a work of art? It’s worth noting that artworks can be technically good without them being, shall we say, systemically good. Like, look: I read and deeply loved, once, The Four Feathers by A.E.W. Mason, and I’ve seen two of the film versions. Is the novel technically good? Sure. Are the films technically good? Also, sure. (By “technically good” I here mean “do indeed elicit feelings.”) When considered in the broader context of their creation, however, they become systemically a wreck — just raw glorification of British imperialism and violent colonialism. Fundamentally, it’s the divide between ethics and aesthetics which, as Cameron has noted, are not the same thing.
But again! You are (probably) an adult. There’s a line, or a balance, between the technical quality of an art work outweighs the systemic injustices it upholds. You get to decide where that is. You and only you (you specifically, dear reader) make that call, and no one can make you change it. That’s up to you, if you want to change your mind or stick to your guns, and depending on the situation, both are good options.
But you don’t get to make that decision for anyone else. That’s the other hand, that’s the tails-up coin-flip here: you have no right to draw that line for any other person, with all the terror that entails.
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