All art is to some extent propaganda,” claimed George Orwell, a
view that was the corollary of his socialist belief that all human
relationships had a political dimension. Though he himself was a
robust conservative about some things— patriotism, for example—he
was essentially conceding the magnificent artistic heritage of his
country to a form of Leninist brutalism by which aesthetic judgment
was subordinated to political. It was a concession that was also
being made, implicitly if not explicitly, by artists themselves at
more or less the same time all over Europe and America. This
surrender to politics and, with it, utopianism is what is
ultimately responsible for the decline of beauty in art so
eloquently lamented in the new book, Beauty, by my
colleague Roger Scruton. Beauty, like honor, demands consensus and
is therefore in its essence non political.
No wonder art seems to have no further use for it. Nowadays,
even many conservatives have embraced political art, so long as the
politics are—or can be construed to be—their own. This inversion of
left-wing aesthetics holds that, especially in the popular arts,
what is good and receives the critical seal of approval is what
serves the counter-revolution. It’s hard to argue with
that, but it is a view that obscures the essential truth that the
revolutionary and the counter-revolutionary sides are not on all
fours with each other. Wanting to politicize everything is not the
same kind of enterprise as not wanting everything to be
politicized—though the politicizers themselves deny this by begging
the question. If, in other words, everything is political, then the
denial that everything is political is also political.
I deny it! That’s why I resist—not always successfully— getting
involved in compiling lists of “the 50 greatest conservative
movies,” for example. Since only conservatives deny the rights of
ideology to filter representations of reality, the greatest
conservative movies, plays, novels, paintings, architectural or
musical works are those that allow you to take a holiday from being
conservative—or liberal or anything else political—and put you back
in touch with a (for once) nonpolitical reality: the world as it
really is and not as it must be supposed to be by the dictates of
any ideology. Of course, in doing so, you have to ignore the
ideologue’s charge that your supposedly nonideological “reality” is
ideological too. Reality for him does not exist apart from
ideology. Hence, all art is to some extent propaganda.
Sometimes I am inclined to think that conservative art in this
sense is a hopeless case or that, like Professor Scruton’s
Beauty, it has all but vanished out of the world of the
popular culture. Then, suddenly, it pops up where it is least
expected. I recently had occasion to go back and re-view La
Femme Nikita (1990) by Luc Besson, the movie that, in my view,
started the long process of development of the postmodern trope of
the killer sexpot that culminated in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill
Bill movies of 2003–2004. At first Nikita seems to be
propaganda because, like the later works of Quentin and the
Taranteenies—including John Badham’s dire American remake of
Nikita, Point of No Return (1993)—it
warmly embraces the politically correct feminist view of human
nature as essentially unisex—though I don’t suppose the feminists
are all that happy about the erotic charge that both M. Besson and
Mr. Tarantino are obviously getting out of their examples of female
empowerment.
Yet, going back to the former’s movie after almost 20 years, I
realized that there is a subtlety to it that goes well beyond the
ironies of the latter. Mr. Tarantino, that is, is confined to his
post modernist playground, a Neverland from which reality has been
banished and in which both violence and sexiness are eternally
filtered through other movies and comic books. Nikita, as
the movie was called on its release in France, instead uses the
violent and sexy idioms of the popular culture to shed some light
on the idea of the feminine itself in a way that is profoundly
subversive of feminist and unisex ideology.
In this sense it is propaganda too, I suppose—antifeminist
propaganda. But there is also a sense in which being propaganda for
organic and traditional ideas of human sex roles is not being
propaganda at all. Rather, it is being anti-propaganda propaganda,
as well as anti-feminist propaganda.
The story of Nikita was an updating of the Pygmalion
myth. Nikita, played by the waif-like Anne Parillaud, was not a
flower seller, as in Shaw’s play or the Lerner & Loewe musical,
My Fair Lady, that was based on it, but a Parisian street
punk who murders a policeman in cold blood in the terrifyingly gory
opening scene and is then taken into custody by the French secret
service to be trained as a professional assassin, working for her
country. The idea is of course as preposterously cartoonish and
therefore postmodern as anything dreamed up by Mr. Tarantino, and
yet it redeems itself to an extent I would not have thought
possible by the working out of its own postmodern premises in a
rigorously realistic fashion. Say that such a thing could be, this
is how it would turn out. Our heroine—just like a woman!—would fall
for her mentor, in this case played by Tcheky Karyo, just as Eliza
fell for Higgins, while he—just like a man—would fall in love as
well, only more with the idea of his own creation than with poor
Nikita herself.
The idea is almost mythic and not all that far from Shaw’s or
Alan Jay Lerner’s, only instead of instruction in speech and
deportment and ladylike behavior, this Galatea is instructed in the
use of firearms and silent killing techniques. In the end, it
doesn’t matter. Like Eliza Doolittle, Nikita remains all girl, her
immersion in the hyper-male world of assassination and
secret-agency—which, by the way, she is forced into—only makes her
more feminine, more vulnerable, more desirous of finding a man to
cling to. The fact that she also becomes good at killing people
comes to seem almost an irrelevance to the question of who she is
in a way that it could never be for a man.
There is an eternal truth far beyond politics—at least for those
of us who still suppose that anything is beyond politics—in this
view of human nature. Even postmodernist art, which is normally
taken up with trivialities and ironic borrowings from the art of
the past, can express it. Or, rather, in expressing it such art
immediately breaks through the self-imposed limitations of
postmodernism to return to one or another of the earlier styles
that tried to represent reality and not somebody else’s
representation of it at two or three removes.
A MORE RECENT EXAMPLE, also from France, where the pomo bug has
not bitten so many or so severely as it has in the U.S., is The
Class, winner of the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes festival
and now on general release in this country. Directed by Laurent
Cantet and based on a memoir, Entre les Murs, by François
Bégaudeau—who also stars in the film—it is a documentary-style re
creation of the author’s experiences as a teacher in a multiethnic
Parisian lycée. Like Nikita, the movie at first
appears to conform to well-worn movie conventions, Ameri can as
well as foreign—in this case conventions about what inner-city
schools are like: dedicated teachers confronting tough, cynical,
disturbed, even criminal pupils and reclaiming them, more or less,
both for scholarship and society. I can’t imagine that it would
have won at Cannes—according to Sean Penn, the chairman of the
jury, “unanimously”—if audiences were not predisposed to see in it
a reiteration of some such quasi-propagandistic “message” as
that.
To my eye, however, Messrs. Cantet and Bégaudeau have blown that
convention to smithereens, and with it the liberal and
multicultural ideology. What emerges instead is the reality of the
liberal but useless good intentions of the teacher and their
inadequacy to bring about anything like the proper education of
these uncomprehending pupils whom he has unwisely chosen to treat
as equals. They are not monsters. They only learn from him to treat
him and the culture he represents with the contempt that poisons
the educational enterprise.
As a result, there is a tragicomic grace in this man’s reduction
to helplessness and impotence: tragic because it makes such a
dreadful contrast with the nobility of his and his liberal
society’s aspirations and comic because neither he nor that society
dares acknowledge his failure as such. As usual, ideology obscures
reality—and it is the job of art not to promote some rival ideology
but to clear ideology away in order to expose the reality beneath.
