In an episode of The Simpsons titled “Home Away from
Homer,” Homer Simpson’s goodie-goodie neighbor Ned Flanders decides
to move from Springfield to Humbleton, Pennsylvania — the place
where they allegedly make those, you know, adorable figurines —
and explains his decision with the typically postmodern comment
that “I wish I lived in a place more like the America of yesteryear
that only lives in the brains of us Republicans.” Of course, no
real-life equivalent of Ned would say such a thing. The supposed
nonexistence of “the America of yesteryear” is by now a familiar
left-wing trope the whole point of which is that people like Ned
are pitifully deluded for believing that it existed in reality and
not just “in the brains of us Republicans.” Putting such a
self-contradiction into his mouth is thus an implicit
acknowledgment by the always cutting-edge Simpsons writers
that the myth of the nonexistent American past has itself assumed
mythic status by now. How delicious to think that the myth of the
myth should henceforth be obliged to don the same quotation-mark
epaulettes as the myth itself.
But the news seems to have passed by Mr. Blake Gopnik, whose
review in the Washington Post this past summer of an
exhibition of the art of Norman Rockwell at the Smithsonian Museum
of American Art slammed the long-dead celebrity “illustrator” (as
Rockwell called himself) as the perpetrator of “an art of unending
cliché.” Mr. Gopnik treats the ur-myth of the wholesome
American past as if he has just discovered it instead of something
that has now become at least as much a cliché as anything Norman
Rockwell ever drew. Indeed, much more so for, in this criticism,
Mr. Gopnik appears not to know his own critical business. Rockwell
was a sentimentalist, if you like, but he didn’t deal in clichés.
His images were not in the least hackneyed or familiar ones at the
time he produced them. If they have become so since he created
them, that is no more his fault than it is Shakespeare’s for
writing what have since become so many familiar quotations.
What the critic appears to mean by “cliché” — which, tellingly,
he regards as a “sin” — is an affirmative approach to certain
bourgeois American values and sentiments that he, in common with
most other “progressive”-minded folk, happens not to believe in.
While progressive trashings of those values and sentiments are now
commonplace, artistic affirmations of them are pretty thin on the
ground these days, yet it is the latter and not the former that are
still regarded as clichés in the left-wing backwater of the
Post’s arts pages. “The reason we so easily ‘recognize
ourselves’ in his paintings,” writes Mr. Gopnik, wielding the
quotes with a po-mo flourish, “is because they reflect the standard
image we already know. His stories resonate so strongly because
they are the stories we’ve told ourselves a thousand times. Those
stories couldn’t have been otherwise.”
But this is quite obviously the critic’s contribution to
Rockwell’s art and nowhere to be found in that art itself. For
those who admire him, Norman Rockwell produces the emotional effect
that he does precisely because we know the stories could
have been otherwise. The kindly old doctor examining the little
girl’s doll makes an impression because his condescension (in the
old-fashioned sense) to the child is unexpected. When we see the
young man returned from the war trying on his civilian clothes in
his boyhood bedroom and finding them too small for him, the
poignancy of the moment utterly depends on our knowledge that he
might easily not have come back at all.
Of course this doesn’t make Rockwell’s magazine covers great
art, but then he never pretended to be a great artist. Mr. Gopnik’s
gratuitous attack on this canny, skilled, and immensely successful
popular illustrator is not only politically motivated, as most
criticism (and most art) is nowadays, but it also has no other
purpose than as a simple-minded reiteration of that tiresome
left-wing myth of the right-wing myth of the vanished America. He
provides quotations from those he amusingly calls “the experts”
(because they share his political views), noting that “literary
scholar Richard Halpern has suggested that Rockwell’s vision of
America is aware of its own gaps, making his paintings ‘not so much
innocent as…about the way we manufacture innocence.’ ” Likewise,
“the eminent art historian Alan Wallach has dared to see” — I love
that absurdly self-congratulatory use of the word “dared” —
“Rockwell’s ‘capitalist realism’ as deeply ideological, along the
lines of socialist realism.”
This is a mere tautology. To the ideologue, everything
is “deeply ideological,” but that has nothing of substance to tell
us about Rockwell or what he or his audience thought he was
doing.
So, too, the idea of manufactured innocence is an oxymoron,
striving for paradox, which really is nothing more than a denial
that there is any such thing as genuine innocence, in the
bourgeois or “capitalist” understanding of the term, just because
it is bourgeois. Those who would thus politicize the arts first
seek to persuade you that they are already politicized by the
purveyors of “clichés” like Rockwell. But the clichés are only
counted — and discounted — as such by the prior assumption that
they are somehow untrue and politically motivated, or even untrue
because they are politically motivated, never mind that
the criticism itself is politically motivated. Another name for
clichés as Mr. Gopnik misuses the term is myths, and Rockwell need
be ashamed of being a mythmaker no more than Mr. Gopnik’s “experts”
are in propagating the counter-myth.
Rather less so indeed, I should say, since the world as it is
looks to me more like Rockwell’s than Blake Gopnik’s. That may be
only because I find the bourgeois and “capitalist” myths so much
more attractive than their glum and nihilistic competitors, but
those competitors obviously have their own attractions, since they
have so largely taken over the supposedly popular arts since
Rockwell’s time. True, the popular arts are now considerably less
popular than they were since audiences have become hooked on
“reality” TV, but it is still remarkable that affirmations of even
the most obvious things (from the bourgeois point of view), such as
patriotism, courage, virtue, self-sacrifice, love, religious faith,
service to the community, or achievement of any kind are now ipso
facto regarded as politically suspect.
MOVIES, LIKE OTHER ONCE POPULAR art forms, are inherently
affirmatory, which is why you have to work very hard to produce the
kind of cinematic nihilism that Todd Solondz does. His vile
Life During Wartime, which had a brief run this summer
before sinking without a trace, makes pedophilia stand, as in his
earlier film Happiness (1998) to which it is both sequel
and remake, for the evil (including terrorism) that is supposed to
blanket the world. So uncompromising is it in its sense of despair
about the world it represents that you almost have to admire it for
contriving, against all odds, to keep anything positive or
hopeful out of it. Could that be the sort of achievement that
critics like Blake Gopnik and his “expert” colleagues are looking
for in art? Affirmation — affirmation of anything —
strikes them as cliché because it hints of the bourgeois revival
that would make them irrelevant.
Long before even Happiness, there was a movie called
Kids (1995) made by Larry Clark and Harmony Korine. Though
not a hit by any standards, it was more popular than either
Happiness or Life During Wartime. But, like those
movies, it failed as a representation of reality. The problem isn’t
that horrible criminal and perverted things we see on the screen
never happen. It’s that the filmmaker has a responsibility to put
them into their proper context — that is to say, the context in
which they actually do happen in a world where Norman
Rockwell moments, however distasteful to one’s highly developed
aesthetic sense, are much more common than pedophilia. In such
films, the filmmaker turns away from this responsibility to
sensationalize — that is, to portray essentially deviant behavior
not as deviant but as the norm.
An article by Jonah Weiner in the New York Times
attempts to defend Mr. Solondz’s nihilistic filmmaking by quoting
Philip Seymour Hoffman, one of the stars of Happiness.
Mr. Hoffman recalled the discomfort he felt on the set playing a
character who gruntingly masturbates at one point, phone in hand.
“I remember once saying to Todd, ‘People are going to laugh at me.’
Just doing it, there was such a vulnerability that I became really
self-conscious. And Todd said, very calming, ‘I think they’re going
to feel for you.’ In saying that, he was telling me, ‘I want you to
find a way to feel for him.’ He has huge empathy for these
characters. He’s not sitting there judging them.”
But maybe that’s the problem. To meet such people on their own
miserable terms instead of judging them is to accept the reality of
their hellish worlds and so miss out on both the perspective and
the hope that judgment would bring.
