Here in Washington, it is hard to go anywhere where tourists
also go, such as the Metro, without seeing advertising for one of
our capital city’s most successful tourist traps, which grandly
calls itself the International Spy Museum. All of it is marked with
the museum’s motto: “Nothing is what it seems.” The more you look
at it, the more nonsensical that claim would seem—that is, if it
were a claim and not a slogan. On the contrary, for most of us, for
most of the time, nearly everything is
what it seems. At least, so it seems to those of us who are not
among the increasing number of people who hope to make a profit out
of showing people that it isn’t, because they know what no one else
does. This claim to secret information is of course what spies
share with the media, conspiracy theorists, and intellectuals, and
those who patronize the supposed possessors of this information are
very often prestige-seekers, eager only to claim a precedence over
their neighbors by virtue of knowing something they don’t know. The
opportunities for chicanery and fraud are obviously enormous, as
the curious history of the “birther” and “truther” narratives in
recent years has shown.
Yet even the craziest of stories have some truth value if enough
people are prepared to band together in an unspoken pact to believe
in them. If these belief-groups are otherwise identified as
privileged in some way, say by victimhood or persecution, they are
likely to be unmolested in possession of their voluntary
absurdities. Thus, according to some estimates, a third of American
blacks believe that AIDS was formulated in government laboratories
to decimate the black population. Well, since quite a lot of other
things have been done by
American governments to victimize blacks, nobody is going to spend
a lot of time trying to disabuse them of the notion, even if nobody
outside their community believes in it either. Believing as they do
has other benefits for them with which the mere knowledge of the
truth can hardly hope to compete.
Lately, however, the claim to victimhood has itself become
privileged information. The protesters calling themselves “Occupy
Wall Street” and their imitators across the country and around the
world are making a claim to victimhood against corporations or
banks or Jews or “the rich,” or some combination of them that
mainstream society, long accustomed to recognize these things and
people as respectable and even admirable, does not recognize. If
the Occupiers are themselves dysfunctional and unemployable in the
corporate world, someone other than themselves must be to blame.
Who else but the corporations? With luck and a bit of cold weather,
the protests will have fizzled out by the time you read these
words, but their claim to legitimacy lingers on, backed by the
increasing conviction with which people regard the Spy Museum’s
claim that nothing is what it seems. Those big corporations might
seem to be producing goods and services
that people need and want while providing employment to millions,
but underneath that benign exterior there must be supposed to lurk
the oppressive power that is preventing 26-year-old theatre majors
with $50,000 in student loans from enjoying the American dream, as
they know they are entitled to do.
That kind of thinking is a kind of addiction and must feed
itself with the arcana of conspiracy as retailed by the media,
respectable and non-respectable, who have in common a pecuniary
interest in promoting the belief that nothing is what it seems. But
it also requires a constant reinforcement of its most basic
assumption from the arts, which are as always the purveyors of our
most cherished myths. As the “Occupy DC” protesters gathered in
Freedom Plaza in late September, there was opening at the National
Gallery just a few blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue an exhibition
called “Warhol: Headlines.” All or most of Andy Warhol’s canvases
and other installations ripped, literally, from the headlines were
gathered in one place for the first time to demonstrate how the
artist sought, in the words of one of the contributors to the
exhibition catalogue, to “dramatize the attempts—and subsequent
failures—of both contemporary painting and the mass media to
structure or give narrative to everyday life.”
Savor, for a moment, that idea of “giving narrative to everyday
life.” It’s not, of course, that there are not narratives aplenty
in the news stories from the papers which Warhol reproduced, often
in fragmentary form. It’s that those narratives are multiple and
superficial. Nothing is what it seems, however, and so Andy Warhol
provided new and hidden narratives to these simple tales of
disasters and celebrities interspersed with the kind of commercial
art in which Warhol got his start by giving them new contexts. The
whole show amounts to one facet of Warhol’s customary technique of
playing with context in order to alter meanings, which is what
irony does. A Campbell’s soup can means one thing in the
supermarket and quite another in Andy’s silk-screened repetitions
hanging on a gallery wall. Yet, says Philip Kennicott of the
Washington Post, “Warhol was
no irony-soaked provocateur mindlessly importing pop pizzazz into
the sanctums of high art for pure shock value. He was strategic,
intelligent and brilliantly adept at analyzing and indicting the
world we live in today, a world he seemed to both predict and forge
through games of representation we now know by the encompassing
shorthand: Warholian.”
The idea of “indicting the world we live in today”—as if it
were possible to live in some other world—is evidence of sloppy
thinking on Mr. Kennicott’s part, but it is a customary sloppiness
of some mythic significance. “Elton John: I want Zachary to grow up
in a world without homophobia,” headlines this morning’s
Guardian. Good luck with that,
Elton. Those protesters, too, don’t want to live in a world
where—well, where bad things happen, like mean bosses and moms who
kick you out for smoking dope. Mr. Kennicott is doubtless right to
give Andy Warhol some credit for the ubiquity of this conceit since
he did, indeed, make an implicit claim through his art to a
proprietary “world” of his own as a platform—not so much for
criticism of the boring old world of those who read newspapers
unironically but for mere anarchic mockery of it and them. If only
we could all be as clever as Andy, we should none of us have to
endure the pain of living life as it must be lived in the world
that they used to call real. Now, however, the exciting quality of
the Warhol fantasy world has lost some of its “pizzazz,” since
fantasy worlds have multiplied to the point they have a quarter
century after his death, as we can see from a stroll down the
street to Freedom Plaza.
YET SINCE ART, including popular art, declared its independence
from reality, what choice do we have but to live in the new reality
of endless fantasy worlds? We have to get what pleasure we can from
them, at any rate. What struck me about the movie Anonymous was how it made no attempt to make a
serious case for the Oxfordian authorship of Shakespeare’s plays,
assuming there is one, by integrating its “narrative” with the
known facts of the lives of Shakespeare and the Earl of Oxford and
Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe and Queen Elizabeth I and
William Cecil, Lord Burghley. As, I suppose, not one in a hundred
of the expected audience for the film will know or care anything
about those facts, Roland Emmerich, the director, and John Orloff,
the screenwriter, appear to have decided to make everything up and abandon any pretense of
plausibility or truth. Thus, for example, the film has the Queen
(Vanessa Redgrave in age, Joely Richardson in youth) giving birth
to a string of bastard children, at least one of them incestuously,
as if our discovery of the joys of sexual laissez-faire in the
1960s had happened 400 years before it did—and without anyone’s
knowledge except the scheming villain, William Cecil
(David Thewlis), and his bunch-backed son Robert (Edward Hogg),
said to be the model for Richard III.
But of course this secret—as preposterous as the idea of
Shakespeare’s true identity being a secret for hundreds of
years—is the best thing about it for those who have the addiction
catered to by the Spy Museum. That’s why those who see the picture
will want to see it and why such luminaries of the English stage as
Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance, to say nothing of the Misses
Redgrave and Richardson, have lent their names and their talents to
such a sorry farrago of historical and literary nonsense. It’s not
really a movie about Shakespeare or anyone who might be claimed to
be the author of his works but about those doing the claiming:
their talents, their intelligence, their superiority to the ruck of mankind
who accept the world of appearances, mostly, at face value because
they haven’t the wit to know, as those of the Ruling Class do, that
“nothing is what it seems.”
