The Politics of Art: The Great Oxymoron

“In a larger sense, all writing is about autobiography: everything that you write, including criticism and fiction, writes you as you write it.”
- J.M. Coetzee

Finally, I have seen the pilot episode of the much-talked about new HBO series called “Girls”. Because the slowness of my internet connection is directly proportional to the speed of internet commentary, the series, which is still one 30-minute episode young, has, as of this writing, already gone through the hype-backlash-defense cycle that used to happen within entire years (in what old people used to call “the old days”).

So what is “Girls”? It’s a comedy series created by 25-year-old writer-director Lena Dunham who made SXSW noise two years ago with her film “Tiny Furniture” and produced by self-confessed Dunham fan Judd Apatow. Now, this, I suppose explains the hype stage.

So what about the backlash part? Well, feel free to google, but I’ll simplify the current clusterfuck for all of you: people have complained that the show is about “rich white girl problems”. This is, essentially, the main criticism against “Girls”. And this is exactly the kind of criticism that has been going on for years now and that I continue to find utterly weird.

I thought the pilot episode of “Girls” was well done. It wasn’t spectacular or especially mind-blowing; unlike the pilot episode of, say, “Mad Men”, or “Freaks and Geeks”, or even “Louie”. But I really liked it. I thought the dialogue was witty without being showy, I thought the humor felt natural, I thought most of the characters were interesting, and most importantly, I thought the main conflict was really interesting.

The central “rich white girl problem” of the series is that of the lead character, Hannah (played by Dunham herself), a struggling young writer who faces the prospect of trying to find a “real job” for the first time after her rich parents decide to finally cut her loose financially two years after she graduated college. Her dream is to finish her non-fiction book and have it published. She wants to be an artist and live the artist life. She seems smart, albeit a little naïve. While high on opium tea, she tells her parents: “I don’t want to freak you out, but I think I may be the voice of my generation…or at least a voice of a generation.”

The pilot is genuinely funny and the series seems to hold a lot of promise. Is it really about “rich white girl problems”? I guess. But I am not really interested in exploring how accurate that description is. I am more interested in why that description is necessarily a bad thing.

Six years ago, my friend Nono and I made it to the semifinals of the Cinemalaya Film Festival (this was the year of “Endo” and “Tribu”). Since neither of us had any directing experience, we asked some friends who knew some people who knew a certain highly-acclaimed arthouse filmmaker (who I will not name because it feels unnecessary to do so) to help us out. When we met him, he seemed like a really cool guy and a smart and passionate dude. I have no issues with him as a person or as an artist. But whenever I come across his name or some of his works, I only remember him for one thing and one thing only: when he finally read our script, one of the criticisms he used was that our script was “too middle class”.

He didn’t like it, obviously. I totally get that because, in hindsight, I think it was a very poorly-executed script (which explains why we weren’t finalists and why we never had to actually deal with the real consequences of him turning us down). But I really thought that the “too middle class” comment was very interesting. I find it interesting, to this day, that that comment exists as a form of criticism at all. At the time, I found it extremely perplexing because our story was exactly about middle class life and aspirations. Criticizing it as “too middle class” was like criticizing a science fiction novel for being “too much about outer space”.

What I find so weird about this “Girls” backlash is that the people who are annoyed at it and its characters are not really criticizing the episode; they’re criticizing the politics that they themselves imposed on it. The episode was essentially about disillusionment, fraying relationships, and the vain search for genuine love. Critics only saw that they were rich, upper middle class girls and that they were white. When you can’t get over your own politics or your inner class warrior, there is no such thing as “universality” in art.

Existentialism, at this point, is a hackneyed concept; yet there is no denying that it is the single-most influential philosophy in contemporary literature and film. And let’s face it: existentialism is a largely bourgeois philosophy. It is only within the confines of material contentment does the meaning of life become a pressing question. When troubled characters that happen to be rich and entitled become too annoying for you to see the core of the story, then you’re just too annoyed by rich, entitled assholes. The fact that they are annoying is sort of the point, especially in a comedy – because they can’t see the big picture and are so insulated in their cushy lives. There is way more insight and tragedy there than mere “oh, poor rich bastards.”

Movies about upper middle class problems are my favorite; movies by Alexander Payne, Sofia Coppola, and most especially, Noah Baumbach. Two of my all-time favorite movies about “entitled assholes” were by Baumbach – “Kicking and Screaming” and “The Squid and the Whale”. In the former, fresh college graduates wallow in their post-graduate stasis, choosing to sit around and do nothing instead of looking for a job. For the politically-obsessed critic, the movie might be an affront to the lower class who are jobless due to circumstance and not by choice. But “Kicking and Screaming” is an insightful and extremely apolitical portrayal of post-college life as this existential purgatory between the heaven of scholastic theories and the hell of real-life practice. One of my favorite quotes from the movie (which is teeming with great quotes) is by Eric Stoltz’s character Chet, the 30-something bartender who is still in college. Looking zen-like behind the bar, he seems to have figured out the solution. “Somehow I experienced my time as a postponement of my life,” he mused. “But eventually I just realized that this is my life. Some people need to have a real career, which is something that I’ve never really understood…I am a student and that’s what I chose.”

“The Squid and the Whale”, meanwhile, is about a lot of things: it’s about the confusion of adolescence and puberty, of divorce, and of midlife crisis. But what I love most about it is its other theme that is rarely covered in film: the failure of intellectual life. The parents of the lead character, Walt Berkman, are both successful writers and both highly intelligent, but their lives are an utter mess. What makes them excellent artists and scholars is almost what dooms them to become horrible parents. Bernard Berkman, the father, talks to his sons as if they were students in his Comp-Lit class. Instead of confronting their issues he always dismisses them with his favorite put-down: “don’t be difficult,” which basically becomes his parenting slogan.

It is this frailty of the intellectual dream that I find extremely fascinating. And it can only be explored by exploring the lives of “entitled assholes”. In Alexander Payne’s “Sideways”, Paul Giamatti’s Miles, who is also a struggling writer dreaming of being published, is suffering from the worst case of midlife crisis – seeing your one last shot at fulfilling your dreams being shattered one last time. I don’t remember the movie being panned at the time for being about “white men problems”. Midlife crisis and struggling writers who don’t reference Facebook are just more tolerable and romantic, I suppose.

Sofia Coppola isn’t as lucky (maybe it’s that “rich, entitled white girl” thing again). Her ennui trilogy is now being retroactively slaughtered; the acclaim for “Lost In Translation” feels so long ago at this point. My current favorite and most respected commentary website, thisrecording.com, put up a highly scathing review of “Somewhere” (in which the reviewer admitted that he now changes his mind about “Lost In Translation” and thinks it sucks too) a couple of years ago, the premise of which I completely disagree with. The point of his criticism is that Coppola is absurd in thinking that any audience would find Stephen Dorff’s forlorn and lonely Hollywood actor character sympathetic at all. He closed his piece as thus: “They admit that their lives are essentially meaningless, and that the true pleasures can't be purchased by money, but as long as they have it, they don't really need it. They are so out of touch with reality they think a silly movie like this is reality.”

Oh, you mean loneliness, emptiness, and the meaninglessness of life does not exist? It’s not reality? It’s almost amusing that a website steep in the tradition of English major high-browness could be this reductive. I guess, given the vitriol and seething bitterness in his text, it’s perfectly understandable: he probably still can’t get over all those rich assholes in his university who wouldn’t take Derrida as seriously as he did.

I feel the complete opposite of hatred towards Sofia Coppola’s brazen semi-autobiographical approach to her movies, in which the world of rich entitlement becomes a prison of mediocre blandness and aimlessness. Her “fuck you” to the entire faux-Marxist critical establishment in media is “Marie Antoinette”, in which she dared to transform the ultimate symbol of imperial decadence into a sympathetic character. I thought it was the bravest and most brilliantly unusual period drama of all time. Was she insensitive to the obvious political implications of her portrayal of Marie Antoinette as a portrait of lost youth, not unlike the Lisbon sisters of her adaptation of “The Virgin Suicides”? Yes, she clearly was. But I don’t think she was making a contrarian political stand. She did it precisely because she was apolitical about Marie Antoinette and the whole history of monarchical France. What was so genius about her creative approach was that she saw something that, heretofore, was nothing but political, as something very existential.

I really believe that politics has no place in art, or at least good art. If something is political, then it is not art; certainly not good art. Politics is about taking sides: it is good vs. evil, black vs. white, rich vs. poor. Art is all-inclusive; it is about the open-minded embrace of all humanity – the virtuous, the disgusting, the painful, the beautiful. It is such, because it exists as an attempt to understand everything about life.

My favorite non-fiction writer not named Chuck Klosterman is David Shields. In his book, “Enough About You: Adventures in Autobiography”, Shields confronts the most common criticism he gets; that his personal demons are allegedly unrelatable:

The impulse on reviewers’ part to use me to get well – to brandish their own more evolved morality, psyche, humanity – flies in the face of what is to me an essential assumption of the compact between reader and writer, especially between the reader and writer of autobiography: doesn’t everybody have a pitiable heart? Aren’t we all bozos on this bus? Robert Dana explains it like this: ‘Was Keats a confessional poet? When he talks about youth that grows ‘pale and spectre-thin, and dies,’ he’s talking about his kid brother, Tom, who died of tuberculosis. But he’s talking about more than that. The word ‘confessional’ implies the need to purge oneself and go receive forgiveness for one’s life. I don’t think that’s what confessional poetry is about at all. I think it’s a poetry that comes out of the stuff of the poet’s personal life, but he’s trying to render this experience in more general and inclusive, or what used to be called ‘universal’, terms. He’s presenting himself as a representative human being. He’s saying, ‘This is what happens to us because we’re human beings in this human world, this flawed and difficult world where joy is rare.’

I am not in any way rich, entitled, or even belonging to the upper middle class. I’m probably in the middle-middle-class at best; so I can’t relate either to royal heiresses, jaded L.A.-based actors, or overweight New York-based wannabe writers with rich parents. But why is it that I can totally relate to them? Whatever their social standing, their ethnicity, their gender, their taste in hookers – I seem to never fail to see that little shred of myself in them; the one that is always insecure, always anxious, always intimidated by expectations and the very idea of failure. Is it because I’m an egotistical middle-class bozo who’s so full of himself? Is it because, when Hannah's mother tells her: "Why don't you get a job and start a blog?", I felt like the cliché that I probably am? Or is it because I love art so much that I don’t allow petty politics to ruin my experiences of it?

Whatever the reason, I’m glad I find Hannah totally relatable.