[lit-ideas] How Can I Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2007 08:05:35 EST
Helm:
"I started to explore when I hit a wrong button
and posted my note before I was ready to send it, namely the morality of
making
movies that present despicable matters as being somehow acceptable, easing
your
frog-viewers into the water of evil and slowly bringing it to a boil. They
describe an anecdote about the writer of Silence of the Lambs who took the
story to someone who rejected it. Years later after it had won several
awards,
the writer saw this guy again and the guy said he would have rejected
Silence
of the Lambs all over again because movies like that should not be made.
The
writer and director of Mr Brooks are therefore aware of that point of view,
but
they don’t do any more than mention it before moving on."
---
Interesting.
I had (and still have) two points, and I'm using this essay by Colin
Radford, in "Aesthetics and the philosophy of art: the analytic tradition", an
anthology, ed. by Lamarque and Olsen (Blackwell, paperback).
I have not read it in detail, but as I recall, Colin Radford's point is that
it is _rational_ to be moved by a 'real' Anna Karenina and her _real_ fate;
not by a string of Russian sentences!
(I tend to agree -- we seem to like to be moved by what Brad Bitt and Kate
Blanchet have to undergo as they travel in Iraq, or Iran, I forget -- she gets
killed by a guerilla -- but we are _not_ so moved (because we don't have the
close up?) when we see that in 8.00 newsprogram). (I'm using 'we'
impersonally).
--- So that's ONE point. It seems that ARTISTS have felt the moral
obligation to impose on us immoral subjects in such a contrived way, that they
make
opaque our reaction to real-life moral dilemmas. You hear of the matricide of
Oedipus and find it sublime and cathartic, but if your next neighbour kills
her stepmother after bearing her a child, he's bound to the asylum.
The two points connects, as the second has to do with the ARTIST's freedom
in creating a truly nastic character. For some reason, literary theory doesn't
like them -- and I'm not a Shakespeare expert, but even OTHELLO seems to have
a good side to it. And if Othello is just the representation of an
'exemplar' VICE (i.e. all warts) that's pretty immoral too. Why did
Theophrastus cared
to write his boring CHARACTERS all about vices, but none about virtues.
Geary will bring an air-conditioning argument here.
So, I think, alla Plato, art has too privileged a place in our civilisation.
It allows to get us swallow nasty beasty evil, and -- even sympathise with
them, "Why, they are the topic of a film; look again Virginia, there must be
some _good_ in it"). _AND_ they blind our eyes to real-life phenomena as
second-rate, not so glamourous, and where a real reaction, genuine reaction
from
us, is all that may be needed to make this a better world worth living for...
Cheers,
J. L. Speranza
Buenos Aires, Argentina
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