Vidor, Texas: 'Rough Beauty'?

Continuing what will surely be a rich tradition on this blog of commenting on articles in the day's New York Times, I stumbled upon a piece [$; will be available free this weekend] on the controversy surrounding a book of photographs about the people of Vidor, Texas, called Rough Beauty.

Vidor, Texas has been in the news recently. A CNN special on race in December featured the town, which is in close proximity to Jasper, Texas, where a black man was dragged to his death behind a pickup truck not too many years ago. One of Vidor's finest, a fat white woman who apparently spends much of her time in a diner, said this: "I don't mind being friends with them, talking and stuff like that, but as far as mingling and eating with them, all that kind of stuff, that's where I draw the line." (What's next? Letting them into our neighborhoods? Our bedrooms??)

What's interesting about Rough Beauty, however, is that it is a book of artistic photographs that seeks beauty in the mundane, and the visual poetry that reveals itself in the squalor of rural poverty. This is controversial because there is an unstated belief by like-minded people that beauty cannot coexist with horror. I am happy to report that this is an aesthetic debate that has consumed much of art theory in the 20th century.

The critic Walter Benjamin made a useful distinction between "aestheticizing the political" and "politicizing the aesthetic." The former paradigm fits most closely with fascist regimes, while the latter will be familiar to those who have seen Soviet propaganda (or An Inconvenient Truth). For example: Shorn from its context, is not the image of a bomb dropped on a Spanish village during the civil war -- from the point of view of the airplane -- beautiful, the orange flames slowly pulsating outwards in a ring of fire? By removing this horrible image from the political context, can't we aestheticize it and view it as art? To take a more mainstream example, isn't Triumph of the Will rightly considered one of the greatest documentary films ever made?

On the flip side, Soviet propagandists created an entirely new aesthetic, injecting art, literature and film with their own political ideology. In film, this resulted in the dialectical montage made famous by Eisenstein. In a communist state, it was deemed necessary to define reality in the terms dictated by the Party so that the people would buy into that reality. The only way to do this was to use the very aesthetic means with which artists have spoken to the masses throughout history. For fascist regimes, it was necessary to mask the horrors of totalitarianism by aesthetic means. So, from the leaders' point of view, one method revealed truth while the other concealed it.

My point is, both methods showed that it is quite possible to combine beauty and ugliness, art and evil. Are the people of Vidor, Texas horrible/racist? I don't know, but I do know that they are probably, in large part, not very well-educated. That, besides utter stupidity, is the only way to explain why someone would display open racism to a television reporter. And it explains a curious aspect of the controversy, which is that apparently, many of the protesters are in fact from Vidor. Clearly, they haven't actually read the book themselves, and have assumed that it is another indictment of their ... way of life.

And what of this way of life? It's funny that I caught this article as I was reading the first chapter of a groundbreaking book called Sundown Towns, which basically asserts that the majority of incorporated towns in America, from about 1890-1968, were whites-only, either by law or through more indirect and unstated means. Interestingly, the vast majority of these were not in the South. The author, sociologist Jim Loewen, suggested that Vidor "takes the heat" for these other towns that most people don't know about or wish not to admit exist. It also helps that Vidor is in Texas and not, say, California or Illinois (and that it wasn't built by the FDR administration ... yikes!).

The Times article had this graf about the reaction to the public opening of the book's photographs:

Reactions to the show were mixed. Photography enthusiasts unfamiliar with Vidor praised Mr. Anderson for the formal composition of his pictures, while those familiar with the town tended to focus on the location. "They're nice," said Jonathan Meadows, 26, a painter who grew up in nearby Fredericksburg, when initially asked what he thought. When told that the photographs had been taken in Vidor, Mr. Meadows laughed and clarified his reaction. "A few are beautiful," he said. "But they're not beautiful in the true sense of the word."

This is a perfect example of the ambivalence and hesitation caused by the unholy mixture of aesthetics and ugliness. It reminds me of a very similar reaction at an AFI Silverdocs screening of the documentary The Bridge, which was about people who threw themselves off the Golden Gate Bridge to commit suicide. What's so stunning about the film is the pure beauty of many of the images. Weirdly, though, the director completely denied this in the Q&A afterwards. I concluded, basically, that he actually had an agenda (to build a decidedly ugly barrier that would prevent people from killing themselves at that particular bridge, which would surely drive them to do so in less-patrolled places instead) and misunderstood his own creation. He couldn't accept that the horror of suicide could coexist with the grandeur of great architecture. But there it was.

This controversy also hits close to home. For my senior thesis, I made a documentary about some of the same thorny issues that were the subject of Rough Beauty. Like Dave Anderson, the photographer, I didn't come out with the conclusions I was supposed to. My shots weren't art, necessarily, but I did aestheticize the subjects of my movie (especially at the end, which took on a surreal quality because I didn't use audio). In other words, I didn't demonize them outright -- I merely asked questions. Partially for this reason, I believe, my classmates and instructor were at times fairly hostile to my work. Here's Anderson:

Mr. Anderson said he was surprised by the storm his project started. His curiosity, and his willingness to represent Vidor in a new light, have not been rewarded, he concluded.

"I think artistically it's problematic," he said. "There have been so many strong reactions that I don't want to overcompensate on future projects."

And that's too bad. My project, too, was very problematic -- but I acknowledged this from the get-go. Anderson, too, has tried to embrace a difficult and problematic subject and come out scarred as a result.

It's worth asking what happens when you do come back with the conclusions you're supposed to. The article mentions work by photographers such as Walker Evans, who traveled South with James Agee for the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (which I kind of despise). The book concealed their obviously Marxist (and condescending) sympathies with various rhetorical flourishes. It's since been recognized as a classic. And what do you know? The gorgeous photographs within politicize the aesthetic.

Movie Mysteries and Film Puzzles

Mahmood has given us a great framework with which to evaluate films on both style and substance, and the intersection of the two.

As for the question, Is David Denby right when he claims that Iñárritu/Arriaga are masking a political message with a deceptively complicated structure that seems to suggest that the world is a complex place in which randomness, unpredictability and fate all intersect in order to create sometimes devastating and always unforeseeable consequences?

For Babel, and definitely for 21 Grams, I think this is a plausible argument. I didn't pick up on any subversive messages in Babel, nor do I necessarily think there's an ulterior motive. A. O. Scott of the Times seems to think it is in part a cautionary tale about the perils of globalization -- but that seems silly to me. As much as I respect his opinion, none of the conflicts in the film wouldn't have been possible 50 or 100 years ago. The story about the Mexican nanny could be seen as more of a parable about immigration policy than anything else. (And are the characters heartlessly bounced around in the pinball machine of global capitalism, or is that just the writer's pen -- or fate?)

So the "unfair distribution of power" argument makes much more sense. The most vivid support for this theory is the scene in which Brad Pitt (an entirely unlikable character, which made casting him such a brilliant choice) manages to helicopter out of Afghanistan with his ailing wife, Cate Blanchett. Iñárritu makes sure we understand that in this particular time and place, the two rich Americans are worth far more than the dirty peasants -- the helicopter swoops in to rescue them, dwarfing everyone else as if the king had just arrived. And Brad knows it. The guilt tears him apart, leading to an entirely unbelievable scene in which the actor attempts to fake crying.

I maintain that Iñárritu's first and still superior film, Amores Perros, is among the finest of the new millennium so far. It features three intersecting stories, each with characters from a different socioeconomic class. But all of them have flaws, and all of them have virtues. The world depicted in Amores Perros truly is complex. Far from glorifying the downtrodden, championing the ex-Marxist guerrilla, and vilifying the rich, duplicitous magazine editor, no one comes out especially well in the end. Denby entirely misreads the last scene in the film, in which, he writes, El Chivo "lights out for fresh territory, like the hero of an old Western." On the contrary, he's limping away from the realization that he lacks the courage to confront the daughter he abandoned and the past that doomed him to a life of crime and poverty.

So we're back to the distinction between puzzles and mysteries. Is Babel a mystery? Surely by the end, the filmmakers have tied up the loose ends and made something of a statement about their characters. We're left to hypothesize what it all means -- but does it mean anything beyond what's in the film itself? Can we apply it to life in general? These questions are another way of asking, Is it transcendent? Is it art?

Certainly, the filmmakers are consciously trying to transcend. But I don't know if they do; there's just one caricature too many (pick one: the rich Americans with a sense of entitlement; the hapless Mexican maid with a heart of gold; etc.). The only truly original character is the girl in Tokyo. Amores Perros's characters didn't necessarily stand for anything, and as a result they were fluid, multifaceted and real. So in the end, we can believe that these real people have something to say about life, and about us. Maybe Babel is only relevant within itself, and once it ends, the puzzle is solved. Nothing more about the mystery of life is illuminated.

This puzzle/mystery distinction got me thinking about other films I like. The example of L'Avventura is classic; I'd add Blow-Up, because that Antonioni picture also begins like a puzzle and turns into something of a mystery. But it keeps elements of both. The photographer's investigation into a crime his picture may have captured becomes a bona-fide investigation into perception, reality, and truth. In one scene, someone literally disappears into a crowd. Did the photographer see her at all? In the celebrated final scene, a group of mimes plays pretend-tennis. But isn't that the sound of the ball? And aren't his eyes following something going back and forth? So, throughout, we get clues that not everything is as it seems -- the main character becomes untrustworthy, and depending on what we think of him (and the film's reality), we can attempt to solve the original puzzle. But the mystery remains.

Other films succeed as both puzzles and mysteries. The classic film puzzle is Memento, which requires conscious effort to follow and finally piece together in the end. But the mental work of understanding the story by piecing together the narrative (which is disjointed and backward, like the main character's memory) leads to an understanding of how the character perceives the world. In other words, the film is subjective. And this aligning of protagonist and audience allows the mystery to remain, because, again, the Big Questions haunt us long after we've solved the riddle.

On the other end of the spectrum are films by M. Night Shyamalan. He's the consummate film puzzler. Surely, in his mind, he's making profound statements about God and our place in the world -- but let's get real. I liked Signs and I even liked The Village, but they are what they are. The Sixth Sense will remain one of the best twist endings of all time, but it will not be remembered as a great mystery that continues to reward viewing after viewing. The end does, after all, give everything away. (Incidentally, he's been consistently championed by David Bordwell, a distinguished film scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This is not surprising, because Bordwell tends to focus on relatively superficial scholarship on film structure and film style. This is not to denigrate his sometimes fascinating work, but it's worth noting that in the end, puzzles are superficial and mysteries are not.)

That's because Shyamalan uses film structure to fool the audience, and in the process, his characters and plot points become tools with which he can impose his idealized vision of the world onto us. Stephen Hunter made this point extremely well in a 2002 essay, which unfortunately is not available online in full. His basic point was that Shyamalan's films always have the same subtext, that things will work out in the end, and even bad things serve a purpose in the grander scheme of things because they enable preferable outcomes in the future. In Signs, this became clear with the flashback structure: the dying wife subplot wasn't just there; it existed to serve the purpose of showing that, despite the tragedy of her death, it served a purpose by later driving Joaquin Phoenix's character to "swing away" and knock a home run with an evil alien's green head.

So, Shyamalan: puzzles and nothing more. Once the movie is done, you know how he feels about life, and there's no real mystery about it. Memento, however, continues to intrigue, and for that incredible feat, the Nolans deserve all the praise they've gotten.

Is evil banal?

This will hopefully be a regular blog. More about me in a later post, but I thought I would hit the ground running. Over at Slate, Clive James has this piece on Terry Gilliam (part of a series about 20th century lives), and his movie Brazil. James argues that contrary to the "bland malevolence" portrayed by Michael Palin's character, who plays a torturer in the movie, real-life torturers are in fact not mere technocrats following orders, but relish their work with great joy. This hearkens back to an age-old debate about the nature of evil, and whether some human beings are naturally evil, or whether they are merely driven by circumstances to do unspeakable things. Hannah Arendt famously argued that Adolf Eichmann was just a bureaucrat in her book "Eichmann in Jerusalem." James takes real-life examples from Argentina, Cambodia, and more recently Iraq, to demonstrate that torturers are in fact not victims of some soulless tyranny, but that any regime that wishes to torture is never short of a healthy supply of volunteers.

Of course, torture is all over television these days, most prominently in "24", where Jack Bauer could be seen torturing his own brother a couple of weeks ago. The creators of 24 seem to be members of a third school of thought, which actually considers torture morally acceptable (maybe even good?) in some circumstances. Using a traditional utilitarian calculus (which is awfully appealing), they follow the lead of the Israeli government in arguing that when millions of lives are at stake, torture may be necessary to elicit important information. It's all part of the new "war on terror." Of course, there is a fourth school, which argues that torture, regardless of its moral acceptability, simply doesn't work, and instead tends to produce false information. Not having the data in front of me, I am still inclined to think that while this may be true at the tactical level in say Iraq where you are interrogating suspects about locations of munitions depots etc., that logic works less well when the cost-benefit analysis weighs so heavily in favor of torture that even the risk of false information seems acceptable (suitcase nukes are a prime example.)

But this raises the interesting question of whether such torture, conducted by agents of the US government, can be analyzed in the same terms as the torture that Clive James is talking about. Does the fact that the torture is being conducted in aid of a goal that many would consider completely morally legitimate foreclose an analysis of the psyche of those who engage in it? This is a classic problem, well-known in the context of riot police who tend to be violent by nature. When we recruit people to our intelligence agencies, armed forces, police, are we going to be attracting those people who cherish torture? If James is right, the fact that we live in a democracy rather than a dictatorship should have no significant impact on the number of people who are willing executioners. If so, the existence of procedural safeguards may curb their disgusting appetites, but aren't they the same people at bottom?