Everyone is headed somewhere, full of things to do. Are those the same things they’ve always done, and if so, why?
Last month’s essay focused on the influence of filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. Irascible, annoying, inventive, and vital, Godard changed the world. Critics and academics celebrate his rare brilliance, and expansive audiences in the middle 20th century, while perhaps not huge in number, recognized that someone bold had just rattled the pantheon.
That was last month.
Most of the time we don’t seek out fresh voices because fresh voices take work to take in. Most people these days aren’t going to stream an old chestnut from the French New Wave. More to the point, we are all inundated by information and the demands of increasingly complicated lives. Be honest: ordinary things are endlessly complex and often exhausting in the modern world. The inertia to shed previous skins and try something new holds the vast majority of us locked in habituated place. There’s a reason so much of the country eats at McDonalds as frequently as they do. (Sad.)
I like spending my time with creative people. They’re usually the ones who see things anew, who hear sounds I haven’t heard, who think the rules of daily life are actually just a good list of suggestions. Most people I know, however, are not creative people. They may be creative some of the time; I may like and respect some them very much. But as a whole, most people don’t spend their lives propelled by acts of creation, exploration, and discovery. They order meals they already know from the drive-thru menu; they listen to the same music they listened to when they were teenagers; they mostly believe the world ought to behave in ways they’ve already experienced.
We are consumers of the problem, but as a collective we are also purveyors of the problem. Institutions are, remember, made of people like us. Institutions like governments, schools, corporations, and mainstream media simultaneously reflect the world as much as they shape the world. The great capitulation is that most of the time we’re all just so busy, so distracted, so damn tired, to notice that we have largely abdicated our own abilities to think for ourselves. We perpetuate big, lugubrious cycles, buying into institutionally pre-digested tropes which encourage institutionally obvious outcomes, thus reinforcing the cycle. To one degree or another we’re all served from an institutionalized menu that only occasionally manages to present us with something genuinely new. Even the versions of “edgy” and “fresh” that make us think we’re being daring and free are often safe bets that serve roles as highly curated niches capable of making us all feel like we can think for ourselves.
News flash: your life is largely not your own. The great discovery waiting for you in the hazy mists is that while you might not be able to fully escape this reality, it doesn’t need to be like this all the time.
It’s cited so often, and for good reason: George Orwell’s protean novel “1984” described so much more than just an authoritarian state. In it we read of the common brand of day to day products that people consume. “Victory Chocolate” and “Victory Coffee” sport their on-the-nose names as a means of endlessly reminding consumers about the greater goals of the novel’s hegemonic government (a big institution made of people like ourselves) while also weakly obfuscating the low quality of the products themselves. Even in the late 1940s, struggling to finish the book before tuberculosis pulled him into oblivion, Orwell already sensed that the options available to his fellow citizens were largely proscribed by nameless, faceless institutions.
It’s a tough treadmill to escape. I’m no Luddite and I do not imply here that we should all throw our shoes into the machinery. Like you, I live in the world, and for good and for ill I count on being able to navigate it amid the grinding gears and pulleys of modern life. But it’s also vital to acknowledge, like Orwell, that modernity is a trap. Why do most people work? Most people work to make money. Money, in turn, enables us to do things, but most of the things we do are really just means to enable—to even encourage—us to redouble our work efforts, often for purposes completely separated from humanitarian utility or aesthetic value.
Sometimes we indulge ourselves with a bit of real-world Victory Chocolate, believing we have seized a transitory pleasure and acted with a momentary burst of free-will. We take a day off. We buy a birthday present for a friend. We fancy a new car.
Artists are the anthesis of this behavior. That’s not to say that money doesn’t govern their lives, too: just ask any artist if he or she has adequate resources. Ask any artist why he or she waits tables at the corner cafe. Artists need to drive cars too, and also have friends with birthdays. But artists often begin and end their days focused on different concerns. Artists live to create, and that independent self-propulsion is the antidote to nameless, faceless, relentless hegemony.
If you ever walk through a book store —remember books?—be sure to look at how many new books are essentially re-treads or new installments of familiar works. “Third in the series of….” or “The latest installment in a saga that….” We’ve been here before, which means we’ve come here again. Familiar things presents less inertia to the mind and body; we relax around what we already know. This is the malevolent cloud that soaks social media; this is the engine of capitalism that propels us toward acquisition rather than appreciation. This is the fallacy of free will. When faced with endless choices and voices, most people go with what they already know. In many ways, this is the genesis spark of racism.
Is it any wonder why fascism grows when people are weary or stressed? Authoritarianism soothes a deep need for so many people to feel like they can count on tomorrow looking like today. The reason artists are always considered enemies in a fascist state is precisely because artists ask people to consider new ideas every day the sun blooms anew against night’s dark horizon line. Artists seek out new sounds and new sights, which fundamentally means they seek out new ideas. Fascism eschews new ideas because old ideas are simply easier for most people to understand. Fascism suggests that the solution for a stable society springs from doing away with anything outside what’s already understood, which in turn paints artists as malevolent agitators. Fascism demands fealty. Fascism, as a result, burns books.
In the great Coen Brothers movie Barton Fink, the head of a Golden Age movie studio effectively holds the eponymous screenwriter’s leash by contract. He excoriates Fink to deliver something commercial, something more in line with what the studio has seen before.
“You think you’re the only writer who can give me that Barton Fink feeling?” he shouts at the actual Barton Fink, sitting in front of him.
(I love that movie.)
The movie mogul embodies a fascist of industry. The creative soul at work—Barton Fink in this case and the majority of us in the real world—finds limited options except to acquiesce or rebel.
We are often faced with similar choices, no matter what we do with our lives. Acquiescence to authority threatens to make us all Winston Smith, referring to Orwell’s “1984” protagonist, but the danger here is that rebellion also makes us Winston Smith, albeit at a later stage in the novel. While it’s probably a truism that one cannot live successfully in the modern world without aspects of both, it bears consideration to wonder if there are third alternatives. I believe there are, and those alternatives always begin with a willingness to test ourselves with a new perspective, a new experience, or a new idea.
Superficially the source of danger in Barton Fink concerns an ax murderer on the loose in Los Angeles. What we come to realize, however, is how that pales in comparison to the real existential threat facing our hero, namely the killer of purpose and passion inherent in the grand machinery where most of us find ourselves each day. Fink writes fresh stories of the noble, ordinary worker, suffused with insights and observations. (Or, in the movie, at least he writes one.) The media machine pretends to respect that, but would much rather have more obvious retread stories that the audience already knows.
When you walk in the woods without your cell phone, or work in the tomato patch of your decidedly non-wired garden, ubiquitous yet abstruse institutional influences gently loosens their grip, even if just for a few minutes. You becomes subtly more aware of the world and perhaps even your small place in it. Light changes around you as clouds intermittently cover and reveal the sun, and leaves move on wings of shifting air, defying gravity.
You don’t even needs woods or gardens. You can absorb the rhythms of other lives as you walk observantly on city streets. You can stand in your cul-de-sac and vicariously marvel as your neighbor’s daughter tries to balance her two wheel bicycle. You can sit on a shady bench by your bird feeder and watch finches grab seeds, hovering as if they can’t believe their good fortune.
In other words, you can shake loose from the influencing machine once in a while. There are new ideas to explore, new sights to see, new flavors to taste. Some days those explorations may require you to consciously shake free of what’s familiar, of what you already know. But if there’s one thing all artists know down to their bones, time is running out. Youthful years disappear; the rest of your years follow quickly; there are no negotiations.
You can acquiesce here, capitulate your free will in favor of institutionally pre-determined obligations and entertainments because—let’s face it— that’s often easier. You can, alternatively, rebel. A choice to fight the power, so to speak, means a life outside the mainstream, and often a life out of balance, out of sync, and frequently tired.
Or you can try to remain open. Doesn’t have to be always, doesn’t have to be extreme, but you can try to see things in ways that might make you a little uncomfortable once in a while. Then, suddenly: you have a new idea. You’ve experienced something you hadn’t considered before. Like it or dislike it isn’t the point; what matters is that it’s a thought you hadn’t considered before you gave it a whirl.
This is the third path. This is the one that propelled Godard (remember we started with Godard?) to take all that he know about cinema and shake it until it recombined into something that didn’t exist before he created it.
Even if it’s only for yourself in the smallest ways, there’s no reason that can’t be an aspect of your own life, too. Then consider how that might re-shape the relentless forces of fearful, moribund culture, if we developed a shared language of tolerance and thoughtful, expansive consideration.
But I suppose that’s just the artist in me, dreaming.