We Should Still Delight in Problematic Art
An op-ed this week by Los Angeles Times critic Nicholas Goldberg asks a very 2021 question: How should we feel about old movies with racist, sexist, or homophobic themes?
What if we fall for the romance of Rhett and Scarlett in “Gone with the Wind,” despite knowing all the reasons we shouldn’t? What if we root for cowboys over Indians in a western? Are these things unavoidable — or are they moral failings?
Some 2500 years ago, Plato worried about the influence of music on the young. While the right sort of music, played to the properly trained mind, could propel a child to virtuous thought and action, the wrong sort of music could stir up dangerous, irrational emotions. That sort of music should be banned, Plato felt, and would presumably tell Nicholas Goldberg that we should indeed avoid art that leads us to feel the “wrong things” and into “moral failings.”
With very exceptions, Plato’s view that art is dangerous has remained ascendant. The particulars of the dangers are always in flux, but the anxiety that art will seduce viewers and listeners away from righteousness is a constant. As an older Gen Xer, I came of age in the culture wars of the 1980s, as religious conservatives fretted about Satanism and heavy metal, and the Moral Majority and radical feminists found wondrous strange common cause in opposition to pornography.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
When the contemporary left talks about cancel culture, it usually means boycotting or deplatforming artists for their views or misconduct. Christian conservatives want to ban Harry Potter because of its themes of witchcraft; woke lefties want to boycott Harry Potter because of J.K. Rowling’s opinions about trans folks. Both groups want you to stop reading the books, but for two very different reasons. In the case of Harry Potter, the far right finds the content dangerous but the writer’s views acceptable – the left takes precisely the opposite position. The common ground is the hope that they will be successful in removing Harry Potter from its extraordinary position of cultural influence.
It would be a happiness if cancel culture limited itself to boycotts of living artists. If the goal of cancel culture was only to send a signal that abuse or contrarian views will not be tolerated, the death of the artist would end the need for a boycott. We could go back to watching “Annie Hall” in good conscience the minute Woody Allen goes to the great editing bay in the sky, or start listening to Placido Domingo recordings again once the lecherous old tenor has joined the angel band. But as Goldberg’s plaintive question makes clear, the great cultural reckoning isn’t just about cancelling the problematic living – it’s about rethinking, even policing, our own internal responses to art created by the long-since departed.
All art is didactic, we’re told. That means that all art, whether it means to or not, is teaching something. Plato and Goldberg and countless scolds in between worry about the wrong lessons it might teach. The worries themselves change: the religious right is terrified of normalizing witchcraft and sexual exploration, while the woke left frets about upholding misogyny and white supremacy. The scolds presume the inability of the individual to discern; they doubt the human capacity to separate pleasure in the art from an unthinking endorsement of the art’s superficial message.
Most of the time when we’re in the car together, the children listen to the Top 40 radio they love. Every once in a while, they let me foist a single country song at a time upon them. A few weeks ago, we played one by Randy Travis: “What’ll You Do About Me?” The song is an upbeat toe-tapper about a man stalking and threatening his ex. (It was written by the late Dennis Linde, one of the greatest country songwriters, who also wrote the Chicks feminist classic, “Goodbye Earl.”)
I sang along with Randy:
What in the world are you planning to do
When a man comes over
Just to visit with you
And I'm on the porch with a .22
Lady what will you do about me?
Well you can call your lawyer
You can call the fuzz
You can sound the alarm, wake the neighbors up
Ain't no way to stop a man in love
Now what'll you do about me?”
The kids ask about the song, and I explain it. The bunnies are slightly stunned, and Heloise inquires why I love it if the message is so awful. I tell them we must learn to separate the pleasure in the song from the viewpoint of the narrator. I push deeper, as best I can, asking the bunnies what they think the man singing the song was really feeling inside.
“He’s sad and lonely,” says David, “He misses her. But he probably shouldn’t bring a gun to her house.”
Heloise turns to her brother. “If a girl breaks up with you, don’t stalk her.”
David protests. “Everybody knows that!”
There is silence for a moment. Heloise offers that she watches “Gossip Girl,” a racy television show, but would never want to make the decisions she sees the characters make. David remembers that he loves watching professional wrestling, and it makes him feel “all bouncy,” but he doesn’t want to actually pile-drive anyone into the ground.
“Music and shows make you feel all kinds of things,” my daughter says. “But they can’t change who you are. They can’t make you do what you know you shouldn’t do.”
I nod. “Remember that,” I tell her.
I don’t add that she will spend the next several years running into people eager to tell her to question the delight she takes in the art she loves.
Feelings are not facts, and art is not instruction. While it is right and good to reassess art and culture in light of new understandings, it is reductive and simplistic to reduce the beautiful and the stirring to its most dated elements.
No reassessment, no matter how overdue, should serve to rob us of the pure joy that comes from having our emotions stirred by a song or a film, no matter how perverse, problematic, or dark the story it tells may be.