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bambamramfan · 8 years ago

Text

“protagonist, audience, and critics”

Last Dead Freddie post for a while (ie, recovering pieces of deBoer’s writing that were killed by his website hack). Mostly this was a really good piece about antiheroes in prestige television, and I wanted to endorse its good points, and engage with the fundamental errors of artistic criticism it has towards the end.

I’ll post my response later, since this is enough to read on its own.

Edit: the title of the post included the word “audience” not “author”, but either could work.

That the early parts of the Golden Age of Television were dominated by antiheroes is an idea that’s by now as cliché and tired as, well, the phrase “Golden Age of Television.” From Tony Soprano to Walter White to Don Draper to the various self-destructive cops and criminals in The Wire, the rise of high-production-values, critically-lauded narrative television was attended by stories told from the perspective of people who weren’t very nice. The essayist Brett Martin’s book on this period, in fact, was titled Difficult Men. In recent years, we’ve seen a growing diversity of perspectives on HBO and AMC and the like, with more racial and gender diversity, a greater range of themes and issues, and less reliance on the tropes of antihero fiction. Thankfully, for those of us who think that art should reflect the full diversity of human experience, the obsession with those difficult men seems to have subsided.

And yet I think that, as much as the antihero has been discussed to death in recent years, the concept could stand to be connected in a deeper way to a broader context: the tangled relationship between protagonists, the audience’s empathy for them, and the moral intent of the artists who create them.

Prestige TV – a term I find viscerally distasteful, but never mind – has famously engendered a cottage industry of analysis, recaps and reviews and explainers by the thousands. The structural incentives for such coverage is obvious; high-profile shows drive clicks for publications, and the regular episodic nature of television provides writers with steady work, a reliable income source of a kind that’s essential for the career of a freelancer. And though I’ve occasionally teased producers of this stuff – how many fresh takes, really, can there be on the same episodes of television, with dozens or hundreds of people doing it? – it’s good for art and for audiences for a robust critical conversation to occur alongside these shows. Not all of the takes will be novel, interesting, or convincing. (Indeed, given the nature of things, a majority won’t be.) But communally digging around and exploring in the text will often provide us with some useful insight.

And yet it’s important to remember that the vast majority of viewers of these shows won’t engage in the text in this way. I don’t just mean that most people who watch shows don’t write or read about them. I mean that, for the average viewer, the concept of treating a show as a kind of intellectual challenge, a puzzle to be disassembled and reassembled again, probably defies the point of watching in the first place. Distraction is a very valid reason for watching television, after all, and after coming home from a long day of work, many of us naturally want to turn off the analytical part of the brain and just enjoy the straight narrative of a given series. But what happens when the series is asking you to analyze? What happens when the basic moral work of the art you’re enjoying requires a deeper consideration of the tension between what’s depicted and what morals are intended?

I want to argue that the tension between fiction as entertainment and fiction as object of analysis – the difference between consuming a story straightforwardly and reading that story against the grain for more complex moral lessons – takes on added weight when so much of what’s depicted in our popular culture is not meant to be emulated or celebrated. I’m not trying to establish some sort of hierarchy of tastes here – the first purpose of art is to entertain, and no one should ever apologize for engaging with commercial art on the level of surface enjoyment. But the prevalence of antiheroes and immoral protagonists in contemporary narrative art leaves me profoundly nervous about the actual ethical impact of such work. There’s reason to believe that too many people are taking entirely the wrong lessons from the shows, video games, and movies they love.

YouTube clips from popular shows offer obvious, depressing examples of what I’m talking about. The Sopranos is exemplary in this regard. Hundreds of clips of Tony Soprano and various other bad actors on the show are presented as role models for life, their grim pursuit of (what they believe to be) their own self-interest and their capacity for violence valorized in video titles, descriptions, and comments. A particularly egregious example states that Tony tells it like it is when it comes to what really matters: family. The clip (since removed from YouTube, likely due to copyright issues) was of a self-aggrandizing Tony Soprano waxing on about the importance of family and how family members are the only ones you can really trust. This should be, to anyone with even a minimal knowledge of the show’s plot, a moment dripping with irony and indictment: Tony is comprehensively terrible to his family. He is a lousy father, a cheating husband, and a bullying and obnoxious sibling. He tries to kill his own mother and succeeds in killing his cousin and nephew. It’s hard to imagine a point more consistently established in the show than that Tony Soprano is an awful family man.

Yet such is the power of the protagonist (and the charisma of James Gandolfini) that the person who uploaded the video and dozens of commenters were convinced that Tony’s speech amounted to the show imparting a life lesson. And this general attitude, that Tony is someone to emulate rather than to despise, is replicated again and again online, with thousands of people taking his oafish violence, sexual aggression, and total indifference to the well-being of others as some sort of exemplar of masculine real-keeping. It’s here where the power of the protagonist is truly revealed, the way that simple depiction of a character’s point of view seems to overwhelm everything else we know about them. It’s as if the human power of identification is too strong, at least in art; we forgive in our protagonists things we know should never be forgiven in real life.

David Chase, the creator of the Sopranos, has talked about this frustrating tendency himself many times, betraying his irritation with audience members who seem intent on seeing the show as little more than a wish fulfillment fantasy for those who would like to be able to whack their annoying coworkers.

In another clip that’s favored by people looking to draw life lessons on masculinity, Mad Men’s Don Draper dispenses with a young rival at his advertising firm with a cutting putdown. “I feel sorry for you,” says gifted young copywriter Michael Ginsberg. “I don’t think about you at all,” replies Draper, asserting his masculine dominance via the Principle of Least Interest. In an age when “giving no fucks” is taken as a Zen-like state of effortless superiority, this is the ultimate alpha male moment. The clip is summarized by the person who uploaded it: “Don Draper puts Michael Ginsberg in his place. He’s still the boss.”

Except that the show has gone out of its way, that entire episode, to demonstrate that Draper is thinking about Ginsberg. Incessantly. Over and over, the episode establishes that Don can’t stop thinking about Ginsberg and the threat he represents. It’s a classic tale of the wounded pride of an aging worker who feels threatened by the younger, sharper, hungrier counterpart. Sure, Don looks cool when he dismisses Ginsberg. But the limits of looking cool is one of the most relentlessly depicted themes in Mad Men, all of the sharply tailored suits and gorgeous midcentury modern design hiding alcoholism, bigotry, and failed relationships. The essential dramatic tension of the show lies in contrasting Don Draper the myth with Don Draper the reality. During the sixth season, when the character devolved deeper into addiction and failure, his façade of control and professional mastery slipping away, many devoted viewers complained that they wanted “the old Don” back – the cool, sexy, invulnerable Don. But in doing so, they were denying the central message of the show, the essential point both in plot terms and thematically: Don Draper does not exist. The ideal is not possible. Both the man himself and the icons he represents are myths. To see the show as simply a depiction of a gorgeous and powerful figure of old guard masculinity means denying its most obvious thematic message.

Reflecting on the divide between authorial signaling and audience interpretation through the example of Walter White of Breaking Bad – a truly reprehensible figure – Isaac Butler writes,

With Breaking Bad, the major, unresolved issue was the character of Walter White. What sort of man was he? And how were we supposed to feel about him? And how did the creators feel about him?…

For many watching Breaking Bad, Walter White was in a morality play, and thus would be sufficiently punished by the time the finale concluded. For an odious group known as Team Walt, Breaking Bad was wish fulfillment, and Walter would in some way be rewarded for his awesomeness. For another group—one I belonged to—Walter was the anti-hero protagonist of a classical tragedy.

A classical tragedy, that is, in the sense that the point is not the Manichean moralism of an episode of Law and Order SVU but the challenge of seeing our own potential flaws in a work of art, to better understand ourselves. What troubles Butler is the show’s moral relationship to its own characters and its audience, and in particular those who are bent on seeing genuinely evil characters as badass instead of bankrupt. And the question I constantly ask myself is whether, in a culture that has so habitually depicts violence as cool and cathartic, that group will always outnumber those who respond to violence with horror.

The point is not that we should take some sort of blanket critical approach to protagonists, but that we should recognize the complexity and nuance in their depiction. The critical reaction to Fight Club shows how both an unthinking acceptance of protagonist behavior, and an overactive judgment of same, can both sand away the subtleties that are essential a movie. Yes, indeed, there are far too many “How to Be As Cool as Tyler Durden” articles and videos online. (Step one: look as good as Brad Pitt circa 1999.) The phenomenon of fans of that movie or book over-identifying with Tyler Durden and the narrator has come in for some deserved mockery, with many pointing out that starting your own fight club – or, even worse, your own Project Mayhem – is a ridiculous exercise, one that clearly misses the satirical and critical aspects of the story. (You should make your own soap, though, it’s fun.) The entire second half of the film depicts the narrator’s gradual realization that he has become involved in something far more destructive than he imagined.

Yet it would be easy to fall too far on the other side of the equation, and to see the narrator’s distaste for the triviality and consumerism of contemporary American life as itself pathological instead of natural. Yes, the violent nihilism he and his alter ego develop in response to that culture is childish and ineffective, but we shouldn’t take that to mean that the world of corporate speak, consumerist conformity, and IKEA aren’t worth rejecting. It means that part of the point of the narrative is precisely the difficulty in channeling legitimate distaste for the way things are into productive avenues.

The last shot of the movie, pregnant with emotional power, demonstrates the closest thing to a message for how to actually live in the film: finding a partner who is equally willing to look past your own flaws to navigate a world that seems bent on destroying the things that make us feel authentically human. Endorsing the romantic ideal as a potential cure for modern disaffection isn’t particularly novel, but the execution of getting there strikes me as the basic point, the recognition of the seduction of nihilism and its impediments to real human connection. You don’t have to think the movie pulls that off, mind you – many people don’t – but failing to really parse out the nuances of the film’s relationship to its protagonist means missing its artistic foundations. The presumption that depiction means endorsement kills drama.

The film and TV writer Matt Zoller Seitz, a great critic who sometimes strikes me as too concerned with whether the films he reviews conform to contemporary liberal social norms, demonstrated the perils of a certain politicized literalism in how we treat the prerogatives of the protagonist when reviewing last year’s Ghostbusters reboot. In contrast to the workaholic women of the newer film, he chastises the original film’s leading character, Bill Murray’s Peter Venkmann, as “a deadpan hipster who fakes most of the knowledge he claims to have,” complaining that he is part of “a long tradition of anti-authority posturing by straight white male characters who act as if the world’s indifference to their happiness is a personal affront.” But what, exactly, is the alternative that Seitz would prefer? That Venkmann conform to the stuffy dictates of elite academia, which he (accurately) sees as full of bullshit? Become a Company Man, another Reaganite yuppie content to play within the system without irony? Yes, it’s definitely true that women and other marginalized groups have traditionally had less ability to subvert the social and economic structures around them. But the response to that should not be to insist that everyone play by the rules, but that we spread the privilege Venkmann enjoys to everyone. It’s a strange form of progressivism that would compel a movie character to drop his sardonic critique of the way things are and get to work on those TPS reports already.

More to the point, if Venkmann was more of a tryhard game-player, going along with the conventional plan, Ghostbusters wouldn’t be much of a movie. Of course there’s a lot of male fantasy in the original Ghostbusters; the question is whether showing such a fantasy for enjoyment necessarily entails seeing the fantasy as a goal worth pursuing. Again, there’s an implicit assumption that artistic depiction presumes that the audience should want to emulate the protagonist. Comedy is full of smirking subversives not because everyone should act like those characters – no one is that clever or funny, and not everyone can be an iconoclast – but because everyone recognizes the need for subversion, the steady drumbeat of absurdities and indignities piled on us by the systems around us.

(Seitz also, incidentally, claims that Murray’s character has an attitude of “The only part of this that excites me is the prospect of getting laid by a demon-possessed Sigourney Weaver,” despite the explicit plot point of a possessed Weaver propositioning Murray and him turning her down, which seems remarkably uncharitable for a thoughtful critic like Seitz.)

The power of identification in art leads to bad political readings of music as well. In recent years, the Beatles tune “Run For Your Life” has been singled out as #PROBLEMATIC for its threatening message to the unnamed romantic partner in the song. (This is made somewhat more disturbing by the fact that John Lennon, the song’s author and singer, admitted to abusing his wife, which is of course inexcusable.) The lyrics are indeed disturbing. What’s strange is the belief that the song, or people who enjoy it, are somehow endorsing threats or violence against women. Depiction is not endorsement, not even in music, perhaps the art form we are most likely to feel intimately inside of ourselves. Lennon felt things that would be rightfully impermissible to express directly. That’s precisely why he embedded them in his music. To argue for the legitimacy of the song as art is no more an endorsement of violence against women than singing the praises of Lolita is an endorsement of pedophilia.

The prevalence of obsession and possessiveness in songs about love reveals one of the cherished functions of art: to depict that which is human that cannot be defended by the rational mind. We are, after all, animals. We remain defiantly irrational creatures. We lust, we feel jealousy, we fantasize, we yearn for revenge, we imagine ourselves as beings of impossible power, and we do it all out of proportion with what is reasonable. My conscious mind, which is what guides my behavior, wants to be a loving and respectful partner to someone, a partner that recognizes the autonomy and independence of that someone and reacts to their adult desires for space and time apart appropriately. My emotional self is filled with an unjustifiable need to possess. That is not an attempt to rationalize or defend jealous romantic behaviors in a relationship. It is a statement of the permanent irrationality of human emotions.

When Nicki Minaj releases a music video depicting herself as a fascist dictator, to considerable controversy, her critics are misunderstanding the basic nature of fantasy. Who hasn’t imagined themselves, at times, in a position of autocratic power? We can pretend that such fantasies don’t exist, thanks to their obvious political problems, or we can express them in art where they do less harm. When Selena Gomez depicts herself as a stalker breaking into a celebrity’s home in a music video, she’s not romanticizing actual stalking but exploring the animal intensity of human emotion and its uncomfortable outcomes in truly obsessive behaviors. Romantic obsession is a commonplace in music because it is in music where those powerful, ubiquitous human emotions can be explored safely.

The contemporary attitude that we must run all of our thoughts and feelings through a political litmus test before we express them in art simply means that many shared thoughts and feelings will go undiscussed. The heart is not woke, and it never will be, and to remove that which is unconsciously felt but consciously impermissible from art simply leaves us less aware of the human condition. Worse, such a condition leaves us bereft of the kind of understanding we need to navigate our tangled feelings for the Tony Sopranos – the ability to recognize that the power fantasies we might enjoy while watching such characters are natural, but that actually valorizing those behaviors is contrary to the public good.

I’m not too worried that the average viewer will take up a life of crime in emulation of Tony Soprano and Walter White, though I cringe to think of how such unthinking appreciation of them deepens the association between masculinity and the capacity for violence. I’m far more worried about our continued inability to recognize the ethical failings of the wealthy and the system that empowers them. Our culture is rife with depictions of wealth that straightforwardly valorize money and those who have it, the shameless promotion of luxury on HGTV and celebrity gossip magazines. Lots of movies and television shows attempt to correct for that by showing the moral rot and personal destruction underneath all that ostentation. But sometimes, the depiction of wealth and glamour is so emotionally compelling that the critical and satirical elements are undone. This is the Wolf of Wall Street conundrum.

I have no doubt that Martin Scorsese and the others involved in the production of the film intended to indict Jordan Belfort and his actions. But I don’t think they achieved such an indictment artistically. When the film’s defenders argue that it was intended as a critical depiction, they’re defending intent rather than execution, which is no more useful than defending a film’s intent at realism, emotional catharsis, humor, or drama. Scorsese’s work has always drawn from the productive tension between how arresting his characters are and how destructive their behavior is. At its best, this leads to a kind of fascinated revulsion, the way that Travis Bickle is both a contemptible figure and an impossibly magnetic one, the light in which the glamor and cool of Howard Hughes in The Aviator were cast by the intensity of his mental illness. For me, The Wolf of Wall Street simply didn’t provoke that same queasiness; the cars were too fast, the suits too well-tailored, the women too hot, the glee on the part of Jordan Belfort too palpable. The intent may have been satirical, but a cursory examination of the internet’s collective opinion on the film shows that for many of its ardent fans, its effect was salutary. And we really don’t need more affection for Wall Street sharks.

You can, of course, argue that Fight Club fails in the same sense, or that Wolf of Wall Street actually achieves its critical intent. At some level we are simply talking about differing subjective takes on the quality of different works of fiction. And you might well ding me for arguing both ways at once – saying that audiences need to do the work of excavating implied critiques of protagonist behavior and also that creators have a responsibility to make those critiques apparent. If nothing else, I am saying that the role of the protagonist seems to inspire deep sympathy regardless of the actions depicted, particularly over the very long haul afforded by a television series, to a degree that many artists seem unprepared for. I imagine this power is even more compelling in video games, where the player literally directs the main character through the story, occupying their point of view. And in a critical world where more and more people are explicitly subordinating aesthetics to politics – where more and more critics are erasing any distinction at all between a work’s aesthetic value and its perceived effectiveness in delivering progressive political morals – the relationship between what is depicted and what lessons are imparted become even more fraught, more pregnant with meaning. We should take care with such things.

The sophisticate’s take on this question has typically been to insist that no artist should be held to account for the misreading of their audience, and of course I agree, in a limited sense. Still, I am at this point profoundly ambivalent towards the concept of the antihero or unsympathetic protagonist in art. These tropes have been mined to great effect for centuries in various artistic genres and media, and I value much of that work. But the consistency with which devoted fans of antihero fiction completely miss the thematic purpose of that fiction makes it hard for me to enjoy it, these days. Authorial intent is, obviously, contested and uneasy ground, and getting invested in parsing it rarely a productive activity. But I cannot help but observe the frequency with which implied moral positions in contemporary artwork seem to completely bypass large parts of their audiences, often to the point of leaving them with the exact opposite lesson that was seemingly intended.

Perhaps, then, the exhaustion with antiheroes and flawed protagonists came at just the right time. Perhaps the fad fizzled out when it most needed to. There will always be antiheroes, and I will no doubt find myself following with interest the stories of protagonists who are not good people. But simple depictions of flawed characters attempting to do their best for others and acting in ways we associate with morality seems like fertile ground. Hell, at this point, the story of good people doing good might seem downright subversive.

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