Judging Movies By Their Message

There is some ambiguity here as to whether we're talking about a "norm" (what people should do) and a "description" (what we actually do, despite our high-minded claims).

At a descriptive level (as many have observed upthread), the answer is "yes." Cognitive biases are well-documented and we all suffer from them. A general pattern that repeats again, and again, is our bias for things we like and our bias against what we don't like.

There are procedural steps we have developed over long years to help check bias (e.g., blind review, third-party arbitration, the principle charity), but we have developed an implemented these procesures precisely because we realize that our bias is "baked into the cake." There is no reliable way to be "unbiased" (a destination, a trait, a stable achievement that requires no maintenance).

Regrettably, we often assert norms as descriptions. Doing so is assertive, bold, and empowering. It feels good to fly the "mission accomplished" banner of a description (e.g., "I don't see race"). This is much snappier than announcing a commitment to an ongoing process (e.g., "I continually work to avoid judging people by their sex / gender," "I am a recovering alcoholic").

That stated, we often have good reasons for our biases. We are biased towards our principles, our values, our beliefs. It would be a queer thing to maintain that we are committed to democratic values or empathy or the scientific method only to find that we hold such commitments in abeyance when we evaluate a case. Thus, the question the real question is more specific. Is the moral judgment of art acceptable? My answer to this question is on record and upthread (i.e., "Yes.").

Yoda has offered an opinion on the formal criticism of art, stating "...but true capital-C criticism of form must at least be capable of divorcing method from message." This statement, however, is tautological. The criticism of form should be formal. Well... ...no kidding? The question, however, is what is it we're up to when we discuss art. Is the "capital 'C' discussion of art" inclusive of the message? If it isn't, then art criticism is a hollow affair, by definition. In discussing Lee, we would properly be able to discuss that weird low "walking/floating" shot he likes to do, but suddenly fall mute when he raises questions racial inequity. The medium deprived of the message. No bueno.

Yoda goes on to characterize the moral criticism of art as if this approach were the only "absolute" option stating, "I don't trust, or have a lot of time or use for, criticism that can't or won't do that. I find little value in criticism that can't sit with the (inevitable) uncomfortable intersection of 'this is a great work of art saying something I don't agree with.' Which treats art as if it's primary function is didactic."

What is the primary function of criticism?

What shall we say of criticism that absolutely refuses to consider content?

What shall we say of the criticism of Hitler's speeches and writing? Kenneth Burke took Hitler quite seriously as a critic and offered an analysis of Mein Kampf which was subtle, prophetic, and evaluative. Should Mr. Burke have restricted himself to studying the balance of Mr. Hitler's sentences, the balance of his themes, the ingenuity of his figuration? Or does content intermingle with form and form intermingle with content?

NOTE: It should be clear that our discussion is (or should be) quibbling a "both/and" and not an "either/or." Yes, we must be able to discuss art formally. Yes, we should also be able to discuss the message. I don't think anyone here is so extreme as to argue one to the absolute exclusion of the other. Therefore, the knotty problem is that of balancing the two.

I regret that I am not all that familiar with this case. I know that it is an achievement in Technicolor, that it has that spicy line, that it depicts African Americans in a way that triggers modern audiences. To be honest, however, I've never really seen it.

I would guess that audiences are triggered not just by the contingent historical depictions of African Americans (19th century racism depicted anthropologically), but rather by the implicit ontology of the film (the judgments of the capacities and dispositions of black people subtly assumed in mid-twentieth century racism). Thus, I am pretty confident that #3 is in the mix.

I think I disagree with this.
Art exists for art's sake. Art is "the message" and the reason and the value. Messages are extras, like getting peanuts on top of your milkshake. And they are the least interesting thing, usually, about worthwhile art, in my opinion. Probably just ahead of Story.
The thing worth "protecting" about art is the art and artistry.

Art, on your view, is self-contained and self-serving. It is mute, because the message is inessential. We can order a milkshake without peanuts, or peanuts without a milkshake. It does not exist for the audience, so it does not even qualify as communication. Therefore, art doesn't deserve 1st Amendment protection on reasons offered by your view. The protected part can, apparently, be segregated from the artwork, like peanuts. Simple. Convenient. Clear. Too simple.

This is the most "head up its own ass" definition of art conceivable. It attempts to dignify art by making it untouchable, elevating it above the fray. But this avowed transcendence severs art from the vitality of the great dynamic unending human conversation, the dance of expressivity, the remaking of culture, collective reflection and direction. It denies art its role as anything but an isolated singularity.

Content and form are not so easy to separate. We can speak of the two separately as a bare conception, but in practice they're hopelessly intermingled. One of the great difficulties of criticism (as has been frequently noted by critics and theorists) is the fundamental intersection between the two, their inseparability in the actual product. It's less like ingredients thrown in at the last second, like a cherry on top, and much more like intermixed aspects fundamentally fused in the baking of the cake. Thus, your preferred metaphor is fundamentally flawed.

The other day I walked down the street and saw a woman in enormous distress with her hands on her head screaming and pulling her own hair. I have no idea if she was speaking English, or total gibberish or if it was English but it was coming out in such a frenzied way it was incomprehensible. I have no idea if she was hoping anyone heard her, or if she was crying out for help. I had no idea what her message was, but I understood at least something about what she was trying to communicate on an emotional level, whether or not she wanted anyone else to understand. Whether or not she was speaking words or nonsense. Whether or not she even knew what she wanted to say or not. Maybe she didn't even know what was causing the distress. Or maybe it was something very specific that was getting her to yell and scream and kick at a garbage dumpster.


An hour later she was gone. Undoubtedly, someone called that she was disturbing the peace and she was taken away or told to leave. Or maybe she was taken to a hospital to get some kind of treatment because someone understood she was a person in need, and brought the people she needed to help her. Or....maybe after a few minutes of screaming, the fit was able to pass, and now she was eating a bagel in the coffee shop next door. Or maybe she just wandered off and was now screaming and pulling her hair somewhere else.


I don't know. But regardless of what I do or do not know about what she was trying to say, her not having a 'message' didn't mean she didn't have anything to say. Likewise, there is all sorts of art that we might not know specifically what it is saying because it will be too personal for any other person to ever entirely decode. But that doesn't stop it from having value. This doesn't mean they are saying nothing, or that it is an empty vessel. Maybe that makes it so the person who can only think to complain to the police about someone disturbing the peace feel better about ignoring everything else about the situation and just getting her to shut up and go away. But just because you might only be hearing a bunch of noise that you don't like, or doesn't make any sense to you, does not mean there is nothing to see here. That we can't go home and think about what we witnessed, or go back to her and try to understand more and see if something can be done, or have the incident get us to attempt to be more empathetic in the future.


Of course this analogy is crude and imperfect, and I already see the half dozen ways it's going to be picked apart for how you can't equate this kind of instance with art. And I agree, someone screaming on the street isn't art. But this is the genesis of where much art comes from, a feeling, a cause to action, a need to react to ones life experiences, and if someone were then to sit down and try and articulate this inarticulate rant onto a piece of paper, or canvas, or song, or film, not necessarily to make it more decipherable, but to represent an emotional state that they believe deserves to be preserved for some later, undetermined function, it's art.


We can complain that artists are just disappearing up their own asses if they create something that not everyone is going to understand, or more importantly, not everyone will even want to try to understand. But the way it always looks to me, is that we can also crawl pretty far up our own asses if we are always needing to strain for intellectual justifications for a piece of art to exist in the first place. It's an attempt to place academia above art, to make it the gatekeeper of what kind of expression is worthwhile, I guess because a lot of art (and emotion itself) exists in a space that can't help but make many branches of intellectualism feel deeply inferior. Dare I say, little more than a bunch of noise that some might call out as a pretentious wankfest. Sometimes not even half as valuable as a woman screaming and pulling her hair and too angry to even form proper words.

Well, I don't even know what kinda ignorant nonsense you're talking here. So since you insulted me on top of talking a bunch of clueless crap I'm just gonna ignore your gibberish and leave.

For you not having seen Gone With the Wind I think you called it correctly. GWTW does seem to fit your #3 I had to look up ontology, I'm not sure if I quite grasp the meaning even after reading some definitions. But yeah I'd guess that modern audiences are uncomfortable viewing the glamours universe of the rich white slave owners who live like royalty. *I'm sure people have other complaints of course too.
You should check out GWTW sometime.

I thought there were really no likable, noble or "good" characters in GWTW.
It's a story about mostly nasty people. The only truly good character seemed to be the lady who died (Olivia de Havilland).

Maybe the message is: war brings out the worst in people?

Thus, there was content. Emotional content is content. Nonverbal communication is communication. There was a "signal" you were able to detect. It was not all "noise." It was meaningful precisely because this event was NOT a walled off "thing in itself." Her humanity traversed a gap and you partook, however imperfectly and briefly, in her humanity through her expression. This isn't isolation. This is connection.
She may not have had an intended message, but the content aspect of the content / form divide was still present.

Likewise, art is a mode of expression. It is not a singularity. Art only exists because we exist. No human beings, no human art. No, art does not exist for itself. It exist because of and for us, human beings.

What it communicates is various (e.g., emotions, representations of life, the moral of the story). "Meaning" is much wider category than "plot summary" or "dictionary definition."

How it communicates it is generally conventional (otherwise we wouldn't have handy terms of art to describe meter, a tracking shot, a "beat).
It is a rare thing for a message to be perfectly decoded, but that doesn't stop it from being intelligible.
That's the beauty of art. It runs along the edge of the inexpressible. Quite often it fails. But when it succeeds, it circulates.
I only take exception to the artist who holds the audience in contempt on the grounds that their art exists for its own sake. Well, if so, why are you publicly displaying it and charging us to look at it or own it? Art that truly exists for its own sake, need not ever be publicly displayed (it does not serve the public, it does not exist for the public, it has nothing to express to the public).

Artists fear the judgment of the public. They fear being misunderstood and they fear negative judgment in such case that they are understood. The mantra is merely a bluster, a defense mechanism against this dissonance.
The only justification art needs to exist is the appreciation of some audience. Art is communal. Denying the communal nature of art is to deny it its essence (a mode of human expression) in the attempt to protect it from community judgment. Art connects us. It has something to say. That's why it is important. It is not important for being a private language or private universe or intrinsic singularity.
Well, I would be glad to join you in condemning such an academic.

I wasn't taking a shot at you personally, Wooley. My apologies for the ruffled feathers. If you didn't offer that definition as a direct rejoinder, someone else would have. You just have the bad luck of sharing a popular (bad, IMO) idea about art and expressing it in response to my post.

There are two signal errors that I see people make in the discussion of art.

One is to trivialize and relativize it to pure subjectivity. Art completely melts into an idiosyncratic response, making critical discussion impossible. "That's just like your opinion, man!"

The other is to Platonically objectify it, sanctifying it into a self-contained self-justifying singularity. The Virgin Mary, according to Catholic doctrine, ascended complete, body and soul, directly into heaven. The assumption of the artwork into a self-sustaining intrinsic value-object is even more of a conceit. The artwork transcends, body and soul, into a heaven of its own making; it defines its own value, it is its own criterion of correctness. This also makes critical discussion impossible. You either seem something which is self-evidently true (i.e., the intrinsic value) or you don't, which brings us right back to the problem of subjectivism.

The proper disposition towards an artwork is appreciation, but not to the point of elevating it into a holy relic. It's about getting the balance right. Announcing the work of art to be self-contained removes it from the dance. Art circulates in a dance of expressivity. It dances with us. We dance with it. And we sometimes step on each other's feet, but the action is on the dancefloor (not in being hoisted into the space occupied by a chandelier or spinning disco ball).

The post above is too long to cut and paste on my phone, so I'm just briefly touching on a couple of points....


So great, you recognize emotional content in a woman screaming. That means it has a message. But my point wasn't so much I wouldn't see a message there or even you wouldn't see a message there. The point is an awful lot of people would not, or would at least choose to not see it. They would view it as a person being a nuisance, or trying to get attention, or probably struggling over some little problem they should just get over already. And you know what people like that choose to do? Silence them, remove them, ignore them, discredit them, vilify them. Basically the exact same things people do when they are confronted with an artwork they don't understand or see the value in. They let their frustration with the work, and their assumptions about the artist, blind them to the very likely possibility there is something there they do not see. It's a view of art that tries to discredit anything that isn't speaking to them directly.


As for your issues with 'art for arts sake', first of all let's make it clear, you don't understand what this means. It doesn't mean that the art only speaks to itself. It means in the creation of it, the artist doesn't overtly concern themselves with how people will respond to it, or if they will even understand it. The hope is ALWAYS there that it might somehow speak to others. Maybe not everyone, but some. It doesn't only exist to make you feel pitiful and small and stupid, which is clearly how a lot of people take a lot of art that confuses them. If they can just believe it was all a big con, right from it's genesis, they can validate their hostility towards it. And this is what you do. Constantly. You don't know how to utilize your particular grab bag of talking points to justify its existence, so clearly, it just shouldn't exist. It's a deeply lame move.


But what makes this so frustrating, particularly with you, is that over the years you have all but admitted that you argue for arguments sake. You take things apart. Deconstruct them. Try and find new ways of talking about things. Get pedantic on little points if only to keep an argument going on any longer than most people think it should. And yet, with all of this argument for arguments sake you do, all of this deconstruction, all of these attempts to see a situation from different view points, you give your self credit for being a humanist. It's all in the pursuit of understanding people and the way they live and think in this world.


Well golly ****ing gee, if that isn't exactly the same thing you would never give a Duchamp or a Cage or a Warhol credit for (artists I am just assuming would attract your anti humanist scorn). As if these particular artists aren't also trying to play with theoreticals and deconstructiok and find different ways to understand man and his relation to both the natural world and the world man itself creates. You reject urinals in galleries, or soup cans on canvases, or musical auditoriums filled with silence because, you claim, by default they can't speak to people or their issues or emotional needs. Which is bollocks, since there are volumes of writing on any of these more extreme artists filled with testimonials of how their work fills all sorts of people with joy, and allows them to see the world in new and wonderful ways. That they elicit, you guessed it, emotions.


But not to you, so they should all just **** off. Don't deserve protection from freedom of speech. Are emotionally empty catacombs of cobwebby self wank. And boy oh boy won't you have reams and reams of references to things you found in textbooks over the years to prove how they are worthless. Paragraphs and paragraphs of how it's foolish to defend them or be moved by them. And that you're the real humanist here because...you've just written a whole bunch of paragraphs maybe three people on earth will ever read all the way through?


It's laughable.