87 Comments

1. Stan:

   Wow. Kudos to Malooga, and to De for bringing this one over. This is a very high-nutrient post. I want to add just a signpost on masculinity.

   De and I collaborated/discussed/unpacked the male violence of Man on Fire some time ago, and I included that bit as a section in Sex & War. We also had more than one exchange on how masculine violence (and violent potentiality) have morphed in response to the evolution of American capitalist patriarchy.

   One of those threads in our exchanges was related to my own intentionally provocative claim that “perfect” masculinity is indistinguishable from nihilist sociopathy. In the same way that our ecological universe is “advancing” in exponential step-changes toward the destruction of biospheric complexity, there is an analog in the universal association of violence with masculinity… In the execrable Man on Fire, we saw the portrayal — complete with sexual revenge themes that mapped directly onto Abu Ghraib — of male violence as what Walter Wink would call “the belief in redemptive violence.” In fact, the religious (and therefore moral) quackery of MOF at least attempted to ground its narrative in a familiar gendered moral convention. The writers and producers felt obliged to dress this shit up in morality, even if the Good Guys and Bad Guys were racially and nationally encoded (as in Coens’ film apparently) good-violent Americans versus bad-violent Mexicans.

   The kind of violence described in this review appears to have been more unabashed about violence for its own sake. That this VFIOS has been shifted from the creepy theatrical wrestling spectacles of WWF (or whatever they call it nowadays) enjoyed by proletarian males to the suites of Santa Monica “serious” film review crowd is a real indicator of just how decadent we have become as a culture.

   I just wish it wasn’t always an afterthought to talk about gender. I haven’t read all the comments on Louis’ blog, though I got a smattering from lurking at his Marxmail site; so I may be missing something.

   It goes without saying that the categories of race, class, nationality, gender, et al, exist in a mishmashed, mutually-recursive, and inextricable gestalt of some kind; but how does gender continue to come last? This real violence and its representation — “redemptive” or nihilisitic — in art and culture is above all masculine… masculine… masculine.

   10 February 2008, 7:55 am

2. Tom:

   There is a minor act of altruism in the film; when Moss returns to the crime scene with water for the dying Mexican. This act, more of an afterthought, is what sets off the action as it allows Moss to be tracked.

   11 February 2008, 1:26 pm

3. DeAnander:

   @tom — ah yes, the “no good deed goes unpunished” theme beloved of the anti-altruists. he attempts one act of kindness and look what happens… powerful propaganda against helping others…

   11 February 2008, 7:09 pm

4. stacia:

   ‘canuckistan’?
   can’t you just say Canada?

   11 February 2008, 10:39 pm

5. john steppling:

   This film is based on a Cormac McCarthy novel. I happen to think its among the top five or six novels in the last thirty years. The film is about as good an adaptation as one can find….but thats another story (adaptation to the screen). I found this book and film both to be expressions of the pathology of modern existence. One of the problems on the left is the reductionist reflex that demands art be *instructive*. Chigurh is, in a sense, the post modern demon (in the book is depicted as blue eyed and pale). The sheriff in the novel spends the last fourth of the book ruminating on his own complicity in the violence he ostensibly is trying to stop. He feels defeated by the savagery around him and wonders at the human condition. This is all dealt with in short hand in the case of the film….and that would bring up a complicated argument about film art that is not really to the point here. What *is* to the point is that writers such as Pinter, for example, or McCarthy, are not overtly political (or not often) but manage in their disruptive ways to force an awakening. It has obvious political point, on the surface, but it most certainly does as one digs deeper. Benjamin described Beckett as a more revolutionary writer than Brecht….by which he meant Brecht had overt political aims (great as they were) but Beckett had expressed something far more disturbing about the human condition. I read david walsh on this film over at wsws…..and Im a friend of david, but I think he got this film wrong too. Art isnt about instruction………its about a complex dialectic of forces …..and No Country for Old Men is stunning in its structure and in its resistance to formula. The violence seems, to my mind, to bear no relationship to a film like Man on Fire which is pure hollywood studio kitsch. This is anti kitsch. In the book Chigurgh leaves 3/4th of the way through. Its a strange departure for satan to make. The emptiness one feels is what McCarrthy has the sheriff talk about at the end of the novel. There is a scene in the book where the two boys, scared, help Chigurh…..its a terrifying scene for it suggests the seductivness of power and the ways in which domination work. In fact, contra to the above post, this is highly shakespearean film………McCarthy falls in line behind Melville and Shakespeare in a sense, and all of them follow the King James bible in terms of narrative tropes. Auerbach’s famous essay on Homer and the KJ bible suggests two basic narrative forms……epic and the mysterious…….and this is the mysterious, as was kafka, and as is Pinter. McCarthy is one america’s great artists. What he is saying is that shit happens, yes, and today the response afforded one in our endless society of the spectacle, is adumbrated and constricted somehow. The loss and failure of everyone in this narrative are deeply suggestive of the bedrock state of the modern psyche. I also wish to add that I dont see at all the racist implications here. I think its hard for one to sell that argument at all….its certainly not there in any McCarthy novel Ive read. A film like The Kingdom, on the other hand, is pure orientalism and racism….but not this.

   12 February 2008, 8:16 am

6. john steppling:

   follow up link to this review….of book…..

   http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=431

   12 February 2008, 8:27 am

7. Tom:

   DeAnder: Not necessarily. Moss goes back knowing full well the potential, even expected, consequences. “No good deed goes unpunished” is invoked as often by altruists and martyrs as by their opponents. Look at Christ on the cross, or more particularly Maloogas expectation of “getting our heads blown off.” The point is that you don’t perform good deeds for a reward (at least in this world) as that transforms altruism to mercenary self-interest.

   There is also an element of self-deception to Chigurh “personal integrity” and “moral code” which Kelly MacDonald’s character touches on in the end. She tells him that coinflip deciding whether he kills her is nonsense, it is he who decides, not the coin. The nihilism-as-fate of Chigurh and those like him is practiced and artificial. They impose this monstrous injustice then claim that it is inevitable and that they are detached from it. Her refusal to play along with this fake idea of fate, even at the cost of her own life is minor act of resistance, but resistance nonetheless.

   What’s more is that Chigurh himself seems to be aware of this self-deception on some level. In the scene at the gas station where he flips a coin for the clerk’s life, he ends by telling the clerk “don’t just put it in your pocket where it will become just another coin.” Pausing to add “Which it is.”

   The cliché of the remorseless killer with at personal code of honor isn’t to be accepted as correct anymore than the southern-fried homilies of the local sheriff.

   12 February 2008, 11:36 am

8. DeAnander:

   @stacia, sorry, just a feeble attempt to satirise the US right wing jargon; US rightwingnuts refer to Canada as “Canuckistan,” i.e. a communist province of the Soviet Empire. one of their many over-the-top bits of silliness. no offence meant, clearly the joke (which wasn’t all that clever) misfired.

   me, I am very glad to be in Canada. though it is getting more privatised and piratised under the Harper neocon gang as each month goes by, it’s still a kinder, less brutal and more thoughtful body politic than the current US.

   12 February 2008, 2:00 pm

9. john steppling:

   Well, it dissapoints me that the response here is so predictable. The complaint that no progressive voice is heard in the film, or book, is really the basic problem of leftist critics these days…..maybe always. Art is not here to lecture. Lectures do that fine, and essays. The questions McCarthy raises are about personal identity and the chain of relations in bougeoisie society that implicate everyone in the violence around us. The dialogue in the film (and the film has several big problems…..most clearly in how Chigurh is depicted) is straight from McCarthy, so to call it southern fried homilies suggests a rather bad ear on the part of the listener. Im curious what people here think of as good art these days? Im serious in this…….because for me McCarthy is perhaps, along with Pinter, the best living writer in English. The narrative reflects the world as it is, not as it should be. Thats not what art is meant to do. The pathologies of modern society, the inequalities and contradictions of advanced capital find expression in the wholesale sadism of these characters — and the sheriffs slowly dawning awareness of compassion and more importantly his own complicity. Alientation operates this way. Adorno certainly understood this about culture……as did Horkheimer and Marcuse. So the quote above is almost ironic given the comments so far.

   13 February 2008, 10:14 am

10. Andrew:

    What a wonderful, thoughtful and thought-provoking review. I will see, and probably enjoy the film, but still agree with the incisive comments about mass-produces stories. Upon the birth of our eldest, we cancelled cable access, for many of the reasons above. Both my mate and myself are devotees of Jerry Mander’s brilliant “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television”. Most people — of those who could actually juxtapose “television” and “elimination” in the same sentence– think the issue is content. Content can always be defended as there are enough exceptions to obscure the rule. The issue is mostly independent of content, though it is related to the homogenisation of content: what is the difference between CNN’s Iraq covergae and “Missing in Actio II”?
    As a fellow Soviet Canuckistanian (I embrace the moniker with pride) has said, the “medium is the message”.

    My fellow Canucks are unaware just how sinister Harper and his cronies are, largely due to the unambiguously cynical and corrupt nature of our “Liberal” alternative and an obedient corporate media. Imagine Bush with brains, drive and less checks and balances and you get the picture.

    I believe that our version of your Democrats (Liberals) are more self-serving and hypocritical than yours. True, we do have a leftish, quasi-credible alternative, but it functions mostly as a vote sponge for disaffected voters, though the NDP usually gets enough seats to marginally soften the tone of national debate.

    Harper’s trolling for a majority and he just might get one. We will have deserved it, most of us, thought the Afghans won’t have.

    13 February 2008, 1:44 pm

11. Louis Proyect:

    Steppling: “The narrative reflects the world as it is, not as it should be. Thats not what art is meant to do.”

    But it does not reflect the world as it is. The indigenous people in “Blood Meridian” have no humanity. For me, it is like reading a novel about the Nazis killing Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto which puts them on the same plane. It is a deeply offensive theme, not to speak of the awful, overwritten language. It is like reading “Mein Kampf” written as a University of Iowa writers workshop submission.

    15 February 2008, 6:17 pm

12. DeAnander:

    Steppling: “The narrative reflects the world as it is, not as it should be. Thats not what art is meant to do.”

    I was thinking about this contention, which is routinely invoked by everyone from pornographers to propagandists — er, what am I saying? by pornographers and other propagandists — to claim that their work is not propaganda, but is somehow “objective” (ah, the good ol’ Objectivity meme).

    Here I’m inclined to quote (or misquote) D Jensen: “every writer is a propagandist — including me.” every piece of literature is a kind of propaganda in the sense that it has been filtered repeatedly through authorial, editorial, and publishers’ agendas.

    C McCarthy chooses — in the tradition of H Ellison and other horrormongers of the literary world — to focus narrowly on what is worst and most brutal in the human condition. except for a less absurdly clunky prose style I am not sure how far different he is from a Bret Easton Ellis.

    at any moment in time, the human race is busy committing atrocities and cruelties, and also, maybe right next door, committing acts of great courage and altruism. the first act of non-objectivity is the choice, from among an infinite number of historical or contemporary subjects, of a particular story to tell. it could be the story of the Chiapas uprising or the Mondragon co-ops or the Maquis. or it could be the story of a Mafia family or a serial killer. a decision has to be made, and someone makes it.

    what narrative the writer chooses to narrate, and whom he chooses as protagonist, is relevant; it serves the writer’s agenda, it demonstrates the writer’s position, it is not “objective.” even an allegedly fact-based book like one of Junger’s (The Perfect Storm was his big hit), or a biography, still serves the author’s intent and presents us with a moral-of-the-story which is meant to instruct us.

    when people hotly claim that Art need not and should not represent a moral agenda, they forget Zinn’s dictum that you can’t be neutral on a moving train art is not reality; it is a highly filtered cartoon of reality, and that cartoon is always a political cartoon, one way or another. the story, and the moral the story tells, will always be pointed and selective. it will humanise some characters and dehumanise others, internalise some points of view and externalise others, tell us that some things are believable and some things are unrealistic, some things are possible and some things are not, some behaviours are rewarded and some are punished.

    and it will tell us what matters in every line and paragraph: the choice of narrative, cast, which interactions are described in full and which are left in the background, which objects and artifacts and settings are described and how they are described, will tell us repeatedly (whacking us over the head repeatedly with, in fact) what the author thinks is important and relevant and therefore, by mirror neurons or whatever mechanism you want to blame or credit, what we as the reader will — temporarily — also accept as important and relevant for the duration of our suspension of disbelief and our immersion in the experience. if the book is a very powerful one, or if we have a habit of reading in a specific genre with consistent narrative rules (boyshit suspense/adventure, for example, or girly supermarket romances), the repeated messaging about what is important and what is not important may eventually become permanent programming. and isn’t that what propaganda aims at?

    when this is done flagrantly and clumsily, especially in service of an agenda that may not even be the writer’s own (i.e. paid PR flacks, professional black-ops myth-makers, and other salaried liars and spinners) we do call it propaganda — and sneer at it. when it’s done flagrantly and clumsily in earnest service of a worthy moral agenda, like tediously predictable “racial reconciliation” movies or quaint Victorian or Edwardian morality tales for the kiddies, we also sneer at it a bit and call it preachy; sermonising often spoils a good story, at least if you’re an adult (kids can probably overlook, for example, the heavy handed Christian symbolism of C S Lewis’s kid-books, but for an adult reader it gets to be a bit much after a while).

    but when the sermonising or preachiness upholds an agenda that we are not allowed to name (like, say, heteronormativity or male supremacy or capitalism or neodarwinism) it passes for “objective” just because our literary feelers aren’t calibrated to scan the bar code on the agenda; we come up against a Laingian void — the Unmarked Category — be it neoliberalism or masculinism or US exceptionalism or whatever, and have to resort to unfamiliar “left-specific” jargon, clumsy locutions, and “argh can’t quite put my finger on it” unease to identify it.

    imho there is an established ideology of despair regarding the human condition; nihilism, cynicism, anomie, whatever you want to call it. and it has a powerful literature of propaganda conveying the moral lesson that life is meaningless, people are stupid and cruel, everyone is our for him/herself, no one can be trusted, the most you can hope for is to grab some bling while the grabbing is good. this moral lesson greatly serves the imperial/capitalist system… first, it defines ugly, greedy, grabby, and violent criminal behaviour as perfectly normal and only to be expected — indeed, as all that is possible or reasonable; next, it defines altruism, loyalty, compassion, and so forth as unrealistic, fictional, mythical, not to be attempted or expected in the “real” world (else the attempter will meet with severe negative consequences); third, it seeks to instil despair and a loathing for our fellow humans, just as flagrantly and overtly as chirpy feel-good kiddie stories seek to instil hope or good dental hygiene or kindness to elders. it is essentially a propaganda for the normalisation of sociopathy, and in a sociopathic and elitist economic and political regime it is — predictably — a preferred and encouraged literary and artistic form.

    above all, superaccumulator elites (whether they be pharaohs or kings or CEOs) need to convince the people that another world is NOT possible: that justice is a chimera, loyalty and commensality are a pathetic delusion, there is nothing to be done and nothing to hope for or strive towards. the literature of despair serves this agenda well.

    literature that blissfully denies the potential wickedness of human behaviour is no more preachy or biased or unrealistic than literature that denies the potential goodness of human behaviour. the literary school of the Unrelentingly Grim and Ugly (not to be mistaken for the Cautionary Tale as in Swift or Sinclair) should not be accepted passively, w/o critique, as some kind of objective form outside politics and ethical discourse; it is a sermon in its own right, just a sermon for a different creed.

    much of contemporary pornography is, I would say, the distilled essence of the nihilistic school of literature, w/o any highbrow pretensions to cloak the sermon: it openly celebrates cruelty, greed, and hatefulness, and expressly denies that any sexual relations other than instrumentality and exploitation are possible.

    and now we get to the big weaselly area: under what circumstances is a deeply dystopian, grim, dour, and hopeless piece of literature a cautionary tale, i.e. a warning against the worst excesses of our human nature, rather than a normalisation of them? satirists and cautionary fabulists have often been accused in their day of undermining moral fibre, being too shocking, too graphic, too negative, stripping away the decencies that make human society bearable. was e.g. Lord of the Flies a cautionary tale, or just a cry of despair? I’m not enough of a lit crit to pinpoint the distinctions but I would say that in most cautionary tales there is at least one character or group of characters who represent the other world that is possible, i.e. altruism, decency, kindness. they may or may not “win” (the story could have a happy or tragic ending) but they do exist and their moral qualities are not derided as illusory (though they may not be sufficient to carry the day).

    I’ve got a relevant quote or two somewhere around here…

    This one will do…
    

    What encourages me in this process is the “delight” that I take in the human struggle. Delight in mankind [sic] — that was the idea launched or rather relaunched in the twelfth century by the forces of humanism as they woke society from its Dark Ages.

    The Roman poet, Terence, had said long before: “I am human and nothing human is foreign to me.” It was an attitude the humanists embraced in what they saw as a struggle between delight and self-loathing — delight in your fellow man and woman, sympathy for them; in other words, a sense of society.

    — J R Saul, The Unconscious Civilisation, peroration of ‘The Great Leap Backwards’.

    I could pick quite a few nits here; the glorification of the Enlightenment and the glib dismissal of a very rich and varied historical period as “Dark Ages”, for one. A big dose of Eurocentrism, for seconds… but JRS imho is onto something in his analysis of the difference between a stance of loathing for one’s fellow human beings, and one of delight and/or sympathy. We will not build a society of sharing and mutual aid if we believe that none of the people around is is decent or deserving of help, that they are all a bunch of greedy dirty ratfinks. The very concept of “society” (the very existence of which neolibs like Margaret Thatcher openly denied) presupposes a kind of mutual regard, interest, and trust for our fellow human beings.

    so (winding up this overlong comment at last) I agree with Malooga’s analysis that literature/movies which present us (people) as uniformly self-interested and/or helplessly trapped in structures which prohibit the expression of our human sympathies and empathies are — whether expressly intended to be or not — a very effective propaganda for the new right and the new corporate/financial aristocracy.

    15 February 2008, 7:24 pm

13. Richard:

    I agree with most everything you say here, DeAnander, except I think this movie is quite excellent. There’s an argument to be made that what we see in the movie are different views of masculinity–none of which “work”. And, for one example where I differ with the interpretations of the film given above, I think that, though the movie sympathizes with Sheriff Bell, it doesn’t subscribe to everything he believes or says. Proyect says this in his review: “At one point, Bell tells a colleague that everything started going downhill when young people began to dye their hair green and put spikes through their noses.” This is true. He does say this. But there is no reason to think that this is the movie’s perspective, even if Bell serves as something of a conscience in it. I think there are other complexities in the movie that are missed by what I see here as a rather reductive political response (even one that I’m extremely sympathetic to).

    Malooga says “Yes, the cinematography and the production values were top-notch, but one expects that from any Hollywood film, and has for a long time.” Hollywood movies evince a lot of skill wasted on garbage. Praise of the Coens for this film is not for that kind of basic skill. It is for how they use visual elements to tell their story, a talent which is largely lacking in your basic Hollywood movie.

    With respect to John Steppling’s remark that art is about how things are, not how they should be–I used to hold pretty strenuously to similar views, and I like what DeAnander says in response. But I think art that does not send the kind of message I would prefer can still be “great”. Great art can still have inadvertent (or even intentional) negative propagandistic value. I’m reminded of Edward Said, and his cultural criticisms: he was discussing art he felt to be great, but art which depended on a certain worldview/condition to be produced, and also reinforced that worldview/condition.

    16 February 2008, 9:50 am

14. john steppling:

    well, let try to answer a few things here……though I may not to get all your points DeAnander.
    First…I never used the word *objectivity* — nor would I. So, I think the very notion of realism or naturalism or objectivity is specias when applied to any cultural artifact. You seem to be criticizing McCarthy for what he chooses to focus on. That seems to be a rather pointless undertaking. *He* wrote about what he chose to write about — thats his vision, and not yours. Now, you can argue that what he chose to focus on is irrelevant or meaningless — but I would argue the contrary. In fact, given another week of school shootings, more bloodshed in the name of western superiority — the imperialist expandsionist project— a book like No Country for Old Men (I will get to the film version in a second) resonates rather profoundly. Now, if you are suggesting, as you seem to be, that an artist *should* choose a morally uplifting protagonist, then I think you would have to deny most of Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Flannery O Connor, Beckett and Genet and Pinter. So, clearly art would tends to, historically, focus on the failures and weaknesses of man, of the human condition. Beckett said once *failure is more interesting than success*. In any case, its not hard to find countless very negative progtagonists….killers, liars, weaklings, traitors, and collaborators. Are you actually suggesting these works are all to be discounted for this reason?

    Now, next, you seem to be saying that a McCarthy (and i guess shakespeare and Dante and Kafka and Mann etc) are ideologists of nihilism. Correct me if Im wrong here, but I would argue art is not about moral instruction — if it were we would have a very different literary canon than we do. Maybe you think that would be a good thing, I dont know. Adorno said cynicism is just another mode of conformity. So it is, but i see nothing cynical in McCarrthy, in fact I see a highly moral writer….same as Melville and O Connor and Sophocles for that matter. WE might profitably introduce the idea of what is tragedy at this point. But first……art that focuses on what is wrong does not need to provide *solutions*……and second, most importantly, a Cormac mccarthy or a Flannery o Conner or a Melville do NOT instill self loathing and apathy in people. This is just a very wrong headed idea and Im almost at a loss as to how to explain the many ways in which it is wrong. Your logic would demand we have *happy endings* and positive clearly defined moral lessons. This is usually how one can describe bad art. Its afterschool specials and its cheap best seller bromides. Your basic hollywood romantic comedy is what instills loathing…..and anomie…..because IT LIES!!!!!!!!!!!!! Life is not like that…….for me life is a great deal closer to the world of McCarthy. Art is there to awaken people and to do that art must disrupt and subvert expectations —- and it cannot do those things by telling polyanna stories about noble and altruistic do gooders. Life is tragic….as the buddhists say, it IS suffering. It is short and brutal (as someone else said :)) And so I would suggest the exact opposite of your conclusion. You may or may not think McCarthy is a good or great writer…..thats a good discussion, but what you are arguing in the above comment is a confused and reductive notion of how art operates. i would even say undialectical. Tragedy, to return to that idea, is the flip side of comedy…..hence those greek masks….they contain each other…..Beckett certainly saw that……….but shakespeare as well….and all of these notions evolve through time. We dont relate to greek tragedy as the greeks did….clearly, because of our notion of civic responsibility etc…..but we still to some degree feel close to Shakespeares. After WW1 aned the industrialized death of the western front and then Hiroshima, the anonymous death of air warfare……our notion of sacrifice and tragedy is altered….in complex ways. Its not nearly as simple as you would like it to seem. I have little interest in *cautionary tales* for they are usually bad art. They are simplistic and reductive. Good art and good books and films are always about many things….they raise questions and demand engagement…….and are often not pretty and are usually disturbing. McCarthy is always disturbing….but for me is a truthful writer and he writes of a world I see everyday…the brutality of advanced capital.

    16 February 2008, 3:17 pm

15. john steppling:

    two other quick thoughts. I want to make clear that there is indeed good art about noble self sacrifice. But the reason we narrative to each other….that man tells stories at all……seems to be to ask questions ,and drama is a by-product of story….and drama comes from conflict…….so conflict is usually in some way at the center of all this. Resolution of conflict cannot be told dishonestly. One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest for example is a tragic story, but an uplifiting one…..and maybe its a bit too positive in the end….one could argue that……..still, the system of oppresion continues to function in that novel….the big *indian* (sic) escapes….but the rest of the patients remain….perhaps altered and perhaps not. What i see is mass media and hollywood changing even this sort of fiction where you have a film like Girl Interrupted where the system is *helpful * and careing…….whoopi goldberg is the good Nurse Rachet…….not the oppresser and not the life negative force. So, indeed the entertainment industry turns out material in support of their knee jerk beliefs….class division and on and on and on……but its perhaps even more crucial then to spot the authentic voice when it appears !! Because things do tend to get more reactionary all the time.

    16 February 2008, 3:28 pm

16. Louis Proyect:

    Cormac McCarthy’s studious refusal to spell out what he thinks about society, politics, etc. is rather clever. It allows a whole Cormac McCarthy cottage industry to sprout up in academia providing grist for the journal/conference mill. Melville, who McCarthy is inexplicably linked to (it is rather like linking John Philip Sousa to Beethoven), was never coy about telling people what he thought about society, politics, etc.

    —

    While Herman Melville never achieved the sort of superstar status of Dickens or Twain, he too attempted a career as a public lecturer. Part of his repertory was a talk on the South Seas. Although the full text is not extant, we do have notes from a “phonographist” from the Baltimore American newspaper on February 8, 1859.

    Melville recounts Balboa’s discovery of the South Seas: “The thronging Indians opposed Balboa’s passage, demanding who he was, what he wanted, and whither he was going. The reply is a model of Spartan directness. ‘I am a Christian, my errand is to spread the true religion and to seek gold, and I am going in search of the sea.’”

    Melville wonders if the Europeans will begin to tour the charming isles of the South Seas? His reply:

    “Why don’t the English yachters give up the prosy Mediterranean and sail out here? Any one who treats the natives fairly is just as safe as if he were on the Nile or Danube. But I am sorry to say we whites have a sad reputation among many of the Polynesians. They esteem us, with rare exceptions, such as some of the missionaries, the most barbarous, treacherous, irreligious, and devilish creatures on the earth. It may be a mere prejudice of these unlettered savages, for have not our traders always treated them with brotherly affection? Who has ever heard of a vessel sustaining the honor of a Christian flag and the spirit of the Christian Gospel by opening its batteries in indiscriminate massacre upon some poor little village on the seaside–splattering the torn bamboo huts with blood and brains of women and children, defenseless and innocent?”

    The final paragraphs are the phonographist’s own words and it is too bad that we don’t have Melville’s. They deal with the colonization of the South Sea islands:

    “The rapid advance, in the externals only, of civilized life was then spoken of, and the prospect of annexing the Sandwich Islands to the American Union commented on, with the remark that the whalemen of Nantucket and the Westward ho! Of California were every day getting them more and more annexed.

    “The lecturer closed with an earnest wish that adventurers from our soil and from the lands of Europe would abstain from those brutal and cruel vices which disgust even savages with our manners, while they turn an earthly paradise into a pandemonium. And as for annexations he begged, as a general philanthropist, to offer up an earnest prayer, and he entreated all present to join him in it, that the banns [public announcements] of that union should be forbidden until we had found for ourselves a civilization moral, mental, and physical, higher than the one which has culminated in almshouses, prisons, and hospitals.”

    full: http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/indian/melville.htm

    16 February 2008, 6:12 pm

17. john steppling:

    and what is your point louis? You continue to make this same argument…..which is that artists MUST state clearly their politics…..this is simply sophmoric thinking….because i could site you a hundred great works of literature in which the author remains silent on political and social issues….at least directly silent. Your demand seems deeply confused…..and while you can argue against mccarthy, you cannot demand he do what YOU think he should — and lets also remember, as Adorno was quick to point out repeatedly, that there are huge numbers of great right wing or even fascist artists. Are we to discount Ezra Pound’s poetry because of his politics? Bresson was a devout christian and a great filmaker….but did he ever address politics directly? no. What to do with him? I guess he has no importance then, according to you. Diego Rivera had leftist politics, mark rothko didnt…..and so what? Rivera’s politics mediated his work, but for Rothko and Bresson, it was mystical and religious. Are they inferior because of it? Goya was political in all senses of the word, but Velasquez was not. Both are geniuses to my mind. Genet was a defender of palestinians….but once said, if they were to get their own country he was done with them, for he was against all nations. He has anarcho-nihilist. Bill Burroughs? Strange politics, no? Great writer to my mind. I could go on and on and on. You have even stated on your own site that two of your favorite writers are reactionaries (Waugh, go figure, and Naipaul)…….so one senses some confusion in this last comment. Someone mentioned Edward Said……whose books on orientalism are hugely important. He was quite quick to point out his love of Dickens…..who he also saw as a de-facto colonialist (one might argue that, but thats not the point). You have only these strange ad hominum arguments, Louis….that McCarthy is bad because he writes bad prose……thats a meaningless comment. What Melville thought about the english in the south seas is interesting and to his credit…..as was Conrad’s anti imperialism…..but conrad also had a few blind spots. What of it? Is Nostromo a lesser book for it? Or Lord Jim?

    17 February 2008, 3:16 am

18. john steppling:

    let me add for the sake of clarification that in one sense ALL art is political. Benjamin thought beckett more revolutionary than brecht despite the former never talking directly about political or social issues. Still, his work resonated in political ways. I would argue the same for McCarthy. What is NOT political is the kind of fatuous bland crap turned out by studios these days. Sit coms on TV, American Idol, or things like Man on Fire (since that was refrenced here) or Lord of the Rings…..the list is endless…..these are the cultural product who purpose is to keep people asleep and distracted. They are good for business, for when you leave the cineplex after Welles Othello, you dont feel like shopping….nor after No Country for Old Men in my opinion. After Spiderman, more distraction seems in order……so people go buy some new trainers. Art should be difficult and demand reflection. If it does that then it contains a political element.

    17 February 2008, 3:37 am

19. Stan:

    I haven’t seen this film. But as to the canon being filled with people who express no point of view on moral questions, let me review the bidding on those I know something about.

    Hat tip to my professor-past Frank Reuter who sometimes lurks here. He instructed me in the intricacies of Beowolf, Chaucer, and Shakespeare; and lo and behold they did express points of view — very conservative ones — that were abslolutely reflective of the dominant court episteme of their times.

    Melville’s opus is a biblical allegory. Toni Morrison and Nadine Gordimer are deeply political writers. Elliot described the alienation of modernism very well, then injected a reactionary solution of Order into his work.

    When Rockefeller fired Diego Rivera, his call to action after the conflict settled was to encourage “color and form” neutrality as the New Cool in art.

    For that matter, Man on Fire is pretty political, as we explained, coming as it did in the middle of a public controversy about the use of torture, with an advocacy of torture sanctioned by God.

    The inescapable politics of any cultural production — especially stories — is that stories serve a critical purpose in our cultural formation by telling us how to be. Not merely reflecting reality — whatever that is — but formative of culture and therefore even of personality. This moral dimension of art cannot be abracadabraed away by liberal appeals to 1st Amendment (not saying that is an argument by anyone here) that shift premises. This confronts art with responsibility, in the existential sense expressed by Camus and others, whether artists choose to accept it or not.

    At some point, when it comes out on disc, I’ll see this film (no way am I paying $11 for a cinema ticket right now. $22 if Sherry and I go together). Then I can revisit this issue as it pertains to NCFOM. But I’d actually like to see a discussion of, say, Lord of the Rings; because this is the stuff that a jillion people have watched — often again and again — and it is formative; and by unpacking it in a public discussion using interpretive POVs that are not yet available to many of those jillions, we stand a chance of getting into their heads… and they into ours.

    That’s political.

    17 February 2008, 8:01 am

20. john steppling:

    stan…..my point is that the political dimension in any cultural artifact or product does not have to come through (and usually doesnt) the top text (as it were). Art is always reflective of its time, and I certainly have never suggested otherwise, in fact quite the opposite. But, and this is the crucial point, that work of art is mediated in other ways as well. But when you say critical *purpose* I would suggest one has to be careful with that word *purpose*. This raises a germane question about the role of culture in general. I teach at a film school, so I often wonder at what exactly art institutions are trying to do. In my case I suspect the real drive is to produce directors for Lexus commercials and polish daytime soap operas. But can institutions ever be other than that? The institution will never support an artist too critical of said institution. The dissenting voice is always marginalized. Now, i also thought i made clear that I wasnt saying art was only there to reflect reality — only that it wasnt there solely to tell us how to be either. It must try to tell the truth — a loaded comment I admit. —- But it does many things…..and Shakespeare is a good deal more than a relfection of the assumptions behind monarchy — if he even is that. Is Lear ONLY about the court episteme? I would suggest most definetely not. So, a Lord of the Rings is worth looking at because its wildly popular….and because there is really NO sub text and because it functions as a piece of kitsch nostalgia and apologia for class division and kingship. I see in this entire new wave of harry potter knock offs a nostalgia (manufactured) for colonial white hegemony. A Cormac McCarthy is to my mind a moral writer who addresses many of the basic social linkages in capitalism and the psychological deterioration under same. He is also a near religious writer. Thats all up for debate….but my objection is treat art reductively. If No Country for Old Men relfects much of the bigotry and narrowness, and more importantly the suffering of modern america….or post viet nam america in this particular case….then that is a valid choice. To complain it doesnt do other things is like complaining that Velasquez didnt paint the poor as Goya did. He didnt, but he did something else that also has validity.
    As for rivera and rockefeller…..that is true, but it doesnt mean a Mark Rothko or DeKooning are unimportant. Or even that they are not political. This leads me back to my question about what role culture is supposed to play in a society. In *this* society lets say. Adorno and Horkheimer set the terms that still apply it seems to me when they began to address mass entertainment and media, as did Benjamin too. Studio corporate products, which includes the film version of NCFOM, is more worth pondering than to field accusations that mccarthy hasnt done this or that. McCarthy like all artists focuses on what concerns him. I have argued he is an important writer. Others dont think so. But I dont think you can wave him away because he isnt overtly instructive of the values we agree with. I think he does express those in an interesting way. But there is, for me anyway, a lurking topic here having to with ANY studio product because there are labor issues behind it and because sometimes, as Godard often wondered about, all film in cineplex context contains something that supports the master discourse. Godard suggested that a close up of a face on a 40ft screen is inherently authoritarian. I wonder if there isnt truth in this.

    17 February 2008, 9:14 am

21. DeAnander:

    I suppose it’s completely apolitical that — unless I’ve missed something — every author cited by Steppling as “great” is male and many are notorious misogynists? but then, I suppose many female writers don’t decribe the world as Steppling “knows” that it is, so their art doesn’t count as “real”. or maybe reading books by girls is too sissy

    17 February 2008, 11:12 am

22. john steppling:

    no deanander, not all of them were men…..Flannery o connor is a woman. You see how stupid you make yourself look. Im trying to discuss things and Ive been quite civil. Now you start insulting me……but really, do you think your comments are serious in this context? If you dont want discussion, you should really just announce, *total agreement required* and I wouldnt bother. This is an important topic DeAnander….IMHO. Culture matters — adorno said, as maybe Ive already quoted, that fascism came to germany as a result (in good part)of the destruction of education. This is a patriarchy…..western civilization has been such….and Im not sure who was a mysogynist and who wasn’t….by your reckoning….but you seem quite keen on knowing the cheap bios of these artists rather than the works … but this desire for agreement does you no credit. Maybe try to answer my arguments. A better strategy I would think. The history of western culture is, alas, largely documented by men…..this is worth keeping in mind all the time…..but it also doesnt mean there is a reason to not discuss male writers. And for the record, a number of the people Ive cited were marginalized in other ways….by sexual prefrence, poverty, race etc. But again, insults are the province of those without any game.

    17 February 2008, 11:41 am

23. xenia:

    Just because someone is in the cannon, it does not make them an artist (even a good, albeit reactionary one). Winston Churchill got a Nobel Prize for literature, for chrissake!

    Very significantly, there are cultural differences. Burroughs to me is barely an artist, but that’s because his experience and his mode of expression do not resonate with me at all. To be more blasphemous, Mozart never meant anything to me. The much-vaunted clarity of his music I tend to find in other traditions.

    Sure, I like to think that art is on some level transcendental and universal, it can be healing, shared by all and so on. Yet, we are also formed in our taste by what we are exposed to. In that sense too, art is political, because that is a political decision. My parents’ generation love Mexican music, because that got a lot of play in the 1950s, instead of US music. But look at people who grew up in the 1960s, when cultural politics changed — it’s all Beatles and they would not think of Mexican music.

    17 February 2008, 1:44 pm

24. xenia:

    Also, as a European and Yugoslav who does Latin American studies, I seriously doubt that there is such a thing as western culture…sometimes it seems to be a very American concept, invented to disassociate from the stolen Native American lands and the strong African presence. Western culture is mostly a fantasy.

    It’s quite known most western Europeans are disappointed with modern Greeks…but that’s because they think Greece is next door to England. It’s not!!

    Only since the “war on terror” do you get that term a lot in Europe. Incidentally, this is where Adorno does fail, as brilliant as he is in writing about “culture industry” (because he does not understand folklore, blues, flamenco… at all).

    17 February 2008, 1:52 pm

25. Stan:

    I’ve actually sidestepped the NCFOM debate; and wasn’t debating at all (at least by intent). My observations were simply about the inescapability of politics in art.

    As to Lear, of all the plays by the bard, that one is imo the most consistently epistemic of its day, almost unadulteratedly so. Deeply, deeply religious in the very way that medieval Catholicism was still carried as content into the stylistic revolutions of the Renaissance. Lear’s ranting in the storm on the heath is an almost essential rendering of the belief that the gravest sin of all is despair, slid into along the slipperly slope of pride. Blaspheming that “Man’s life’s as cheap as beasts” is not mere metaphorical language; this has a very precise and (then) well-understood doctrinal meaning that is nested into a strict cosmology, complete with chains of being and celestial spheres that make music. Cordelia as representative of Virtue (also called naturalness) is almost a carciature.

    [another hat tip to Dr. Reuter’s classes some 33 years ago]

    17 February 2008, 1:58 pm

26. john steppling:

    Stan……i feel like I must not be communicating my points here. I said Lear was not JUST about its moment in time……but it is, indeed, expressed through the prism of the time….although I think I would argue with Dr Reuter about the heath speech. Jan Kott’s interpetation in his great book Shakespeare Our Contemporary is to the point here. Kott was a pole and came to shakespeare via translation. His was a very political reading of those plays — in the light of communism at that time, and he saw the mad tom/Gloucester scene as the precursor to Beckett and inherently theatrical in modern terms. But I digress…any art work is political….i think i said this already……ANY art work…..the question is do we interpret it superficially as one dimensional *instruction* or dialectically — .

    Allow me to quote Kott on King Lear;
    “only the Fool stands outside and does not follow any ideology. He rejects all appearances; of law , justice, moral order. He seeks brute force, cruelty, lust. He has no illusions and does not seek consolation in the existence of natural or supernatural order, which provides the punishment of evil and the reward of good. Lear, insisting on his fictitious majesty seems ridiculous to him. All the more ridiculous because he does not see how ridiculous he is. But the Fool knows that the only true madness is to regard this world as rational. The feudal order is absurd, and can be described only in terms of the absurd.”

    So, its tragedy performed by clowns….like Beckett. Shakespeare is of his time…and reflects it, but he is a great writer because he is also beyond his time.

    17 February 2008, 3:19 pm

27. James M:

    For the record, I saw and did not like No Country For Old Men … but not for philosophical reasons. It simply has to do with the fact that the amount of cold-blooded murder packed into that film far exceeds my recommended daily intake. Other people seemed able to handle it; I came away nauseated. Also, Tommy Lee Jones’ folksy philosophical soliloquizing struck me as a little, ummm … inauthentic.

    But I read an interview recently with the Coens where they described their movie as a “horror film,” and something clicked. Somehow, situating the film within a genre took away some large chunk of its objectionable-ness. A genre has certain rules, designed to create a certain tone, evoke a certain mood which is the signature of the genre. And no, this does not exempt the film from political / philosophical considerations and criticism; but it gives a better sense of what the filmmakers were out to accomplish, and whether they achieved it … and to me, at least, it makes going to certain extremes, as the Coens did here, more acceptable. They set out to create a mood, and they succeeded — it just happens not to be a mood I like to be in for two hours. Sky-high body counts do not translate into my preferred idea of horror, for whatever reason.

    I haven’t read McCarthy, so I can’t speak to his intentions, but I can envision the Coens, as artists, saying “Let’s make a horror film” … which, of course, being the Coens, won’t conform to conventional notions of the genre, but could still fit within the general rubric. In their case, they use a philosophical premise — that no good deed goes unpunished, that greed is the primary human motivation, trumping compassion more often than not … that far from there being some cosmic lawgiver in the sky dispensing justice, there’s merely random chance, that the vicissitudes of our fates are really just the outcomes of rolling dice, or more precisely in this case, the flip of a coin — and use that premise to inspire horror, because that is the tone they’re setting. And really, what could be more horrific than that premise? I don’t think they necessarily need to believe in it to make the movie.

    I agree with Stan that stories have the effect of creating or reinforcing a larger cultural narrative, and that we often tell stories, consciously or not, for that reason — but also, I think sometimes we simply tell stories to scare the shit out of each other. Been doing it for as long as we’ve been around, as far as I can tell. Perhaps in Louis P.’s world, there isn’t room for such trivialities — perhaps every story, to be worthwhile, must reflect and help advance The Struggle. And that’s fine with me. But in my world, a good horror story is its own justification.

    And, as I said, these films are still fair game for criticism. I will criticize the modern slasher film, for example, to no end for its misogyny and its revelry in cruelty. These films have been better termed “torture porn,” which I agree with. It’s quite a different story, though, when a film seeks to portray violence as something to be titillated by, as in these films, versus when it’s appropriately situated within a context of horror and revulsion … as I feel it was in NCFOM.

    Speaking to whether we must agree with an author’s politics to enjoy their work — I’m a big fan of the stories of Paul Bowles, which often tread the landscape of horror, however unconventionally. His signature work is “The Sheltering Sky,” which, much like NCFOM, uses a philosophical premise — in this case, “existence-precedes-essence” existentialism — to propel his narrative. His story of westerners in an alien wasteland is driven by the premise that we are, underneath our enculturated veneer of civility, mere wild animals operating on instinct … and that this veneer is much like the blue sky above us, just an illusion protecting us from the ultimate horror, which is the Void which surrounds us and lies at the core of our beings. Now, being someone with a rather mystical bent, I couldn’t disagree more with this premise. And yet, I will unhesitatingly recommend this to anyone as one of the best novels I’ve ever read, and I resonate with it in ways that, years later, I’m still trying to find words to explain. Go figure.

    Another of his short stories, “The Delicate Prey,” is of such a short length and minimalist style that it may actually be almost devoid of any detectable philosophical perspective … what it is, however, is a damned good horror story. It has no redeeming positive social value that I can tell; it paints no ennobling picture of humanity. But it is damn sure Art, a beautiful thing to behold.

    On a side note, I was troubled to read Mr. Steppling throwing out the word “stupid” in reference to DeAnander. Aside from being obviously a completely ridiculous characterization, which tends to reflect more upon the person doing the characterizing, it’s also troubling in terms of the timing of its use, right after De makes the first mention (as I can recall) of misogyny in this conversation. If, as I suspect, this timing is more than coincidental, it would seem to be just another example of lefty-boy emotional backlash against any mention of feminism. I mean damn, De sure does have this annoying habit of failing to submissively agree with every male opinion on this site, but you don’t have to go calling people names. And John, weren’t you the one throwing out charges of “ad hominum” [sic] attacks earlier?

    Echoes of Kathy Sierra …

    17 February 2008, 3:22 pm

28. john steppling:

    james….Ive been nothing but civil until DeAnander suggested I was excluding woman writers because it was too *sissy*. I said such remarks made him look stupid……which I maintain it does. But perhaps you need to re read that exchange. First, he was factually incorrect and second rude and snide. I was not. I responded to his attack on me….and really, I think in a pretty reasonable way.

    MODERATOR: DeAnander is not a he.

    17 February 2008, 5:44 pm

29. john steppling:

    and james…..I love Delicate Prey, I think its a small bit of genius. But then you say it paints no enobling picture of humanity….and this is exactly to the point. Art is not required to do so. That is what i keep calling simplistic. Art functions in a good many ways, and often this dialectic unearths the deeper toxins before anything of a cure can occur. But without that excavation you will never find the deeper truths. Thats my opinion anyway./

    17 February 2008, 5:49 pm

30. DeAnander:

    Tsk tsk, my bad not to have noticed F O’Connor buried in the long litany of Famous Male Writers. One token female, of course, completely changes the picture — just ask those who perceive Condi Rice as a trailblazer for women’s rights and proof of the feminist creds of the Bush Regime

    Perhaps I was just so boggled by an attempt to invoke the (imho shallow boyshit merchant) Kesey as a Great Name, that a coupla neurons misfired I thought the whole Nurse Ratched theme had long since been critiqued to death as a famous instance of Enemy Womanising, if I may coin a phrase. Certainly not the example I’d pick of how Art stands “outside” politics.

    All I can say about McCarthy’s work from personal experience is that 2 friends of mine read “The Road” and both reported — not quite in these exact words — that it filled them with such despair and horror that they felt like giving up entirely and running away to join the Amish, or a nunnery, or pulling the covers over their heads and never getting out of bed again. “Don’t read it,” said one. “You’ll be paralysed for days.” So I didn’t, since the experience of being bludgeoned with horror is something I can have any day just by scanning the news.

    Frankly imho there is no horror theme in fiction that can compete with what we are currently, this very minute, doing to the biosphere and to each other. Or what men are doing to women and kids, every day. Internet porn is one big shop of horrors; when we call slasher flicks “torture porn” are we implying that there is not torture in “normal” porn? ‘cos the celebration of inflicting pain and humiliation on women is everywhere. Patriarchal poetry is patriarchal politics is the same, as a very famous writer once said (or something very like it) who does not appear in Mr Steppling’s list [actually it’s surprisingly difficult/nonobvious to find the text of that poem online… lots of papers about it, quoting it, discussing it, but hard to find the full text.]

    Incidentally, iirc W Shakespeare wrote a lot of his stuff to flatter the ruling family; chunks of it are blatant swiftboating of prior contenders for the English throne… It’s still lovely stuff, but stand outside politics it does not, and deliver a tailored, directed political message it does. The groundlings were to understand clearly that Tudors were better than Plantagenets and that Richard in particular was such a vile creature that dethroning and replacing him was not usurpation at all, but — hmmm — “regime change in the cause of goodness and freedom”. It’s better literature than, say, Atlas Shrugged by miles and miles, but (at least in parts) equally an apologia for a particular political faction. Perhaps what we mean when we call a piece of literature “great” is that it has managed to transcend its agenda… that there was enough of playfulness or insight or compassion about it that even when its context as propaganda had faded, it was still worth reading just for enjoyment. (Which I fear can hardly be said about any of Rand’s output, alas — what potboilers.)

    I still suspect there is something deeply gendered about the genre of Despair and Horror Fiction, and about its readership. How many obsessive Artists of the Horrible are men, vs women? Does it prove some kind of toughness to show how much horrible graphic description of violence, pain, and cruelty one can read w/o closing the book or watch w/o running from the theatre? certainly slasher flicks are a kind of ritual hazing or proving ground for teen boys (and a way to subject girlfriends to cultural discipline: this is what happens to women alone, this is what happens to women who wander off, this is what happens to women who are too curious or not pretty enough). Does it prove some kind of toughness to stare directly into the worst side of humanity and say, “This is what’s real, and I can handle the awfulness of that”?

    It all reminds me too much of the “realism” of neocon economics and the necessity for imposing suffering and “market discipline” on country after country, because any more kindly or humane social order is “unrealistic” — because we know that humankind is “really” greedy, selfish, ugly, violent, and generally vile.

    Art is not required to do anything (except to flatter the reigning monarch, revile rival aristocratic families, sell books, inflate the author’s reputation, etc) — but can we really judge –say — Triumph of the Will only on its cinematography? Or watch a late-model lavish and well-acted miniseries like “Masada” w/o recognising it as fulsome pro-IDF propaganda? or not recognise the ideology of despair and loathing as part of the neocorporatist political moment?

    17 February 2008, 7:55 pm

31. Louis Proyect:

    “I’ve always been interested in the Southwest,” McCarthy says blandly. “There isn’t a place in the world you can go where they don’t know about cowboys and Indians and the myth of the West.”

    More profoundly, the book [Blood Meridian] explores the nature of evil and the allure of violence. Page after page, it presents the regular, and often senseless, slaughter that went on among white, Hispanic and Indian groups. There are no heroes in this vision of the American frontier.

    “There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” McCarthy says philosophically. “I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.”

    NY Times, April 19, 1992

    17 February 2008, 9:45 pm

32. DeAnander:

    Hmmm. why am I not at all surprised by this quote?

    “freedom” here meaning the freedom to live in a world dominated by bloodshed, empire, enslavement, colonisation, etc? the “freedom” of the Free Market again? if we desire — let’s say — to improve the species by ending, or at least struggling against, slavery, somehow that desire for freedom will “enslave” us and make us less free? talk about Newspeak.

    I have to wonder whether Mr McCarthy might not be so complacent about the story of the conquest of the Western half of the North American continent, if his racial subgroup had been on the losing rather than the winning side? maybe if he were living on a reservation somewhere with all the consequences of defeat and occupation, he might think that a bit more justice (and even some harmony) and a bit less bloodshed would not be such a bad thing.

    maybe Mr McCarthy wouldn’t be so convinced that a world without bloodshed is a terrible and dangerous idea, if his own personal safety were at risk from, say, US bombers or other mafia hitmen — or if he were swept up by HSA and extradited for “rendition”? but of course, having such an Anglo face and an Irish rather than Arab sounding name, that isn’t going to happen to him

    my personal suspicion is that those who are convinced that the world really needs no improvement or change, are those who happen to have won the lottery — be that racial, financial, national, gender… in other words, if you’re white and male, the son of a successful lawyer, and talented enough to swan around your whole life on writer’s grants and academic appointments without, say, having to work 13 hrs a day in a maquiladora, enlist in the army, flip burgers, or work the killing floor at a meat plant… sure, a bit of poverty now and then as you struggle your way towards the Oprah reading list, but it’s voluntary poverty… then I guess the world probably does look like it’s pretty much good enough just the way it is.

    for the rest of us, trying to improve it a bit makes a lot of sense — it makes only sound common sense (and good solid collective self-interest, fwiw) to “take the human for what the human is and believe it is worth trying to to better.”

    17 February 2008, 11:04 pm

33. Kevin Gannon:

    For what it’s worth, I got the feeling McCarthy wasn’t thinking about progressive activists when he said that, but more along the lines of communists and/or fans of the “nanny state”. “Improvement of the species” has a wide range of interpretation, and might be anything from Greenpeace to nazi ideolology.
    Thanks for the great posts here everyone, and just for the record, I think NCFOM is brilliant, watched it twice already. For the “sky high body count” guy, a sky high body count is what you get from Robocop, Predator, or Terminator. I counted 10 people killed on screen in this movie. I might be off by a few, but it’s a very small number by any action/horror movie standard.

    18 February 2008, 1:22 am

34. James M:

    the experience of being bludgeoned with horror is something I can have any day just by scanning the news.

    The aversion to horror fiction is certainly understandable in this light, but just to make sure I’m understood: I don’t read it for its resemblance to real life, I read it for its artifice. If I wanted real life, I’d read a history of the plague, instead of The Masque of the Red Death.

    Does it prove some kind of toughness to show how much horrible graphic description of violence, pain, and cruelty one can read w/o closing the book or watch w/o running from the theatre?

    I can’t speak for anyone else, but I certainly don’t read Poe / Bowles / whomever as a test of my manliness. And I don’t go near the slasher stuff — I think your analysis of that is spot-on.

    How many obsessive Artists of the Horrible are men, vs women?

    Good question. The only woman who comes to mind is V.C. Andrews, who “ranks with Stephen King as one of the all-time best-selling denizens of mass-paperback gothic horror.” From what I hear, her books are absolutely without redeeming value. This, apparently, is part of their allure among a mostly-female audience.

    But then again, how many painters in the Louvre are men? How many composers of symphonies? How many writers, period — comparatively speaking, over the course of history? Patriarchy has kept women out of artistic fields since its dawn; who knows how many female Artists of the Horrible there would be if the chance had been there. Boyshit is everywhere, yes — but I don’t know that the desire to tell (or hear) a scary story is unique to one gender.

    Re: The McCarthy quote — that is certainly a reprehensible point of view, and if that’s what he’s peddling, I want none of it. I don’t think I could separate his artifice as a writer from his philosophy, like I can with Bowles — because this philosophy is more immediately dangerous (e.g. if it’s making your friends want to retreat into a convent) than a little harmless existentialism here and there.

    I am at least glad, however, when a writer (like Ayn Rand, also) frankly identifies their premises, instead of trying to mystify them. Somehow, if nothing else, their honesty about being misanthropes seems commendable.

    18 February 2008, 1:22 am

35. john steppling:

    I confess Im growing a bit tired of having words put in my mouth DeAnander (I gave up a long time ago on Proyect)… but let me say all this yet again. First…..Flannery O Connor is a token female? That means what…..she is the only woman artist i happened to mention, therefore there must be a quota system here I didnt know about. I could also cite Alice Munro and anne waldman and a good many other women artists that I love. The point was that i listed who I did because of the context of what i was saying…..but lets go over yet again a few points. If you can stop with the snide tone and little cute emoticons it might help discussion too. Just, you know, my opinion.,

    First…if you bother to read my comments on Kesey and OFOTCN you will note i say its a *too uplifting* book (meaning borderline sentimental), but the point was that in comparison with a film like Girl Interrupted the politics of the story have shifted. The system is *your friend* in the latter while Kesey at least clings to a healthy anti-establishment sensibility — but no, I dont see it as a particularly profound book. And while one could certainly critique Ratched in the above mentioned frame, this is beside the point in the context we are discussing.

    Now Im sad your *friends* didnt like The Road…..but well, thats your friends. I have some who loved it. That kind of anecdotal remark is all but meaningless DeAnander — and art works in various ways as Ive said. I asked before, so I might have a better handle on your position, what does pass for great art in your mind?

    Per Shakespeare; FOR THE FIFTH OR SIXTH TIME, I agree all art is political…..how many times do i have to say this before you process it. My point is that a writer like Shakespeare is not JUST a reflection of the time in which he lived…..or rather, he is a relfection of his time but he also transcends it. And of course he flattered the court, but like Goya (a good example) he also subverted those flatteries and was well enough aware of the poisonious nature of power. In fact, he largely wrote on this subject. Now, Pinter writes about power too, but in a totally different way, from another strategy altogether. But neither are flattering mankind nor writing “enobling” portraits of man. Is that what they have to do to be considered of value? You describe Shakespeare as better than ayn rand……well, gosh, I guess so…..but then say shakespeare is an apologia for a certain political faction? This is really beyond simplistic. I think critics from Ted Hughes to William Empson to Jan Kott would disagree. But then I can already hear that none of those critics are women. Kott is a useful signpost here because he came from eastern europe and politicized Shakespeare a great deal, influencing along the way Peter Brook and Peter Hall. I could suggest a viewing of the great Soviet film version of Lear……fascinating to see how they approached it……but see, Shakespeare is more than just a simple apologia, and he has helped shape western consciousness and even shaped the language we use to struggle through daily reality. So I find a conclusion that suggests all he did was sort of transcend his “agenda” to be pretty limited. But hey, thats just me I guess.

    Now, nobody says you are staring into the horror and saying *I can stand this* — thats absurd and not worthy of a serious discussion. Do you HONESTLY think that a McCarthy or a Melville or whoever is doing this? And next, McCarthy is not a genre writer to my mind…..so we conflating things a bit to start lumping him in with pulp fiction. This is interesting though, because one might discuss a Raymond Chandler in this context. But I want to stay on message as Rove would advise me. My point has been that to critique McCarthy as some (you and proyect for sure) as a writer who says “freedom ” is the freedom to live in a world of bloodshed is an argument couched in bad faith. He is doing nothing of the sort. You may not like his writing for whatever reasons…..Proyect has given his arguments on that…..I dont agree, but its a valid position…….but you DeAnander seem to have no position on his work other than to suggest he is one dimensional. You seem to base this on your *two friends* who were depressed by The Road. Well, fuck, its a DEPRESSING book, but i would say thats the point. Tragedy is superficially depressing and later, in a deeper sense, it becomes liberating. McCarthy says bloodshed is everywhere…..and I would agree. He also says those who think man can be improved are the first to give up their freedoms….which I take to mean superficial and ephemeral freedoms….those of distraction…..the freedom to buy one of seventy brands of toothpaste. All the while another form of enslavement is taking place. I think you and Proyect might benifit from examining your own agendas in this debate. And I respectively request you read what I actually wrote before making comments on what I DIDNT write. I dont know exactly what McCarthy meant in that quote…..which probably has a context we dont get right here, but its not a meaningless comment to wonder at the idea of *improvement* — which is a concept often linked to Enlightenment values and assumptions and which has been co-opted in this culture in amazing ways.

    Art is there to awaken us to the world…..the political, historical and spiritual world around us….for advanced capital (as guy debord said over and over) is there to keep us alseep……the Spectacle is for distraction, to numb us and keep us from deep feeling or thought. Great art, and I consider McCarthy great, is to help awaken….the bloodshed and violence in his books is stark and part of a project to demystify the assumptions of *the West*. You may not agree he is doing it at all well, but that is what is being attempted. IMHO. Now, that myth is patriarchal and racist and all about violent oppression — and conquest….but thats not McCarthy’s fault anymore than its your fault. To demand artists paint uplifting visions of man’s goodness is reductive and simplistic….and those who demand it are the ones afraid to confront the real horror of The Spectacle. The real life negative numbing of mass marketing and industrialized death and sound bite salves for the suffering of the planet.

    18 February 2008, 3:43 am

36. Legume Sam:

    I’m amused by the long literary critiques in here, but perhaps this is only my knee-jerk reminiscence of the time I spent getting college degrees in the 1980s and 1990s. There is, after all, serious work to be done in bringing about what Teresa Brennan called a “civilizational U-turn,” reversing the world society that burns 85 million barrels of oil each and every day.

    That aside, I tend to find the reviews of movies to be much more entertaining than the movies themselves. I watch “Ebert and Roeper at the Movies” and feel like I’m getting more than I would at the movies themselves, not to mention more cheaply. When I was pursuing my Ph.D. in Communication, I was encouraged to theorize the mass media; the dropping of names such as those of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno on this blog, then, produces a warm feeling in my heart out of memory of those days. In them I felt I could understand my own feelings about art — art, then, is about the social triumph of exchange value and the cash nexus; it’s about driving to the shopping mall and paying eighteen bucks to enter the theater rather than actually watching the movie. “Films, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part,” to quote those whose names are dropped in such celebration. Art, schmart; what’s (perverse, yet relatively safe) fun is watching the critics twist themselves into knots over it while the world goes to Hades in a handbasket. So, no, I haven’t read McCarthy, nor have I seen “No Country for Old Men.”

    Nowadays, my theories of the mass media center on the question of “why is there a camera there?” If it were real, there would be no camera there; people pose for cameras. If it were real, it would not cater to the desires of the viewing audience; merely filming reality would be too boring. Film is boring, then, but not merely because (as Proyect says) film is “merely reinforcing of the most jéjune values of contemporary society, albeit dressed up in pretty wrappers.” Even if film expressed the “right” values it would be boring. Film is boring because its attempt to replicate experience comes off as boringly false.

    John Steppling’s appreciation of Cormac McCarthy in terms of “the narrative reflects the world as it is, not as it should be” is certainly a valid assertion of enjoyment rights; who (esp. among the Rotten Tomatoes crowd, eh?) doesn’t like a realist moment? The question is begged, however, of why one needs art to experience realism. A hint at an answer is to be found in that word, experience; art contributes something to experience that can’t be found in the present-day, ideological, variant of “experience itself.” Maybe John Steppling gets that “something” out of reading McCarthy or watching “No Country for Old Men.” I’m OK with that, and I’m willing to defend John Steppling on it, though I’m still far, far, FAR away from being persuaded that I need to experience any of this “art.”

    Against that reading, though, we have DeAnander’s cautionary statement:

    imho there is an established ideology of despair regarding the human condition; nihilism, cynicism, anomie, whatever you want to call it. and it has a powerful literature of propaganda conveying the moral lesson that life is meaningless, people are stupid and cruel, everyone is our for him/herself, no one can be trusted, the most you can hope for is to grab some bling while the grabbing is good. this moral lesson greatly serves the imperial/capitalist system…

    Against this, John Steppling thinks that McCarthy is a “highly moral writer.” But, honestly, does that even matter? Art is not the ad hominem judgment we make of its creators; it’s a contribution to experience. I get enough ideological despair out of other people when I talk to them about ecosocialism. Why do I need more of it from a movie? Eh John?

    18 February 2008, 6:48 am

37. john steppling:

    Sam — I think you raise really interesting questions….and ones I tried less clearly to allude to early in my response to stan. The question of corporate production of ANY and ALL hollywood studio film, and really just about ALL film, is a genuine issue in all this. Warner Bros produces a film like Blood Diamonds, and ostensibly its about exploitation by the diamond cartels (DeBeers essentially) and yet what is the exact nature of the exploitation of the film company on location? I had a long debate about some of this with Colonel Chabert at her blog…….and I didnt agree with her, finally, but I think she made quite important points. Before directly addressing what you asked, let me say that one can’t fully debate the film end of this discussion without addressing the way mass media and technology have mediated the daily lives of westerners. So there are two topics…the film and the book. The issues are related but are not the same I dont think.

    So, yes I think it matters. I think culture matters profoundly, for it is how we order our thoughts and create/structure our inner lives. The quote about art reflecting the world as it is seems to be getting a lot of attention. I thought i had clarified it more in the next posting….but my point is that art is not meant to be *enobling* or superficially uplifting. Its not instructive in that sense. Now, i dont agree that film is boring. Nor do I at all agree with Proyects reductive description of it. Fassbinder, Bresson, pasolini, Bergman, and these days Bruno Dumont or even some of Claire Denis (Beau Travais for sure) are hardly boring nor are they at all reinforcing the values of contemporary society. Proyect contradicts himself (a habit of his) when he gives very glowing reviews to kistch like The Sporanos. So, film neednt be only studio pulp — and I tried to mention Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter in this context. But the experience of art….the experience of the engagement with art, is something quite important to my mind. Yes, reality TV has so saturated pop consciousness that people DO perform as if on camera even when there is no camera. Absolutely. Its quite terrifying to watch in fact, and I see it in my students all the time. But what you describe as ideological despair is not what I think one gets out of what DeAnander calls *depressing* works like The Road. Depressing is a superficial description of anything anyway, its almost pop psychology. Does one come away depressed from Hamlet? From a reading of Crime and Punishment? Or from Dumont’s Flaners or Clarie Denis’ Beau Travais (two of my favorite recent films)?? I dont. My students seem not to — in fact quite the opposite. I ran into a student on the way out of the theatre after NCFOM……she was excited, said it a joy to see a film without the usual formula and with the courage to not resort to a happy ending or easy resolutions. This I take as a very good sign.

    But sam, you raise a terrifically relevant point about listening to critics rather than seeing the film. Post modern art is about *chatting* after viewing the installation or whatever…..there is no experiential content to that….its all theory and distanced….while I would argue a Rembrandt or a Goya provides one with a great deal of experiential content. Its very different……they are not the same thing. But this is era of post-irony. All is ironic. Sincerity is suspect it seems….and this accounts, in my opinion , for part of the backlash against mccarthy. I dont advocate realism….let me be clear…..mainly because I dont know what it is. Someone famous said , the theatre director from france, and i cant recall her name…she said something to the effect that if you look out the window at your dog in the backyard it seems natural…..but if you stare at it for six hours it stops seeming natural. The very notion of naturalism is indeed a construct of post enlightenment thinking……a dependency on science…..on some sort of definition of rational. I think life is quite irrational and I think art helps to mediate that irrationality. Montaigne said man is neccessarily insane…..for to stay sane in such a world is a sign of madness itself. Our own mortality and our fear of it, is there every second. I dont want to go all buddhist on everyone, but Lacan said some of this too, and Ernest Becker…..our fears of our transcience, our inevitible death, is a good part of what drives art and cultural output. All art is political and all art is, I think, in some sense religious. Your quote from Hork and Adorno was in the context of the culture industry…..and adorno’s opus Aesthetic Theory makes pretty clear his devotion to what he saw as *real* art.

    18 February 2008, 11:33 am

38. DeAnander:

    To demand artists paint uplifting visions of man’s goodness is reductive and simplistic….and those who demand it are the ones afraid to confront the real horror of The Spectacle.

    speaking of being misquoted I don’t recall ever having “demanded” that artists produce uplifting visions — and I certainly would not have said “of man’s goodness” — merely contending that we have every right to analyze the degree to which they intentionally or accidentally prop up abusive systems. for those traumatised by Stalinism, I wholly understand the warning lights that flicker on as soon as we apply political critique to literature — but imho there is a world of difference between official State censorship and the free expression of criticism by individuals of the corporate media in which we are marinated.

    all this kerfuffle about Great Art frankly leaves me yawning — for a start it’s Eurocentric in the extreme — and given the bloody and indeed omnicidal track record of “the West”, why on earth should we assign any but the most dubious significance to those officially recognised Great Artists who have “influenced Western thought”? either they have been doing a piss-poor job of influencing it — since the outcome is so intractably, consistently stupid and destructive — or their much-vaunted influence has been incredibly sinister.

    if pressed I would say that Great Art is, evidently, art which educated people with leisure time enjoy and collect, and which provides a living for an extensive cottage industry of critics and instructors-in-appreciation who in turn, self-referentially, get to define what is Great Art. like haute couture or haute cuisine, it’s an amusing (and it can be a delightful) hobby for a privileged few who play a gentle game of point-scoring by dropping all the right names, and who demonstrate their social position, memory skills, and a certain amount of personal discipline by the hours they have been able to spend training themselves in appreciation of the fine points of whatever — be it wine tasting, snuffbox collecting, Noh theatre and fine calligraphy, or film crit.

    I’m not knocking any of this — it is harmless enough and far preferable to foxhunting — just another version of knowing the entire game history of the Dodgers or being able to identify every make of train engine past and present on UK rail. we all enjoy knowing about things, memorising lists, having expertise — it’s a human thing, and was once actually essential to our survival. the civilised, cultivating utter ignorance of the processes that keep us alive, instead demonstrate a scintillating mastery of useless knowledge.

    this kind of thing is a hobby that, having the privilege of some education, I often indulge in myself; but like “high” finance, it’s merely a game of juggling abstractions. (imho you can always tell how far something is divorced from the everyday business of living by how often “great” or “high” or “advanced” is prepended to its name — and here I’ll invoke Veblen as shorthand for an analysis of disutility as a marker of status).

    but no, I don’t believe in transcendental, magical qualities in Art with a cap A; I did once, years ago, but I don’t any more. it is discussed here with almost religious zeal, like a salvational option, a way to save our souls from the “irrationality” of life. but here again I differ with the first premise: I don’t see anything irrational about life, even its seamy side. violence and greed are perfectly rational. killing people to steal their stuff, or to keep a secret, or because it makes the killer feel powerful, is perfectly rational — sociopaths are often extremely, narrowly, obsessively rational. there’s nothing irrational about the exercise of power. and there is nothing irrational in resisting it, when it’s being exercised at your expense.

    the essential difference I suppose between my POV and Mr Steppling’s is