"If you look at the suffering around you, you can't be happy,'' says the director Michael Haneke in Anthony Lane's profile in the October 5 New Yorker. Haneke, who has, it appears, a very pleasant life, makes very bleak films, including two versions of the hideous Funny Games. He embodies the comfortably elegant European despair in art that Americans love to mock. But the question is worth asking: How is it that we can enjoy movies, and the other arts, knowing that so many other human beings are miserable?
The great novelist Hermann Broch proposed that there are only three possible answers. One is religious: The ugliness and cruelty around us are part of a screen covering some other reality. Art points us to that truer reality. If one doesn't have that kind of faith, though, there are only two other choices left, as Broch observed: ``Either one must transfigure what is horrible into beauty -- like the Romans with their gladiator games, like a Nero or a Borgia -- or one must keep one's eyes shut in the face of ugliness and cruelty, and distinguish the beautiful so that it becomes an aesthetic 'elect' and makes possible undisturbed pleasure."
The former I suppose is what Haneke is about, because while his subject matter is often horrible his movies are gorgeous. On the other hand, the other path leads to Disney World -- a life where grief and fear are invisible in movies, stories, pictures and the other arts. It seems to me most of us shuffle inconsistently around these three poles, telling ourselves sometimes that suffering must mean something in a greater scheme, then switching to an aesthetes's view that appreciates the cinematography of that massacre scene, then spending time in the third camp, with art that ignores pain.
The question of how, and how often, people cycle through inconsistent views of reality is a rich subject in current psychology. More on that soon.
Discuss
jagannath rao adukuri on October 20, 2009, 1:07 PM
An interesting thought comes to us when we watch the glitzy Bollywood films or the T.V.soap operas that unfold in every middle class household every night .Around 40% of Indians live in abject poverty and it is just 10% who can afford a two-bedroom flat and a college education for children in a decent school. May be ,just 5% can afford a servant and travel in a car .Anybody who watches our films and soaps has inevitably to come to a conclusion that our countrymen are a prosperous lot who can afford huge mansions for living and large sleek cars besides so many other comforts available to an extremely rich citizen .Apparently art concerns itself with the reality as it should be ,not as it is .Of course ,if we call that by the name art! So if there is no beauty around us we often create it , covering the ugly reality under a sort of polyester film of imagined beauty
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