Simple and Deep Art

When does simplifying art make it simplistic?

Popular art simplifies art as when, in musical comedy, a look and a sneer in “Kiss Me Kate” shows that the lady lead is jealous of her ex husband’s  new love. Irving Thalberg, an executive at  MGM in the Thirties, said you didn’t  need twenty pages of dialogue to explain that a husband and wife were on the outs. Just have her give her husband a dirty look when he notices a pretty girl getting off an elevator. High art, on the other hand, explains just how complicated are relationships as we slowly unpack the motives of the great Gatsby. Great art can do both. Shakespeare allows the playgoer to see that Beatrice and Benedict are so preoccupied with one another engaging in their banterring that they are candidates for love. Jane Austen presents Mr. Knightley was so attentive to Emma, the daughter of his friend, though it takes a while for the reader and Emma to realize that he cared for her for a long time. Picasso also uses simple lines to make objects fresh and reimagined, as in strokes that make a bull come to life or van Ruisdael, in “Dunes”, freshly see what a rise from a seashore looks like even if seeing only a very small amount of the view.

A good way to see the difference between art as simplification so as to make it popular while art is elevated when there is added complexity is to consider the movies made in the early Fifties about the communist menace. There was “I was a Communist for the FBI”, where everyone had disdain for a Communist, this worse than being a murderer or a thief, and so a truly deviant figure, whose villainy is turned to heroism because the central figure turns out to be an agent of the FBI, a hero for dissembling as such a despicable person, ever at the mercy of mean sounding higher up Communist operatives so as to gain their secrets. There was also Robert Walker, late in his career, in “My Son John”, playing a Communist not unredeemed by being an undercover agent, his mother, played by Helen Hayes, bemused as to why his son had so fallen into iniquity. The movie about Igor Grezenko, the Soviet attache in Canada who turns spy against the Soviets, has the excuse and sympathy because he was portrayed as a simple man who did not want to go back to the dreadful Soviet Union and who could blame him

A deeper and more probing examination of the McCarthy period is available in “Trial” a movie that looks inside the Communist movement through the pretext of a young and naive lawyer who needs some experience and so becomes an advocate of a celebrated court case of an innocent man. The cause is supported by the Communists, a not ridiculous possibility in that the Communists supported the Scottsboro Boys, innocents prosecuted in the Thirties for being Negro hobos, though the main counsel for the defense was Samuel Liebowitz who was hired by others. In this case, the communists are concerned with fundraising and propagating their general truths, the defendant an opportunity for exploitation. The movie “Trial” shows the main Communist pledging to his crowd that they should all wave their money blindfolded and no one will take their money and that when aides all take the money away tell the crowd that this is a cheap lesson for learning not to trust leaders, and the crowd laughs and acquiesces. I don't know if Communists actually used that ploy to raise money but that was the kind of thing to be expected of them. Liberals considered Communists to be “bottom feeders” who raised money on the misfortunes of others. The woman associated with the Communists and asked to look after Glenn Ford, the naive lawyer, played by Dorothy McGuire, said that she had slept with the Communist boss as well as his principles, was strikingly realistic given that good women remained chaste at that time.So “Trial” shows the process that goes on in a radical social movement: manipulation and casual sex, and not so foreign to human experience as the other movie that showed Communism from the outside. More material flushes out the reality of the story.

You can also complicate by simplifying, turning tragedy into farce. The usual interpretation of “High Noon” a classic movie also of the early Fifties, is to think of it as another rendition, very elegantly done, of a standard Western trope. A sheriff, rather than an outlaw gunman, has to defend himself all alone but by a quirk of fate he is assisted by his wife, the kicker at the end of the film. A deeper interpretation is offered by David Riesman in “The Lonely Crowd” his dazzling exploration of the American character at mid century which says that the townspeople had abandoned the sheriff so that the sheriff was all alone to face those who will kill him, assisted, it turns out, only with his wife, the only one in  town who has true allegiance to him. A third interpretation, my own, is that the sheriff runs around town to get help to do what is his job, which is to deal with gunslingers and so he shouldn’t whine about it, making him silly and cowardly, and has to be aided by his wife to do his own job, showing him just as foolish as he seems. 

Which of the three interpretations is correct? All three have merit in that they are  garnered from  the facts and the conventions of the Western, but the third seems to  me most accurate even if an unusual choice, because it offers a simplification of the  story by reducing  it to its fundamental elements which cohere once that the movie is seen. I have not consulted Fred Zinnermann, the film’s director, to see whether he intended the movie to be a farce but it makes sense as one on its viewing and that is what counts. It is difficult, however, to boil down a movie or a novel to  its simplest element. It takes a lot of experience as a critic to shed the conventional to the direct interpretation, to look  at a work freshly. Criticism means scaling away what you think you should see with what is there to be seen. Thee thing to notice about “High Noon” is the consistency of the central character, that he is trying to avoid confrontation despite provocation from a number of forces, not coming to a moment when he engages his heroism, as might happen in Shakespeare, as when Lear off on the heath comes to understand deep rather than petty things-- and is unlike Hamlet, who hesitates so long that everyone he touches is doomed. Only that continuous character can explain the drama and that illumination becomes the clear and apparent meaning.

Here is a clear case where altered versions of art can simplify and trivialize what an artist does so as to become what producers think, probably correctly, will more engage a popular audience.  I. B. Singer’s story “Yentl”, written in 1983, was to create a legendary figure who carried a moral message. This was of a young woman so taken with learning the Talmud that she donned male garb so as to pass into a yeshiva even though she was forbidden to do so by Rabbinic law. This story, straight out of classical mythology about people changing themselves in the quest of forbidden passions, exhibits a paradox: how can one become so taken with the law so as to violate it? TThat is a problem fanatics face and even just singular people like the heroine, Joan of Arc is also of this type.It remains insoluble: how a person of good conscience can become overwhelmed by doing what seems so right, which is to defend  your king or to study Talmud.

A Broadway production of the story as a play, starring the excellent Susan Strasberg as Yentl, opened just a few years later. I guess to make theatergoers more amused and distracted from its dark intertone, much was done about what it would be like to masquerade in boy’s clothing and so for a naive young girl to learn the secrets of young men. This is a bit titillating but beside the point. It might be considered a dumbing down version of the story. An even more simplified version was provided in the movie version of 1988 which was produced by Batra Streissand and where she herself starred in this musical adaptation. There is the same problem of cross dressing as when Yentl has to marry a naive girl for an arranged marriage and somehow manages it. But most important is that the story ends by Yentl sailing off to America so as to become free, which is a conventional way to solve the problem. Singer himself offered his own opinion about the movie: were there no other yeshivas in  Poland for her to run off to? After all, all she cared about was to learn Talmud. But there is a different take that can be considered, however conventionalized and simplified it may be, that does have some wisdom. Coming to America is always the solution  because it is the place where people can become free in ways they themselves, much less immigration officials, cannot understand. So simplification can provide a profound meaning even if one that is also popular, which means easily understood and acceptable.

Here are some science fiction movies, rarely thought of as art, that sometimes simplify but sometimes complicate their stories so that they can be considered art. An example of the dumbing down side took place with the early set of stories collected by Isaac Asimov under the title of “I, Robot” which insisted that an intelligent robot could be constructed which would not violate the three laws of robotics: a robot will not harm a human; a robot will not assist someone to harm a human; and a robot will assist a human so long as it does not violate the first two directives. That is the equivalent of an iron law whereby robots will always be subservient to humans and the stories, as extended to other of Asimov’s novels, are tested to see if the legalistic formulation is sufficient to cover all cases so as to make robots benign. Asimov thinks the three laws meet that test and, by the way, could serve as ways for humans to behave with regard to one another. But the movie version of “I, Robot" starring and producing Will Smith has to simplify the ethical principles by abandoning them and makes robots the evil monsters horror rather than science fiction movies can conjure. Rather than incorporating robots into an enlightened humanity (though not so enlightened as to give robots the vote but remaining servile, a kind of slave) the robots are just another version of the bogeyman and so does not offer anything fresh. I might add that the same thing happened when a streaming series on the Asimov novel “Foundation” transformed it into mystical and magical mumbo jumbo, a species of science fantasy, when the original was rigorous in its disclaimer of all mysticism in favor of a strictly scientific view of how galactic societies evolve, relying on the history of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. Asimov thinks the priests who pray for spacecraft to work are in fact engineers who in fact have their power because the engineers can actually make the spacecraft work. Science is the only miracle worker

Here is a way to complicate criticism. A bit of complication can be added to a popular work so as to make it more intriguing for those who care, including the writers themselves for their own amusement, without allowing the popular appeal to be altered, remaining itself simplified. Think of the Terminator series which is best known for its shootouts and clever car chases and the Schwarzenegger delivery. But added to it providing some depth is that its story is that messenger comes from the future to protect the child who will save the future and also becomes the vehicle to impregnate the mother of that child, the unfolding of the story, contrary to what happens in the Jesus story, is how the Mary figure over and over again has to  protect the special child from those who will harm him. A very clever turn on a story heavy with meaning and reverberations to provide a serious felty aura from the shoot em up enterprise. The Jesus story is a sure fire additive even if vaguely sensed as one of the great stories reinterpreted but also appreciated on its own for the visual confrontations that bring people to watch it. To make the Mary story  the center of a Terminator film is to read too much seriousness into the enterprise, an exercise of over the top criticism to show up literary allusions.

Here is a recent science fiction movie that complicates a little bit without overwhelming its basic animus. The latest in the post-apocalyptic series “Mad Max” is called “Furiosa”. It teases the observant viewer with a sort of early Iron Age culture where there are modern windmills and pedal driven knife sharpeners and motorcycles and oil trucks that might be tempted to present a full scale development of the stages in the recovery of civilization but is mostly filled with crashes and piquant ways in which people with bad teeth and outlandish costumes die. That brings in the audience, I suspect, though the anthropological interest provides a moment of complexity and an aura of a plausible alternative society.

The thing about these histories of alternative worlds, these contexts of seriousness, is that they are undermined by their scriptwriting in that atmosphere is not developed so as to intrude on the front and center action, which has its own particular and uncomplicated energy, as also happens in sword and sandal epics like “Ben Hur” and “Quo Vadis”, which make characters seem in pretentious rhetoric and opulent scenery so as to tell a puny story of chariotg races, remarkable in their own fight as visuals, but where the story is a re-rendering of a traditional and uninspired piety to tide one over the excitement. Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” has plenty of action but also front and center is  how conspiracies erupt and what becomes of their consequences both to the society and to the conspirators themselves, people undone by more resourceful and, like Marc Antony, more eloquent adversaries of the conspirators. The play is for all ages and is high art

I frequently am reminded by a line from the musical “Mack and Mabel”, which covers the era of the silent movies, when, it is said, these creators are out not to make art but to make movies. True enough and the irony is that Chaplin and Keaton did make art but did so in a new vein by exploiting the new found medium to achieve pathos and slapstick rather than the more elevated emotions and meanings. Do not confuse them with Shakespeare who was also working a popular art and made it great art.