THE GATE OF THE GODS, Part 2

Repeating the Frye quote from part 2:

"The creative process is an end in itself, not to be judged by its power to illustrate something else, however true or good."

In one of those interesting cross-correspondences I sometimes encounter, the same week I read the Frye quote, I came across this fascinating post on the blog AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS.

Said post, by blogger CRWM, began in reaction to posts that are fully documented on this blogpost by Curt Purcell. Now as it happened, I've no dog in the specific fight that inspired CRWM's post, as I've not seen any of the films he references: INSIDE or the two HOSTEL films.
But I enjoyed CRWM's defense of the idea of meaning as being inherent in any narrative (which I *think* is implicit in his argument even though in the following quote he speaks only of the film medium:

"Every film, no matter what its final form, is the product of a creative process that inevitably leaves traces of interpretable clutter behind it. No matter how lame or great, no matter powerful or dull, there's always already something beyond the literal. Even if you could somehow remove all human agency from the creation of a film, the fact that you removed all human agency from the creation of the film introduces space for interpretation.You'll never make a perfectly flat film. To even try is to automatically fail."

Now, CWRM is also careful to emphasize that not all forms of meaning are equal by saying that some works can have such a low level of meaning that it's not incorrect to judge them to be "lame" or "dull." But CRWM's point is that it's a critical mistake to speak of any work as intrinsically "pointless."

In making these assertions, I think CRWM has broadly agreed with the above Frye quote, that one work is not automatically superior to another because the first seems to "illustrate something else, however true or good." This would apply just as much, I should think, to the appearance of a "higher purpose" in a horror film, even if that "higher purpose" may not illustrate anything particularly "true" or "good:"

'Again and again we get some sort riff on the idea that violence, even perhaps the most extreme violence, would be okay if it were somehow wedded to a higher purpose. Violence shouldn't be "the point" of violence, but should rather serve "weighty and serious in intent" or be, somehow, necessary.'

It's because I find meaning inherent in works that are not necessarily "wedded to a higher purpose" that I formulated my conceptions of Thematic Escapism, which I explored here and here. Though I haven't seen the specific films that CRWM defends on the basis of their not needing a "higher purpose" to be interesting, I've certainly sampled many, many works whose only aim was to excite the audience n what I've called a "kinetic" manner. Some of these works fail even at that aim and so are both lame and dull: PUNISHER WAR ZONE comes to mind as one that failed to impress, despite its considerable production budget. While not the worst work of its kind ever produced, it was still less interesting than a lot of drive-in junk that on occasion had nothing more than a daring, exploitative idea to run with. Frye in a less charitable moment would have called such works a "babble." But the word "babble" is an interesting one, for though it directly descends from a 13th century European word, it has a perhaps-coincidental resemblance to the words that gave rise to the city-name Babylon: "Bab-ilu," which despite sounding like a Desi Arnaz song connoted "the gate of the gods."

And how can that which seems to be without purpose or function be the gate of the gods?

More in part 3.