I never cease to be amazed as to how many people, intelligent and otherwise, allow themselves to be seduced by the fallacy that morality applies to everything in life and art.
That it plays a large part in human life, no one could doubt. But there are any number of aspects of life not reducible to moral dimensions, and so it should follow that art is similarly capable of being separated into works of "thematic realism" and "thematic escapism," to reiterate my own terms for the distinctions.
On a related topic, while I was answering objections to my "superhero decadence" posts, I remarked that Curt Purcell might well get sick of all the "comic book crapola." I was a little unspecific as to why I thought arguments between comic-book people tended to become excessively crapulous, though.
The reason is this: comic-book people, whether elitist or populist, tend to make extremely-moral arguments against any position they don't like, often taking facile straw-man arguments to save themselves the trouble of engaging with said position in detail.
The two "Noah's Arghs" posts, here and here, exemplify this trend. Not only did poster Noah Berlatsky respond to my "decadence" posts by making some obscure remark about cultural studies-- which had no applicability to my posts-- but also tossed off a snide remark about the "Torture Guardin'" essay, which did no more than observe that in some fictional works torture (albeit broadly defined) simply doesn't have any moral resonance.
I don't doubt that the Spectre of the Straw Man sometimes haunts the blogs and messageboards devoted to non-comics fandoms, but comic-book people certainly seem to invoke its spirit with annoying regularity. Usually at Curt's blog, proponents of various ideas discuss them in mature fashion, without attempting to make up anything about an opponent's position. But often it seems that comic-book people, whether they do or don't read superheroes, tend to fashion their moral universes into Manichean cosmologies.
(Spoiler warning about the movie discussed below)
Admittedly, by the time the comics-people got ahold of Moral Manicheanism, it had already applied to just about every other artform and medium, and it still crops up. For instance, INGLORIOUS BASTERDS has recently come under fire for having supposedly trivialized the subject matter of the Holocaust by allowing a fictional commando unit the liberty not only to kick a lot of Nazi ass (as Simon and Kirby's BOY COMMANDOS did much earlier), but to actually rewrite WWII history by letting its heroes kill off Hitler.
This was pretty audacious for a contemporary film. Of course Hitler was revived in fantasy-tales in just about every pop-cultural medium extant, which could be viewed as a similar distortion of history, but most such stories only altered events taking place after Hitler's historical demise. Even in certain comic books, which asserted that Hitler was burned to death by the Human Torch, hewed close to the historical record by having the event take place in the same locale where Adolf reputedly perished with Eva Braun.
But the claim that such a rewriting of history endangers the ability of viewers to engage with the Holocaust is just more manic Moral Manicheanism.
In this post Brights Lights After Dark treated this question more seriously than I would have. I won't go into a lot of the specific ways I both agree and disagree with Joseph Lanthier-- at least, not in this post-- but I will point out that the originator of the Moral Manicheanism, one Jonathan Rosenbaum, does himself no favors in my book by quoting Roland Barthes:
'Since many people have been asking me to elaborate on why I think "Inglourious Basterds" is akin to Holocaust denial, I’ll try to explain what I mean as succinctly as possible, by paraphrasing Roland Barthes: anything that makes Fascism unreal is wrong.'
Equating a work by a thematically-escapist artists like Quentin Tarantino with "Holocaust denial" is one of the most egregious Straw Men I've encountered in many years. One would hope that Rosenbaum's argument doesn't stand upon the reputation of Roland Barthes, that ingenious but superficial Marxist moron, but I've no faith that anyone who would even put forth such a cocked-up argument, with or without Barthes, would be able to judge what is or isn't "unreal" in the world of artistic endeavor.
So I guess, even if comic-book fandom plays host to countless hordes of Manicheans and their moral fixations, our little peccadillos-- "Superman's a Fascist; Vampirella's sexist"-- don't even compare with the dopiness that sometimes passes in other fandoms for intellectual discourse.
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3 comments:
It's nice to see someone able to separate their dislike of the movie from the "moral" question - most of other discourse I've seen seems to be either "I liked it" or "Tarantino is a Naughty Boy who did a Bad Thing".
The masterful Jog excepted, of course.
I would hardly call Roland Barthes a "moron", but it would certainly be a precarious argument on Rosenbaum's part if it relied entirely on Barthes's comment.
More damningly, Barthes was talking about Pasolini's film "Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom", and what he actually said was that anything that made Sade real and Fascism unreal was doubly wrong. Barthes then went on to say that, despite this, the film still had artistic merit.
Rosenbaum mentions this in a review he wrote of "Salo" some years ago, and he more or less agreed with Barthes on both points. With "Inglourious Basterds", he's simply lifted the comment about fascism out of context and ignored the mitigating point that Barthes was careful to make (i.e. that a film being "wrong" doesn't exclude the possibility of it being worthwhile art).
LWS:
I suppose I was being hyperbolic when I dismissed Barthes as a "moron," but I certainly think he was guilty of some moronic interpretations, even though he sometimes argued them with considerable ingenuity.
I've not found a copy of the Barthes review online, only passing references to it, like one where he's quoted as saying, "What happens in a novel by Sade is strictly fabulous; i.e., impossible..." I suppose this is what he's building on when he labels any attempt to make Sade seem "real" as "wrong," but the statement seems almost Zola-esque in its privileging of realism as THE principal literary mode. There are other problems I have with Barthes, but that privileging would be the only one relevant here, and the one to which Mr. Rosenbaum seems responsive.
I would agree with Barthes on one general point: there are works whose main appeal is that they seem to put aside concerns for realism or responsibility. Some of them can be judged as works of art and some are essentially junk, just as the impulse toward realism informs both artfiction and junkfiction at once, albeit in different ways.
I would agree with you that Barthes seems at least to consider the possibility that non-realistic works can be works of art, but any progress he makes toward such a conclusions seems truly tortuous (but not torturous, except to those who don't like his writing!)
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