Lies-to-children

One of my favourite authors of all time is Terry Pratchett, who is a master of the explanatory footnote and the witty aside. I love the way he peppers his work with rambling observations, anecdotes and interesting thought-exercises that in the hands of a dourer person might be spun into pieces of wordy, convoluted theory.

One of my favourite of these is the ‘lies to children’ analogy, which originally appeared in the 1994 book The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart. The idea goes something like this: the world is complicated. The older we get, the more knowledge we acquire (in theory), and the more knowledge we acquire, the more likely we are to scratch beneath the pristine surface of factual simplicity to expose the gooey grey mess underneath.

Depending on how far we advance through the field of education, the epistemological complexities and contradictions we encounter will eventually chip away at these facts, exposing the mess of interpretation underneath the lie. If we venture into the sciences we may learn that the fact ‘the solar system has 9 planets’ is more complicated than it first appears. This is because, over time, scientists have acquired more knowledge about how Pluto behaves as a planetary body, and they have decided that Pluto does not, in fact, meet the required criteria to be a 'planet' in terms of its mass and orbital trajectory.

If we venture into the humanities, we might learn that ‘planet’ is the word for a large orbiting mass that exists, but that ‘planet’ is also a word that humans invented to signify our shared social imagining of an orbiting mass and that the image we call to mind when we think ‘planet’ is actually just a representation of an orbiting mass, and this representation may bear little relation to the actual lump of rock. Which then begs the question: the orbiting mass may exist, but isn’t our understanding of it just a social construct that we have created?

Oh, the humanities.

At any rate, the lie is exposed: the solar system does not have 9 planets. Or perhaps it does, depending on your perspective.

Academics who make their careers by delving deeply into specialised areas of knowledge use this technique because they often have to make their highly complex work intelligible to the general public, to policymakers, to academics in other disciplines and (and this one is especially important, from the academic's perspective) to grant funding bodies. When a physicist explains the expanding universe theory using the analogy of a balloon (an explanation that has been often parodied in science fiction shows), this is a lie. But it gets the general concept across to us usefully.

With science communication this arguably can work well. With humanities subjects that are (seemingly) less empirical in nature, ‘lies to children’ analogies which aim to explain aspects of critical theory can become muddy, badly communicated and misunderstood. The highly politicised nature of these subjects can also mean that simplistic interpretations are created, co-opted and distorted to support biased positions.

Recently, Conservative ministers hit out at ‘Critical Race Theory’ by stripping fragments from this complex body of scholarship and casting them into the sphere of public discourse. There, they took root in the fertile soil of racist prejudice and very quickly sprouted into assumptions that were oversimplified, wilfully-misunderstood and devoid of context. Then the ministers harvested their crop, cut it, dried it, spun it into fibres, wove it into a rope, turned the rope into a noose and then used the noose to choke the education sector.

Okay, so maybe I’m really not that good with metaphors.

Getting to the roots of knowledge is difficult, and ‘lies to children’ can be comforting to us. They are simple, and they are useful, so long as we remember that the ‘lie’ is only one step on the longer journey toward knowledge acquisition and cognitive development. We also need to realise that there are many people with vested interests in co-opting simplistic ‘lies-to-children’ versions of social theories to support their own biased positions. Responding to these people by offering them routes to greater knowledge is unlikely to do any good, not least because they are simply not motivated to probe beneath the lie, even though doing so is a valuable aspect of educational development and personal growth.

Film Authorship: Sky Gods with Beards

In a seminar on film authorship many (too many) years ago, a fellow student turned to me and said, in a tone that was almost reverent: "The director is God." At the time I didn't respond, partly because the sheer magnitude of chauvinistic assumption this comment implied had left me temporarily speechless, and partly because I was new to Film Studies and I lacked the ability to articulate why I found this idea so unsettling. If I had the ability to travel back in time and respond to this student from my current intellectual vantage point, I might talk about film as a collaborative process, and I might talk about the above-the-line creativity we value versus the below-the-line creativity we ignore. Certainly, I would talk about the disciplinary turn in Film Studies that imbued scholars with the (almost moral) responsibility to challenge the Romantic view of individual authorship as the most sublime form of creativity. I would encourage him to undergo the rite of passage that all film students must experience at some point in their studies, and begin the messy work of unravelling the gnarly, inherited corpus of dogmatic ideologies that have supported this view of authorship for so long.

Today, I am woman enough to admit that I might be wrong. I am not willing to consider the idea that ‘the director is God’, but leaving this student and his unexamined sexism to one side for a moment, I’m at least willing to consider the word ‘auteur’ alongside the word ‘God’ and to meditate on the differences and similarities between these words and the multifaceted meanings they connote.

Many atheists read 'God' as a finite concept that stymies critical thought and closes down rational inquiry. Through 'God', the mysteries of the universe can be revealed and understood: we didn't just come into being through some random, beautiful assemblage of particles that happened to be situated in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. Through 'God' the universe can be explained, and in the most mundane way possible. One man was responsible for the whole thing (and in our collective imaginations, that man is probably sporting a beard. A splendid, bushy beard.).

For a non-atheist, 'God' might have many meanings. 'God' may be polytheistic, theistic or deistic, but they/it are always polysemic. There might be many facets of one God. God might exist in the imagination as an anthropomorphised being, or perhaps as a more humanistic God who resides in all things and is agendered, ahuman and infinite. For an atheist, 'God' jettisons the need for the Grand Unified Theory of everything that Einstein (who favoured a moustache over a beard) was developing prior to his death, and that some physicists are still working determinedly toward. For atheists, 'God' is often anti-empirical, anti-complexity, anti-rational, and anti-science.

In Film Studies, the decades-long trend toward de-centring the auteur in the canon of scholarship has been immensely valuable for the spiritual and ethical journey of the discipline. But we should think about how we often read the concept of 'auteur' in a way that is similar to how atheists read the concept of 'God'. We may think of 'auteurism' as an approach that threatens to unify the discipline under some grand delusion that obscures cinema as a complex industrial product. Auterism smacks of something simplistic that explains cinema without the need for the decades-long work of the pragmatic empiricist. Our instinct is to resist such explanations for the obvious reason that, well, they are really dumb. We also read an auteurist approach that deifies the creative labour of one individual as harmfully chauvinistic, because it is an unfortunate consequence of systemic inequality that the auteur under discussion is usually a man (presence or lack of beard may vary).

But it is possible that 'auteur' is also polysemic, and it is possible that we have done enough, through our collective inter-disciplinary efforts, to move toward a more secular Film Studies. Today, auteur approaches exist as one sub-disciplinary method among many, and perhaps we miss a trick by laughing at the auteurists and poking fun at their sky-god delusion. While a director's name may call to mind an image of one individual, often a man and less often a woman, a director's name can also function as a metonym that is symbolic of the many particles which coalesced to form one collaborative vision with a distinctive aesthetic identity. When non-atheists say 'God' and atheists hear 'man with beard', perhaps the atheists are the ones who are seeking to avoid sustained critical engagement. And when an auteurist says 'the director intended...' and we say 'Christ, not this again', perhaps we are, too.

In defence of mindful philistinism.

“Well, art films are fine and that, but sometimes the only thing that really hits the spot is watching Jason Statham punch a giant shark, in its giant head.”

Well, I suppose I should begin by apologising for quoting myself. That is unforgivably lame, although if it helps, the intention is confession and the sentiment behind it is remorse. It was Induction Fortnight (Covid Edition) and I was running a film quiz for undergraduates in which I was struggling to strike the right balance between the many different forms of film appreciation typically seen in 18 year olds who have looked at a university prospectus and circled the page titled ‘film’ with intentional disregard for parental side-eye and any received social wisdom about ‘graduate employability’. (Although just so I’m not egging on this harmful stereotype, I should really point out that according to ONS employment data, students of media courses are really not much worse off than the scientists in this regard, Covid excepted).

I was trying to lighten the mood of online teaching, because I’d discovered that students are unanimously unfond of showing their faces or talking onscreen, which meant a whole lot of lecturing into a weird digital void of blank avatars and muted microphones. But later I considered the potential impact that statements like this one might have in the classroom. While it might seem universally evident that The Meg is not exactly high art, it’s an unforgivable fallacy to pit the amorphous notion of ‘art’ (what do I even mean? European independent cinema? Auteur cinema? New Hollywood?) against action cinema, blockbusters and mega co-productions. I was unintentionally invoking that false binary where ‘art’ becomes synonymous with ‘pretentious’, like a black and white film made after 1980, or a person who begins a blog by dissecting one of their own bullshit observations. What I wanted to get across to the students is the idea that all cultural texts are valid and interesting in their own contexts, but instead I ended up reinforcing the old art vs blockbuster cliché. Oh dear.

Film academics have written at length about how the ‘bad object’ (the action film, the exploitation horror, the romantic comedy – choose your fighter) is only considered to be a ‘bad object’ because of our inherited social assumptions about value, taste and distinction. Social meaning and artistic value in art is determined by the dominant culture, and this extends to all aspects of our cultural lives. Your grandparents had to suffer through Evelyn Waugh in school, and now so do you. Sorry about that, but you know, it really is good for you.

Various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences have spoken truth to the power of that lie by demonstrating that no one cultural form is better than any other, and that every text should be considered in its context. Film academics know that the mega-blockbuster about a giant shark is just as fascinating for what it can tell us about globalisation as for what it can tell us about the evolving visual style of the Hollywood action movie. Our cultural lives consist of a multiplicity of contested meanings (although in my darker moments, I have sometimes wondered if postmodernism was invented by academics to keep us all in work). And this is all perfectly wonderful. Isn’t it?

The Stath knows that hierarchies of cultural taste are inherited expressions of bourgeois ideals.

While I might enjoy some cultural forms more than others, in general I won’t see ‘good’ or ‘bad’ when I watch a film, only ‘hmm, interesting’. Slice me open and you’ll see ‘Cultural Studies’ engraved on my innards like the writing on a stick of Blackpool rock. But the problem is that non-academics probably weren’t there for the postmodern turn, and whilst in our everyday lives we might be continually surrounded by metanarratives and multiplicities of meanings, it is less clear how meaning, value and distinction might actually relate to film culture. Or to art in general.

Frameworks of inherited taste and distinction still determine how we think about the social value of film. Long tracking shots and characters having stilted conversations while internalising their pain are still held to be vaguely ‘arty’. On the other hand, frenetic edits, CGI and cluttered frames are considered to be ‘trashy’. But really, these things are all similarly predictable in their own generic ways. If we have seen Almodovar films, we have a fair idea of what we might get from the new Almodovar film. If we have seen Michael Bay films, we have an idea of what we might get from the new Michael Bay film. That is not to say that these things are equivalent, or that they are so generic as to be uninteresting, just that they operate according to specific and distinct cultural and artistic rules and frameworks. But how do we set the tone for our new undergraduates? Showing them all kinds of cinema is great, and on any film degree (including our degree at Hull) students will watch everything from European auteur cinema to Japanese horror to American exploitation films. But we should always be critical of how we curate that canon, particularly in the first year of any media or film degree. Showing students the classics, or the films we might find on Mubi… that’s good too, but it is also possible that these might be things they don't have much of a cultural framework for understanding. Only 3-6% of films shown in multiplex cinemas each year are non-English language films, which means that around 90+% of them must hail from either Britain or (as is usually the case) North America.

It is possible that many people growing up with British/Hollywood cinema as the most freely available form in their cultural diet may not understand the intertextual references in a Fellini film. That is not meant to sound patronising: it is simply that Fellini films hail from a cultural framework that is less familiar, and is therefore less well understood. But the relationship between cultural value and class in British society could mean that for some students this might be profoundly alienating, rather than just mildly frustrating. We are not always aware of the ways that cultural unknowingness can be internalised as class alienation, and so we should make clear to them that it's not by our own deficiencies that we do not understand a cultural reference. This is just another cultural tradition that hasn't yet been learned because we don't have a lot of space in our mainstream cinema for films by Italian auteurs. Hollywood action cinema, we know. Fellini, we generally don't.

… but whoa, we really should.

As the saying goes, ‘strangers are just friends we haven’t met yet’, and I believe that other cinemas are just cultural traditions that we haven’t met. Getting to know them is a joy, and we might even become lifelong friends. It is just unfortunate that I was in my mid-20s before I felt able to approach some of my favourite avant-garde directors in the spirit of friendship, rather than in the guise of a shy, lumpen impostor. And I worry that because of our inherited assumptions around class and cultural distinction, undergraduates who don't gel with films outside their cultural frameworks will just internalise that as ‘well, perhaps this is not for me’, or even worse, ‘well, I must not be very smart if I don't understand this *insert really fucking obscure classical mythology reference here*’. Ideally, the first thing we should teach students is that all culture is worth experiencing, and that all culture does its own particular thing, because unless we do then there’s a danger that in our selections we could be passing on a version of the art/trash binary that is reinforced by those sociological intersections where class hierarchies meet cultural taste.

Certain kinds of culture may be alienating for many reasons, and I have already mentioned what I consider to be the main reason: scarcity. Because they are not part of our everyday cultural conversations, there are many texts that we have to make a special effort to seek out, and it just so happens that the people who go to the effort of seeking them out tend to embody those cultural taste markers specific to the middle classes. Another reason why certain types of culture might be alienating is inscrutability. If we don’t understand a cultural reference in a film, that may be because we don’t understand the social world it originates from, or perhaps because we didn’t read the specific book/poem/play that the film is referencing as part of our own national curriculum. It may also be because the director is telling us something about their internal worldview that is so specific and unrelated to our shared human experience that few people would be able to understand it (this behaviour is what we might call ‘indulgent’, as in, speaking to the self and not to the viewer).

In those situations, we can actually end up going too far the other way, and seeing art and culture as purely an expression of class distinction with little value in and of itself. We may think: ‘surely this is all one big joke? Surely this thing that doesn’t make sense isn’t actually good?’ And if only we were all brave enough to call it what it is: utter wank! The emperor is wearing no clothes! Well, it’s true that sometimes he isn’t. But most of the time I would say that the emperor probably is wearing clothes. We just might lack a frame of reference for why he is wearing his shoes on his head and his underpants on his feet. But there is the class reproduction angle in all of this, and that’s why when we select films to teach from among the canonical greats we must be very careful, because the lesson we are teaching might be received as ‘here is what you should like, because the previous generation of cultural tastemakers liked it’ not ‘here is an exciting new friend that you haven’t met yet.’ In selecting and curating our canon we might also unintentionally be reinforcing the received social and cultural wisdom that is woven into our lives as they are defined by our social class: that ‘this behaviour is best’, that ‘this way of seeing the world is best’ and, even more damaging, that ‘you actually really want to belong to the class in society that actually watches this stuff’.

As a friend recently reminded me, dissing art is a privilege that you can only afford to claim if you present as privileged. If you do not present as privileged, this can actually be a huge risk. Without the accumulated social and cultural capital to say ‘I actually think Almodovar is shit, and Michael Bay is excellent’ there is a danger that members of your peer group might think your opinion is uninformed – that you are a philistine - and this can lead to losing the respect of your peer group. But, regardless of your starting point in life, if you are educated, if you can measure your legitimacy in the letters after your name, and if you can point to the published articles that stand as evidence, in black and white, that you really know what you’re talking about, then dissing art is not only a privilege: it is a sign of discernment.

If your position in life is less likely to be affected by an admission of ignorance, and if that admission of ignorance may even be taken as evidence of some kind of deep knowledge about culture and society – then that is a privilege. But really, anyone, anywhere, has exactly the same right to talk about how they responded to a cultural form, no matter what their background or level of education. Any feeling is an authentic response to art, and it’s wonderful to be able to share this feeling with others, free of judgment. We often find such value and ‘all-feelings-are-valid’-ness in fandom and fan communities (the supportive ones, anyway).

I am a mindful philistine because I want others like me to see the lie that kept my new friends locked behind those walls made of ‘not for me’ for such a long time. But in the end, I am a mindful philistine because, like many film scholars (and, hopefully, many film students), I can value the cultural, social, industrial, textual, aesthetic and sociological importance of watching Jason Statham punching a giant shark, in its giant head.