Death of Creativity II: Director, Actors and Audience Need to Work Together

Reading both the Tribune and the NY Times today and was struck by stories reporting film directors being concerned about the levels of violence in the films they make...but are resigned to it because they are "commercial" and in the end they must produce what sells.  Studios demand a payoff for their massive investments.  The directors wish it was different...but...

We knew Bane was bad.  Did he have to annihilate an entire stadium full of people to prove it?  Or could we have figured it out?  How did we ever know that Scorpio was truly bad...OK...a couple of long-distance murders and a buried kidnap victim...but it was not until he hijacked that school bus full of children and menaced them (because we knew he was a killer from before) and put the audience on edge that we all were rooting for Harry to give him a third eye!

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xmj714_school-bus-from-dirty-harry-1971_shortfilms

Yes...1971...yes there was violence...but it was not the wholesale destruction we get today.  Point is this...Don Siegal (Director, Dirty Harry) had to build the tension throughout the theater throughout the first two acts.  Scorpio was bad.  Harry was always a step behind him.  Would he vanish like the real-life Zodiac (now there is an alternate history idea)?  Would Harry catch him without losing yet another partner? (Sardonic Humor) Would justice be served?  It took work...a lot of creative work to get there.  At any point the film could have slid into formula (yes, I know there was a formula...Harry would get the Scorpio in the end...and yes, Harry would stay true to his Avenger creed of being the instrument of the audience's justice) and become a parody.

Of course, it helped that Siegal (and Harry) had an audience with an attention span of more than 45 seconds.

But, what Don Siegal did with the help of the ever-internalizing Clint Eastwood was a lot of work...directing and acting work.  Even Andrew Robinson (Scorpio) didn't call in what could have been an otherwise stereotypical nut-case.  His Scorpio was slobbering, drooling insane...and clever.

Now I am not suggesting that Heath Ledger's Joker wasn't spot on.  It was...and honestly, that issue of the Batman trilogy was so strong because of the menacing nature of the character and his threat.  And that made it a more intense film experience.

OK...which is more terrifying...the shadow of Norman Bates on the shower curtain?  Or the stabbing itself?

Menace takes work.

Destroying a fair chunk of downtown Chi/Gotham requires a lot of technical work...and certainly Nolan is great here on the technical stuff.  But, how hard does the audience have to think?  Everything is laid out on a platter so that even the most uninspired can get it.  Oh...he blows up a stadium full of people...he must be really bad! 

"Blockbuster" films feed us existential threats.  Bane will destroy all of Gotham for the sheer (paradox here?) nihilistic pleasure of it.  But, cartoonish as he was, Goldfinger did not want to destroy the planet.  He wanted to rule it!

And, a lot of what we get is because of the rush for profit.  These films make money precisely because they do not demand the audience to stay engaged with the plot.  I call them "popcorn burners."  This rush forces the filmmakers to appeal to the most basic and obvious human emotions and driving forces...survival against overwhelming odds, sex, violence, conflict and anger.  Yet the core of the human being is often ignored because of the need for one more car chase...one more monumental blast.  The actors work hard, but often they are merely decorations around the edges (or perhaps in the center) of one more action sequence. 

These films ultimately are easy (and I am not talking about FX)...and are truly formulaic...and nothing really new...consider how the old style Westerns were cranked out.  Peaceful setting...small town...bad guys show up...shoot up town, rob bank, kill honest, but kind of creaky old sheriff (town has been so peaceful that the job was a sinecure..see Andy Griffith without gun-play)...noble young man vows over the not too bloody but certainly dead sheriff to avenge the death...but, he has a conflict...the good-looking daughter of the store-keeper wants to see him in one piece and so has made him vow never to strap on a gun...so he walks it off...baddies return and harass her (maybe even rip her dress!) and beat up her Dad (maybe shoot or stab him...but if it is a knife, has to be someone greasy looking), but not fatally..daughter is distraught over both her virtue and her father...now the avenging angel arrives...and we see strength and leadership and nobility of purpose as our (now) hero proceeds to eradicate the bad guys with dynamite bombs and finally a flood caused by a blown beaver dam upstream from their hideout!  No guns...so he gets the girl...and the baddies are once-again removed from the scene...oh...and the noble Sancho-Panza best friend gets to be the next sheriff as our hero and the storekeeper's daughter are married and leave town in a buckboard off into the setting sun. (Note...best friend could also not make it to the final reel because he takes a bullet because our 'hero' won't stand up when the bad guys come back to hit the General Store.)  Sound a bit like the latest?

Only when the Batman and Alfred are alone together on the screen do we suddenly get the sense that this is something more than one more Ninja movie (replete with the heroic nobility).

Where does the Batman's loneliness come from?

I do feel a bit like Justice Stewart who said famously about porn "I know it when I see it."  Got the same situation with creativity.  Consider these films as markers of true creativity:  Inception, Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Rear Window, Headhunters (Norwegian), Bob le Flambeur, The Professional, Ronin, The Raid:  Redemption.  Even if some are violent beyond belief, these movies establish an intimacy with the audience.  You cannot view these films without being involved in the plot.  If you ignore development, you will be lost.  You cannot follow.

But you do not need insane violence...existential destruction...to understand that the bad guy in The Headhunters (go see it...the movie is set in Norway, not in the jungles of New Guinea) is really awful.  Wait for this scene...the one AFTER the bad guy has slammed the police car off the road using a stolen 18-Wheeler (violence...but all core to the plot...in fact everything fits into the plot...everything)...when he comes to the destroyed vehicle and checks out the bodies.  Tension and menace. And it is very up close and personal.  Remember to breathe.

The audience has to work as hard as the directors and the actors.  That is the creative process.  Otherwise, what is it that you are creating?  Or are you following the old Roman formula which knows that as long as the Lions win over the Christians, the Audience leaves with a smile and forgets just how crappy their lives have become.  Bread and Circuses...the old equation that keeps the Patricians somewhat secure from the rest of the population learning who has picked their pockets.

The Death of Creativity?

On my quest for the inner heart of American creativity, I have started reading "The Book of Tea" by Kakuzo Okakura.  This was a book first published in 1906 when Okakura was a curator at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.  My copy is a bit more recent (1989).

Now you may ask why a book by a visitor to the United States should place so prominently in any quest for the roots of American creativity.  If you research the American modernists (artists like O'Keeffe, Dove, Hartley) fostered by Alfred Stieglitz you will discover that many of them were profoundly affected by this simple little book.  Maybe it was their reaction to the acceleration of American life as Europe committed suicide in World War I.  And after the United States emerged from the war as the dominant economic power, the pace only moved faster.

They needed a pool of tranquility into which to peer as they searched for new ways to interpret the world around them.  Recall that O'Keeffe literally stopped painted for two years as the second decade crept toward its midpoint because she felt she could not do original work, rather copying the forms and styles "proven" by Europeans and "approved" by art critics.  This little book on tea and the structure the cult of tea imposed on the two dominant Asian societies China and Japan offered a new path, perhaps with a bit of Tao and Zen, to a new way of looking at the world.

And so they did find that way.  And, in the process, I am convinced, these artists and writers and filmmakers and composers and choreographers developed forms which each of us can "get" as something which is uniquely American.  But, this creativity took time and a lot of staring into those dark areas of the soul...not seeking sadness or guilt...but rather looking for that which had been hid in the process of creating an American soul.  And it was found in the richness of the land and of the people.

Most of the seeds had been planted and had sprouted by the time the United States had closed its borders in 1924 to the unlimited immigration that had fed the American industrial revolution of the 1880s forward.  As it was, the War had cut most immigration to a trickle, so there were fewer newcomers and those who had arrived previously were swiftly being submerged into the American stream.  Most of these immigrants had been the poorest of their peoples, the ones with nothing to leave behind...and certainly the ones who had done little to influence the cultural norms that were characterized by the elites of their states.  But what they brought to the United States was a vitality and folk sensibilities which leavened the American loaf.

O'Keeffe was Irish/Hungarian.  John Ford was a first generation Irish-American.  Aaron Copland's father emigrated from Russia.  Others like Ansel Adams and John Steinbeck were children of first or second-generation Californians who had put down roots in the Golden State before Frederick Jackson Turner declared the frontier closed forever in 1893. Martha Graham was a relative late-comer to California, but her parents, too, left Pennsylvania for the West sometime after 1910. These, too, were immigrants of sorts, those who abandoned the predictability of the East for the possibilities of the West.

But all found an anchor in something which we today can identify as American culture.  Not something translated from British norms or French and German techniques of opera or impressionism or nihilism.  They found America in its hills and valleys and cities and people and told these stories using abstract impressionism on canvas or in bronze or sonic riffs which characterized the work of another immigrants' child, George Gershwin.  Some argue that Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby tells the American story of the 1920s.  Maybe so, but Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath is a true sequel exploring the fruit borne by the vines so planted in the 1920s.  An American "gets" it.  "An American in Paris" or "Appalachian Spring" when performed in Berlin will sound "American" to one raised in Lawrence Kansas or another brought up in Eugene, Oregon.  But, to the German ears in the audience, while beautiful, it will not transport them to the same place as their American counterparts.

And these masters arrived at their greatness slowly, with contemplation, looking through that shimmering curtain of quiet and concentration which was discussed in that little "Book of Tea."  And that solicitude and calm is what we may have lost in the process of achieving our own speeding modernity.

"The masters are immortal, for their loves and fears live in us over and over again. It is rather the soul than the hand, the man than the technique, which appeals to us,--the more human the call the deeper is our response."  Okakura,  Kakuzo"The Book of Tea", Part V Art Appreciation  accessed from http://www.sacred-texts.com/bud/tea.htm on July 25, 2012.

Two Weeks In and a Beginning

You know...my actual birthday is July 13th...but I am looking at July 1 as my 59th birthday because that is when it changed...the day I returned from New Mexico.  Since then, I've been grading...but also reading and revisiting.    Fighting to keep fit.  Riding 4 days-a-week. To pull back, claw back that which I never really had.  I will admit that I started this about 6-7 weeks ago before Santa Fe.

Santa Fe...the workshop with the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Me...an American History instructor from a community college there in Georgia O'Keeffe's refuge...the land which was her soul.  A journey meant to illuminate one of the more creative spirits of the last century...a remarkable woman who discovered that the greatest loss for her  was to compromise artistic vision  on the altar of the critics' views.  She shed it all...the New York determinism...Stieglitz' monumental disloyalty which sapped her strength...and came to New Mexico where the horizon is closer to heaven.

I came away with a different sense of my time and place, with the belief that there are corners I have yet to turn and sights I've yet to see.

And maybe that's the message of Santa Fe for me.  What has been need not always be.  That this year is one of change, of transition.  The face I see in the mirror is a veil draped over something yet to be carved from tat timber I have spent 59 years growing.  This year will take me from where I have been rooted for too many years into higher meadows where the shadows are crisper, the colors stronger and my own place becomes more defined.