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<\/a><\/p>\nOne of my favorite phrases from Flannery O\u2019Connor is in her short story, \u201cA Good Man is Hard to Find,\u201d in which she describes the mother of the family, a passive and almost inert 1950s housewife, as having a face \u201cas broad and innocent as a cabbage.\u201d<\/p>\n
Innocence. It\u2019s what we try to protect in our children; it\u2019s taken to be cognate with goodness. We mourn the loss of some mythic \u201coriginal innocence.\u201d But O\u2019Connor shows it as looking like blankness. A vegetative state.<\/p>\n
Vegetables are innocent, and animals may be, but humans are not. I\u2019m not talking about original sin, here, by the way, but simply stating the reality that we are existentially alert to good and evil, and too frequently end up choosing evil, or maybe sort of bumbling into it. Wherever we go, we wreck things: our bodies, our relationships, our property, our planet. Our frantic scrambling after better bodily health, greener energy, are usually just races against the destructive energies our systems have already set in motion.<\/p>\n
This is not to say that our inclinations to protect our children are mistaken, or that we should just go ahead and rub their noses in grim human reality as soon as possible. If innocence is a state of not yet knowing how bad and difficult things can be, children should be able to pursue their innate curiosity and follow trails of wonder unperturbed by existential angst about death, or the realities of war and genocide.<\/p>\n
So, there is a time in life when \u201csafety\u201d means not only rules about playing in roads or taking candy from strangers, but also rules about what can and can\u2019t read or see. But then this time passes. The fledglings leave the nest. It\u2019s not so safe out there, but we do our best: we learn defensive driving techniques, get our immunizations, carry pepper spray in unsafe areas. And within whatever parameters of safety we choose to draw, we may also take risks: diving into abandoned quarries, smoking forbidden herbs, going home with intriguing strangers.<\/p>\n
And now we read the books that were withheld to us before. We can see whatever films we like, go to plays with full, in-real-life nudity. We can take it further, and go to strip clubs and sex shows. We can learn how to beat people up. Really smash their faces in.<\/p>\n
At some point, reasonable exploration of risk can turn into the sort of self-destruction mentioned above. People become drug addicts, porn addicts, sex addicts. Some are enamored of violence. And there are plenty of forms of destructiveness \u2013 capitalism, for instance \u2013 which are considered perfectly acceptable. Risk-takers who \u201ccreate\u201d (ha) wealth are praised.<\/p>\n
But how safe can we expect our life to be? How safe can we expect our art to be?<\/strong><\/p>\n I want to focus, for now, on the world in which art is made (I\u2019ll write, soon, about the world in which it is experienced).<\/p>\n In the history of art and artists, it\u2019s difficult to ignore how often great talent is coupled with difficult personality. Google \u201cwhy artists drink\u201d and the entries will go on and on. As an article in The Irish Times<\/a> points out:<\/p>\n Alcohol has played a central role in the creative lives of some of the most famous authors of the last few centuries. Lewis Hyde notes in his essay Alcohol and Poetry that four of the six Americans who have won the Nobel Prize for Literature were alcoholics, namely\u00a0William Faulkner<\/a>, Eugene O\u2019Neill,\u00a0Ernest Hemingway<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0John Steinbeck<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Walker Percy wrote a memorable essay on why writers, in particular, tend to be drunks: it has to do with knocking out the barrier between the left brain and the right brain. Yes, I think, and pour myself a generous bourbon on the rocks. He\u2019s right.<\/p>\n There are also articles that warn us that drinking in order to unlock creativity is not a great idea. It destroys talent, and sometimes lives. And while this is true, there seems to be some tragic mechanism at work that places talent in close proximity to a tendency to addiction and self-destructive behavior. This comes out in relationships, as well. It seems to be more difficult for artists to maintain stable relationships, even though the qualities required in an artist \u2013 empathy, discipline, love of beauty \u2013 would seem also to make for good relationships. I\u2019ve had discussions with other writer friends, though, about what sort of artist would be the worst in a relationship: painter? Musician? Fellow writer? Actor? There\u2019s an element of doom in every direction.<\/p>\n This topic of bad behavior and artists takes on a special importance right now, as we are learning more and more about abuses behind the scenes in Hollywood. Did we really<\/em> think this stuff wasn\u2019t going on? It\u2019s hard to connect art that one enjoys with violence and injustice, especially because art is supposed to be always on the side of justice. Tyrants silence the artists first for a reason.<\/p>\n A few days ago, a musician friend with whom I started an amateur theatre company, years ago, brought up the question: can art ever really be safe? Can art happen in safe spaces? Even in community theatre, there was so much emotional turmoil brought to the surface, yelling and melodrama, despair and self-hatred. Oh, yes, and we drank heavily. Our recycling bin, spilling over with PBR cans and cheap wine bottles, was a source of shame. There were hookups, too. That\u2019s the theatre life.<\/p>\n But there\u2019s a vast difference between two actors hooking up, on an equal footing \u2013 and Weinstein forcing women to perform sex acts. The question is, at what point do we start drawing lines, to keep the \u201cwild theatre life\u201d from turning into \u201crape culture\u201d?<\/p>\n And then there\u2019s bad art\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n Putting too much restraint on the artist ends up resulting in bad art, art in which a kind of middle-class morality gets enshrined, art in which the costumes can\u2019t even be period, because of cleavage. Where you\u2019re not allowed to explain the double entendres in Shakespeare, because some mythic innocence must be protected.<\/p>\n And I think this is because the role of art is not simply to affirm us in where we are at the moment, but to challenge our preconceptions and prejudices, to force us to look where we didn\u2019t want to look, to take in the entire scope of human depravity as well as heroic virtue. This is a challenge, ultimately, to any humanistic optimism, and even to the Christian belief in grace. You want to believe in the human spirit? Fine. Then let\u2019s be real about it.<\/p>\n So a certain pushing past the boundaries is necessary. But, to draw on an old Nietzschean distinction, one needs the Apollonian as well as the Dionysian. One needs restraint. In the film Black Swan<\/em>, we see an artist\u2019s navigation of these polar extremes: too disciplined, she makes art that is \u201cperfect\u201d yet somehow dead, dead as a marble statue. Once she taps into her dark side, out comes the wildness. Suddenly her art comes to life \u2013 but kills her, in the process.<\/p>\n Art without restraint is also bad art, though. Look at Tarantino\u2019s films, for instance: Pulp Fiction <\/em>was a masterpiece of grotesque comedy and violent grace, but then he got sloppy. You get the idea that he became fixated on his own power to depict monstrous, unbelievable violence and get away with it. It\u2019s implausible and pointless, but it\u2019s Tarantino, so it\u2019s okay. Everything is okay, for the artist.<\/p>\n Ann Hornaday, writing for the Washington Post, poses a theory about the dangers of the \u201cauteur\u201d \u2013 the powerful, usually male artist with a cult of personality and authority over his artistic underlings. In \u201cUma Thurman, Quentin Tarantino, and the costs of auteur worship<\/a>,\u201d she states:<\/p>\n \u201cSince the \u201cauteur theory\u201d was imported from France to the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the term has earned value as a marketing hook, not just for movies but for the men who make them: The mystique of Terrence Malick has prompted name actors to work on his films for relative peanuts, just for a chance to work for him \u2014 even if they risk ending up on the cutting-room floor. Up until now, Woody Allen has used a similar business model based on reflexive adoration, not just from actors but also loyal audiences who can be relied upon to see whatever movie he makes, even if it\u2019s a tired rehash of his cardinal themes of death, moral culpability, sexual insecurity, alienation.<\/p>\n Whether it\u2019s Malick and Allen or David Lynch, Martin Scorsese and Wes Anderson, auteurs count on their audiences to internalize the filmmaker\u2019s anxieties, fetishes, fears and appetites, and take them on as our own. As often as not, those preoccupations are benign \u2014 and can be illuminating and provocative when they\u2019re artfully plumbed.<\/p>\n