Something Thoughtful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.  

QUALITY OR IDEOLOGY?

Here’s a very old problem that some critics seem never to have wrestled with.

When you judge a work of fiction (be it short-story, novel, film or TV series) do you assess it for what it says, or do you assess it for how well it says what it says? In other words, do you praise a work of fiction by how much you agree with its ideas and to hell with the quality of its prose or production? Or do you praise it for the quality of its prose or production and to hell with its ideas, whatever they may be? I’ve dealt with this problem before on this blog. To be precise, when reviewing Henry de Montherlant’s tetralogy Pitie Pour Les Femmes back in 2014, I wrote the following:

“I resist vigorously the notion that fiction should be praised or blamed solely in terms of the values it expresses. The sort of criticism that concentrates on morality and values alone will rapidly become the sort of criticism that is really promoting propaganda. I am a socialist or a feminist or an agnostic or a  Christian. Therefore I endorse literature that advances the cause of socialism or feminism or agnosticism or Christianity. Should I adopt this approach, I will end up praising the second-rate because it confirms those values which I already profess; and decrying much worthwhile work because it does not share my world view. I sometimes think of this approach to literature as the high-school approach, because the main emphasis of many high-school English teachers is to give their classes novels that will promote healthy attitudes, “improving” novels that teach tolerance and gender equity and justice and so forth. A good scheme for advancing a peaceable society, perhaps, but a very bad way to approach literature if you have got beyond the classroom …And yet, having said all this, I am as wary of the approach which concentrates solely on aesthetics. Let us look at Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s dense prose, let us consider how he piles detail on detail, let us analyse his fascinating mixture of classical and demotic phraseology – oh, and let’s just not happen to notice his nihilism, the frankly loopy ideas he endorses and his rampant anti-Semitism. If the values-fixated approach to criticism leads to the endorsement of propaganda, the aesthetics-fixated approach leads to a sterile art-for-art’s-sake mindset, which detaches literature from the world around it. It is the talent, skill or genius of the writer as a writer that makes the writing competent, very good or brilliant. We should always be responding to, and judging, the words on the page. But what the writer is promoting, advancing, criticising, in sympathy with or satirising in fiction also has to be considered.

As a critic or reviewer, I should be able to say sometimes that, while I approve of a novel’s outlook, it is nevertheless a very bad piece of writing.  Conversely, I might sometimes have to say that something is outstandingly good as a piece of writing, but that its implicit moral values are defective.”

That is what I wrote eight years ago, and I’m still sticking with it.

Why am I resurrecting this old material? Because recently I saw a gross example of a film widely over-praised, I believe, for its ideology without much real scrutiny of its aesthetic merit.

I ask you to control yourselves here. Please don’t collapse with the vapours, as I’m about to commit heresy.

I thought Jane Campion’s film  The Power of the Dog was itself a dog - dull, plodding, poorly paced, manipulative and in part wilfully obscure. I know it won Jane Campion an Oscar as best director. I know it was highly praised by the great majority of reviewers and critics world-wide. As a New Zealander I know it’s very unpatriotic of me not to praise a New Zealand director and to be so negative about a film which was largely filmed in Otago and Auckland. Obviously I’m committing treason as well as heresy. But there it is. I have this awful habit of making my own judgements on things rather than following a trend.

If you haven’t seen it, here’s a curt synopsis.

1920s in Montana. Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a nasty piece of work – a rancher who bullies and belittles people. He bullies his sister-in-law Rose (Kirsten Dunst) so badly that Rose becomes an alcoholic. He bullies the local Native-Americans by not letting them buy the surplus hides he’s about to destroy, so he’s also racist. Most of all, he bullies Rose’s son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) whom he sees as weak and effeminate. He shows his nastiness when he callously burns the pretty paper flowers Peter has made to decorate the table. Hiss the villain folks.

Phil is macho, aggressive and racist. Therefore he is the model of toxic masculinity. But he’s also single. An unmarried man. Hmm. That’s suspicious. Aha! Peter spies on Phil and discovers Phil is actually homosexual, fixated on his relationship with a cow-poke he knew years ago. Clearly he once slept with his cow-poke buddy. So that explains it neatly. Phil is a bully and a thug and excessively macho because he’s suppressing who and what he really is. He’s punishing effeminate Peter as atonement for his own sexuality. And he is irredeemable.

Solution? After Phil has messed up the lives of both Rose and Peter, Peter (who is studying medicine and toxicology) works out a way to poison Phil with anthrax and without being suspected of murder. So Peter kills Phil, the bully is dead and Peter smiles at what he has done. Happy ending.

Now lets admit that this synopsis could have made an interesting film. But let’s also note that it falls apart both in terms of its ideas and in aesthetic terms.

Its minimalist musical score was hailed as a deliberate riposte to the standard grandiose scores that accompanied old Westerns. The Power of the Dog is intentionally an “anti-Western”. Regrettably the much-praised score is bland and forgettable. The film’s pace is leaden – everything played slowly, much vague camera movement, redundant shots of farmhands. And in spite of moving as slowly as a stranded chuck-wagon, it still manages to be wilfully obscure in places. More than one viewer told me that they couldn’t work out exactly what happened at the end because Peter cutting up strands of hide to make a belt wasn’t clearly related to infecting Phil with anthrax. Some who watched it on Netflix, rather than at the movies, said they had to watch the last quarter-hour twice before making any sense of it.

And the film’s ideas? In the end, it is of course justifying murder. Annoyed by a bully? Okay – kill him. Problem solved. As for the critique of “toxic masculinity” – do you really believe that all macho thugs and bullies and racists are suppressed gay guys? Some may be, but it’s highly unlikely that the great majority are. So what does the film’s diagnosis of Phil really tell us? Very little, because it’s dealing with an unrepresentative specimen.

My beef here is my strong suspicion that The Power of the Dog was over-praised by critics determined to show they opposed toxic masculinity – a current simplistic and modish preoccupation. A prime example of a film being praised for ideology rather than merit.

How DARE I say these things when the critical consensus was so favourable?

Because I do dare, that’s why.