New Voice

In my last post I mentioned Lars Von Triers, and the hostility his films provoke. Bryan Appleyard, in last week’s Sunday Times, went on at length about how provoked he was by Antichrist. What quite provoked Appleyard’s hostility was a little difficult to pinpoint – he didn’t like the explicit violence, the nastiness, and he wasn’t sure whether or not it should have been given its 18 uncut rating, as he isn’t quite sure about the whole rating thing. But it wasn’t that, it wasn’t the violence that left him “insensate with rage,” although he spent quite a bit of the article talking about the violence and nastiness. No, it was that the film was bad, and a display of “undergraduate cynicism” – clearly the worst kind of cynicism, or indeed the worst kind of anything – undergraduate appears as a pejorative more than once in this article. A skip ahead to the movie reviews in the Culture section reveals a selection of movies such as Fired Up (a film about a summercamp for cheerleaders), Hannah Montana The Movie and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, none of which, it seems, have moved Mr Appleyard to vandalise his local Oddbins. But then none of the “sucker” arthouse crowd are going on about Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen, at least not in public anyway. Part of Mr Appleyard’s problem is that Antichrist is bad (Appleyard tends toward the declarative), but there are a lot of bad movies out there. His problem is that it has pretensions – indicated by it’s dedication to Andrei Tarkovsky – to art. Unacceptable, of course, and worse than that, the arthouse crowd, presumably armed with their undergaduate degrees, are talking about it as art. So, as well as an exposition of the chips on Mr Appleyard’s shoulders, it basically comes down to the age-old argument about what constitutes art, a debate I thought was flushed down the toilet by Duchamp et al. Anyway, Appleyard, by virtue of the fact that he is writing about it, as opposed to any of the films mentioned above, or any of the plethora of pretentious undergraduate films made each year, elevates the importance of the film and the filmmaker beyond the rest. Von Triers, in his films, attempts to provoke a reaction, and I imagine, to instigate a debate, and Mr Appleyard has been provoked to react and to take part in the debate – suckered into it, as he might say himself.
In my view, good or bad, that a film can achieve this, or even attempts to achieve this (and by this I mean not just a reflex, visceral reaction but a debate, and indeed a considered deabte) is, surely, refreshing. And if Von Triers attempts this by resorting to undergraduate cyncism, surely this is preferable to the commercial, marketing-led cynicism that inspires the relentless conveyer belt of bland, American teen movies and romantic comedies.

In my last post I also touched on the curious idea of realism, and quoted a line from Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, that mentioned the uneasy relationship between ideas and realism. I have been reading Saul Bellow’s short (ish) stories of late and, as James Woods argues in the introduction, Bellow in fact is a writer who managed very well to combine both ideas and realism. In fact Bellow’s writing is essentially about fusion – America and Europe, Ideas and Realism, High and Low and so on. Bellow’s stories, so rich in detail, and especially physical detail generally eschew what Amis has someone describe somewhere in The Information (I did try to find this line, but it’s a big book and the golf is on) as the necessary getting from A to B. A concession to realism that Richard Tull is unwilling to make in his ’difficult’ novel.
Woods argues: “His prose is densely “realistic,” yet it is hard to find in it any of the usual conventions of realism or even storytelling. His people do not walk out of the house and into other houses – they are, as it were, tipped from one recalled scene to another – and his characters do not have obviously “dramatic” conversations. It is almost impossible to find in these stories sentences along the lines of “He put down his drink and left the room.” These are at once traditional and very untraditional stories, both “archaic” and “radical”.” (Collected Stories, xvii)

It could be argued that this represents the position that Bellow finds himself in – an urban Canadian-American, (maybe not, like Augie March, “Chicago born” but a Chicagoan certainly), but rooted in an archaic European tradition, an intellectual concerned with the rythms and cadences of the American street.
But that’s enough undergraduate waffling for one week, I’m off to watch the golf.