ON TAR ART

Live or die, life is really short and it’s meant to be lived. Everyone gets to choose and never give up. I’ve been on airplanes millions of miles everywhere. It’s my passion. You get on a plane that is going towards the unknown and you are told that you are welcome. That’s when I feel alive. I have met many people, some of them have stayed in my life, and some have not. You shouldn’t be afraid of life; you should live it with a smile and courage. You never know when the last day will be.

an online post

When the British playwright and screenwriter David Hare was meeting with Steven Spielberg sometime after the release of the film The Hours, which he had written, Spielberg said to him confessedly: “Everyone knows you have written the best screenplay of the year”, after which the renowned director looked down. It was in that moment Hare realised that he had not received Steven Spielberg’s vote for the Academy Award for the best screenplay of the year.

Now that the worst of awards presented to film are over for another year, some universal truths remain and are nowhere as noticeable as in how Tár, the film written and directed by Todd Field, dwindled away with hardly any of the more prestigious trophies in its wake. This is not to say that the impact of this highly ambitious and artistic film – both features to elicit frowns and uncomfortableness – cannot be felt even after many days of seeing it. As a piece of cinema, Tár, like its eponymous central character, stands alone, not entertaining enough to relax its viewer and not poetic enough to permit a full dismissal upon seeing it. For those who have become aware of the film merely as a cultural curiosity it represents exactly the kind of target for unbridled anger we have come to expect from cinematic art, now more than ever, when our universe is in constant danger and needs periodic rescuing from superhuman beings. What, says the moviegoer, to watch a lesbian conductor do what? What for?

Tár, like all great works of art, is about many things and hardly any of them are explicitly on its surface. It is simply not possible to walk away from it spouting conclusions such as life-affirming, tragic, gorgeous and mysterious, without the awareness of a more buried uneasiness undoing any full take on the experience. No sigh of relief for this work, no ‘putting cinema to its place’ without the guilt from a tendency to unculture oneself; to not have to face the world of contradictions or the questions (all of the deeper questions) still unanswered. In a word, no escaping from art. When a powerful work of art is presented to the public it is rarely met with universal praise or an immediate acceptance, because artistic expression – real, deep-seededartistic expression – cannot be met with indifference or banality. It can be banned and constricted, but to have a real take on it one would have to – heaven forbid – take a closer look, and in this act the socially acceptable veil of an approach to art (when so much of it is now restricted to demonetised no-longer-than-a-minute appearances to be glimpsed, swiped and forgotten) starts immediately to come down. Similarly, when a person is truly heard, and this is naturally one of the themes of Tár, only two things remain, a recognition through empathy and the stubbornness of a refusal.

To ignore the highest form of cinematic art is akin to refusing to see the world as it is. By saying no to a work of art the consumer (of culture, of life) is choosing a less cultured path, something to contain an ultimately boundless existence, and puts an importance on a hierarchy that is there to comfort and to lull to sleep, in shifting variations, but never far from the underlying message that art is in its place to service a society and the values within, and never the other way around. When a film such as Tár comes along, this agreement is in immediate danger of starting to disintegrate in the mind of the viewer. Watching a film seems an activity simple enough, safe even, and yet there are occasions when something outside of control starts emerge, the near-lifeless undercurrent starts to move, and at last the voice of an artist is heard. It pierces through political discourse, conversations about opportunity and rights, the truth about what remains important, through infrastructure and culture itself, and finally reaches the heart of the matter, morality. It is here that the greatest danger of all is revealed. The protecting and seemingly benevolent forces that run all the way through to the most revered institutions in a society (therewithin the ‘message’ to the masses) start to tremble with the slightest suspicion of art running wild, and while recent developments would suggest that the acceptance of the artist is gaining more footing than before, certainly in Western countries, this is quickly being replaced by the story of a societal awakening, of a country correcting its course, and hereupon the appeasement of any and every neglected sector of artistic people, now indistinguishable from other neglected groups, and the qualified critic who is inseparable from the one who simply gathers a following.

Nowhere is this take on art present as vividly as in the American film industry. The existential struggle that is ravaging through it on every level is narrowing many of its freer qualities, among them the celebration of art for art’s sake. The cultural shift has taken on such politically subverting elements that there is now one question to settle before all others: to remain American through and through, how can cinematic art continue to be a part of its surrounding society? To this day the greatest outcome of this struggle, still universally seen and heard, is the Academy Award for the best film of the year. I have no desire to take a stance here on whether films are political, since all art in one form or another is political, but to define the grievous destiny of cinema more accurately, it can be said that as much as artistic work remains political and in dialogue with the political forces of a society, it is equally a reflection of the kind ofpolitical environment that surrounds it. To remain free in one’s art, there are ultimately only two routes to take. Either the work is subjected to a specific political goal, however vague in detail, or the political discourse is made aware of itself, not only by criticising it, but by creating art powerful enough to illuminate the flaws of a unified vision for the world.

But what does it mean to step away from society itself? In the first place, the artist refuses whatever notion is given as the way things should be. This is no small feat, for if we keep with our example of the most dominating form of them all, the American art, to turn away from or to even show indifference towards a literally potent, unrivalled industry (as with entertainment, so with military), one is turning away from the American exceptionalism and the American dream, its liberal forces, its joys and abundant gifts, the promise of a unified world under one banner, and to a certain extent from behaviour and morality itself. Artistic work that refuses to show what should be and instead turns its focus on what is cannot be celebrated by a culture that is more concerned with an image and an impact on the world than on an authentic view of what there is behind a press conference pamphlet, and this is true of most Western cultures. The time we are living is terrible for art for art’s sake, because a social stranglehold is now forbidding financial forces from finding interest in the complexity of human life, and instead a light is shone on the relentlessly redeeming qualities of it; a heroine must rise, lost connections must be mended, forgotten truths remembered, obstacles overcome, and all human complexities resolved. In a phrase, good must continue to prevail. From here we return to Tár.

Todd Field’s third film has mostly been criticised for being pretentious and brooding, and this reaction culminates in the reception of the acting by Cate Blanchett. Works of art that address directly one or two of the inconveniencies that are present in the act of viewing itself are periodically pushed back and criticised for doing precisely this. When a film begins to communicate on the level of the awareness the viewer is having about the ongoing viewing, reactions are bound to be varied. It is easy to ironize this exchange, and the latter period of cinema is noticeably full of irony. In some ways this is an era of entertainment that can only be described as ironic, when budgets and brutalities are beyond comprehension, and the ever-expanding ‘messages’ are those of security, salvation, awareness, and acceptance. But when a film does not make a mockery of its thematic depth, when it doesn’t shield itself against the ironizing gaze, but rather opens up to represent a simple channel for conflicting human responses, when it neither shakes up nor pacifies, it has the potential of turning into an occurrence of a truly artistic experience. Among the many unspoken agreements the public is now having with cinema is that it can represent life in all kinds of ways but not become a part of life. Sitting in a movie theatre is still by and large an escape from something unbearable by itself, and however briefly, perpetual hope descends to eradicate a looming responsibility, and a life without art. Tár is a film that by all accounts cannot be enjoyed completely personally, and in fact it can be argued that this is one of its objectives, in other words, the refusal of anypersonal relief. The judging eye is put to the test, and the work of art finally stares back, as if to say, “This is what you are, no more than this, no less”.

Another point of contention though less frequently articulated is the intelligence of Tár. Popular artistic entertainment puts itself at risk by becoming intelligent, and the intelligent actor is the bearer of disappointment felt by the offended viewer. Thinking is still largely unacceptable activity in a movie theatre, and thoughts that are not easily articulated, worse still the ones that need illuminatingrather than verbal expression, eat away at the promised sense of comfort one is meant to experience before anything else. Artists the world over are accused of making a point about creating art, and this is faithfully presented to them as though the thought had never occurred to them in the first place, but a finished work that can withstand the entirety of accusations is closer to a monumental existence in a literal sense; not separate to the experience the shorts-wearing, phone-operating obedient tourist is having at the pyramids of Egypt or the Colosseum. There are moments when the ridiculousness of the endeavour rushes to the head, and the following thoughts are inevitable: What are we doing with these ruins, what is the point of them? What if we simply blew them to bits and carried on with our lives? Who would suffer from it? Ancient Egyptians? Romans? Once again, these are themes of Tár. Artistically speaking, the film is at its highest when depicting the preciousness of art, the obsession surrounding it, and the three letters easily rearranged to ridicule and obliterate it. It speaks as much to radical student theatres as it does to the concert-going public, but only a great artist, someone at the absolute peak of their craft, is able to communicate within that sweet spot, where art is both revered and frowned upon, without the viewer ever being absolved with a ruling. In the marriage of Todd Field and Cate Blanchett this resonant force is present in rare form.

The arrangement of counter forces in Tár is truly all-encompassing: women composers and conductors, lesbians, European life, high art, wealth, languages, exotic landscapes, psychology, female relationships, nazis – one building block after another saying to the man holding the financial reins: no, no, no, and for the last time, no. And yet the images that linger in mind days after seeing the film are of ordinary quality, more allied with how the experience of the world has now become to millions of people, to the vast mass that can now travel, enjoy culture and the arts, and have every opinion about life – in short, a vision of luxurious banality. We see a person coming home wheeling a suitcase late at night, we see corridors of hotels, we see an exotic waterfall, we see calming rivers, we see Berlin in all its worn-out polyphony, we see concert halls, European cafés, parks, good-looking and well-dressed people wrapped in thought, and things, things and more things. This multitude of things is what keeps Tár from becoming a purely elitist work. The viewer is the continuation of Lydia Tár, flawed and in a sense having accidentally stumbled into the world of classical music, eventually being held captive by the assigned position – as the conductor, as the film critic – and yearning for some kind of relief, of humanity even, where titles and past failings can finally wash away to reveal a person like any other, with as much potential for love and destruction as anyone. A film that can communicate to all levels of society in such expansive ways is popular art in the truer sense. Upon seeing it, Tár can be denounced, but it cannot be diminished in its effectiveness. It is the cinematic equivalent of a citizen stopped walking through a busy metropolis by a sudden political or humanitarian plea. Nothing quite hits the tax-paying consuming body like a foreign cry for assistance. In this shared understanding, in this intelligence, lies our real predicament. The viewer cannot help the opinion forming, as Lydia Tár cannot help being the great artist and behaving as such, and there is no unaffected state to return to anymore, for to denounce anytake on the film is to denounce one’s own intelligence, the very core of human existence and the source of cinematic art, among other things.

What I have wanted to say in this essay is that while there has been universal praise for the film Tár, there is something to be said about the fact that at the greatest film event of them all it was all but neglected. Not one Academy Award was presented to this film, and I cannot think that it didn’t have something to do with the seemingly more challenging aspects of it, with its unapologetic mixture of simplicity and complexity, of artistic and of decrepit, of East and West, and of being neither here nor there, and the greatest sin of them all, of not being about one universally understandable thing, or the kinds of things films are meant to be about, such as the importance of family, realizing one’s own value, making amends, overcoming insurmountable obstacles, finding a voice, etc. Surely a popular film cannot only be about art? But there it is, an artistic film like none before it, one not produced by recycling what is soothing or shocking to the moviegoer’s mind, but rather by pushing to the front that which is unpopular and nevertheless unquestionably still there, like the event from our past we wished to forget so badly we nearly succeeded at it over many years, until for whatever reason and quite disagreeably it surfaces again, forcing us to bear the entirety of our failings, of still remaining human despite our perfected story. But for all the film’s rawness, Tár is perhaps most surprisingly not unpleasant. (Another stroke of incredible artistic luck.) On the contrary, its viewing is mostly an enjoyable experience, and furthermore powerful in that it manages to introduce a character that has been missing not only in cinema but more pathologically in the attentive political discourse at large, and by default the consciousness of the citizen: the fearful, uncertain leader.

The discomfort felt at morally ambiguous deeds are no more than the fears of the experiencing witness manifested. We are unnerved by bad behaviour and simultaneously drawn to it, and a story that succeeds both at giving us space to purse our lips and position our noses for a downwards lookand simultaneously awaken our bloodthirst is worth the price of admission alone. Consider the climax of Tár, where our floundering protagonist charges the stage of a concert hall and pushes the substituting conductor down from the podium. What could be more inappropriate? What more embarrassing? How could anyone have misjudged their response so completely? And still, Lydia Tár isn’t entirely wrong. Even here, when her struggle for art is at its most absurd, her actions are not unrecognisable. Who hasn’t thought about what it would be like to conduct an orchestra or do anything in front of a full concert hall, inappropriate or otherwise? In addition to this, the greater themes of the film are revealed in this scene. This is what wewant from an artistic experience, this what we expect from a civilised society; an evening of classical music must be a safe space, certainly after tickets have been bought and behaviour fitted to the occasion.

Tár brings to mind two films of somewhat equal substance, Black Swan and The Square, but the main difference here is a lack of terror and an addition of empathy. The company of Lydia Tár is not altogether unpleasant, and at moments it is the very opposite of this. At the end she gets nothing less than what she deserves, and she bears her fate finally with surprising dignity. After the unbearable Europeanness and a few glimpses of New York, Tár is cast off to two locations where high art isn’t – at least not in the sense in which we consider it. Both places are interestingly left undefined. First we see the conductor return to her humble American beginnings in a detached suburban house, firstly to rekindle her love of music and conducting with VHS cassettes and in the next moment to be brutalised by her unsympathetic brother calling her Linda – again, when is the particular dynamic of families of artistic people ever discussed? –, and finally Lydia Tár leaves her Western surroundings entirely and ends up living, and conducting, in an unspecified Asian country. There are a few references to Marlon Brando, but otherwise we could be anywhere from India to Indonesia, at least to the forever-traveling eye. It is hard to think of a more appropriate ending if one wanted to pull the rug from under the all-knowing, all-seen cultured audience who has at long last concluded that it has been watching a film about somebody unknown to it. And then without warning the ultimate discomfort falls upon the viewer. A tropical landscape fills the screen, no language is understood anymore, and the way in which most people on the planet have been living all along, with very little prospects of change, is simply dropped to silence a self-important voice. All of this is pretention, of course, we have not left our comfortable cinema seats, and the difficult question about human value lingers to unite those who have never seen life outside a Western city, and those who dreamed of making it to be big city and sometimes in this process left their home countries far behind, the environmentally savvy and the pure consumer alike, all are united by the awareness of a paradoxical, counter-intuitive world we must share in one way or another, one which cannot really be discussed away nor made sense of with a soothing turn of a phrase. This world can only be looked at, and in this undertaking there remains no greater approach than art.

Joining in anger

It is not that Joe Rogan and Jewel sat together and that after the eleventh “holy shit” out of the mouth of Rogan the American society was more enlightened, taken care of, covered with a wisdom that could have been self-explanatory but was dependent upon those that had suffered, had become rich and successful, and were now cutting through a shared experience with the clearest eye and a trademarked understanding on human psychology and educational needs. There they were: Jewel and Joe. Joe and Jewel. It wasn’t the communion of these two voices soaring above whatever the average American was going through while it was happening. It wasn’t the story of the suffering. There was no American story that could be told, nothing separate from the painstakingly visceral struggle for a sense of wealth and community, of peace, of a piece of land and a flag above it to wave with the winds of all eternity. These had always been there. It was the voice out of the mouth of the current orator, the voice of the people, as it were, with campfire extinguished, but the flame of the eye still gleaming, still staring into the withering nothingness of an uncertain camper. I, it said, I as the leader of this particular camp, with great kindness in my heart, with my little position and with the security of the mass that upholds me, I will now proceed to shut you up. It was the voice that can only be produced by word-ready, energy-surging, survivalist reactionary, one who has learned that to have a talk is the safest way into having a voice in the world. To just keep talking is to keep the fire burning.

Elsewhere it wasn’t. It couldn’t be found in television produce that had started to drag, not specifically and not in one product, never only in one, but in the attitude that had taken over the production of televised drama. Here is how it happened. It was discovered that there were no longer limitations on how far dramatic content could reach, and so it was decided that the only option to respond to an unlimited media network – and it is a response, make no mistake – was to proceed to take over the world. Nobody really understood the significance of this at first, and it was still relatively easy to laugh at it, to shrug it off. But after the consumption of an adequate dramatical content had turned into anticipation and quickly thereafter ‘my time alone’ with all of drama melting into one and the few gaps in it filled with post-productions and midway-productions by amateurs in channels fast turning into something indistinguishable from the original product, only then it started to become clear that there was in fact a coated state, a fallout of sorts, taking hold. Entire cultures were drowning in something that couldn’t be traced back to one event or culpable party. It had simply been there ready to be responded to. It was understandable why producers and shareholders took this course. It is only what anyone would have done. The media-consuming mind was starting to overheat, but there was no turning back, not with things as they stood and with the financial opportunities they undoubtedly presented. The need for action was seen in an obsession with nuclear holocaust, Hitler and Nazis, American presidency, Vladimir Putin and Russia, with climate, sexuality, sexual orientation and gender, superheroes, races, historical wrongdoings, abuse, and in sharing, joining, and separating. Of the last three, the need to join was by far the greatest. It was important not only to join a cause and join those that were riding on momentum, but to join a time in history, to keep production going, to dream with expanse, into universes and galaxies, and if any barrier would appear, a foreign language, for example, this anomaly could be overcome by joining with more people, translators, distributors, the media, high school students, the opposition. And the dream came true, and everyone was swirling in the same vortex, not united in geography or culture, but in essence; everyone saw the same program, everyone could speak on it. The unwashed young male with his critical do-it-myself-from-my-armchair-surrounded-by-toys-and-technology was as much a part of it as any first-rate film critic. Nobody was above anyone else; nobody had an opinion more worth hearing. And in this cacophony of no beginning and no end, with the produce inseparable from the story behind it, when theories and criticisms were absorbing not only what was being watched but the producing forces behind it, and indeed it was beginning to seem that the great analysing multitude was determined to see into every human motivation behind every action, before and after, and the enjoyment of the global moment was shaped by the pursuit of ownership of thought, then it became clear where the truest power lay. It had been known for a long time before the walls had started to fall between the greater world and the voice worth listening to, and now when the Western Mouth was only producing Critical Thought, unemotional, unfettered, unapologetic, boldened by righteousness and the desire to leave this crumbling fragile existence behind, then the old truth came forward: to capture the raging mind, greatly harmed by its own actions, it must be given more to consume, more to watch, more pleasure and enjoyment to battle against. When this course of action was finally in place, when the amount to watch was crushing every farcical attempt at organizing it mentally, only then peace would reign. Drama had started to deteriorate, it lingered over an ever-consuming mass like cloudy sky on a rainless day, and thought was surpassed, in its stead there stood a monumental box of pleasures, open to all cultures, all genders and races, young and old, anyone with an eye to see and a mouth to speak.

It didn’t appear in the pianist that I had deemed homosexual with absolute certainty, and who then appeared in a television show as a prize bachelor, desired by heterosexual women. Some thoughts occurred out of this. For a classically trained pianist, of which there are too many to get a grasp on, there are very few alternatives outside of being purely a classical musician. It is probable that the pianists who are classical musicians to a fault are like screenwriters and poets, that is, a very rare breed of people that don’t appear all that often. What this means is that a true screenwriter, for example, is unlike any other. This is an artist who simply cannot help being specifically an example of the artform of which he is a part of, whose consequence, it seems, is writing for the screen, and while some other activities could be imagined on occasion – writing for the stage, writing a novel – these would result in attempts as futile as pretending to be from another culture or a language. Classical musicians the world over are now being asked to adapt to a more social time, where any kind of sharing is accepted for building a brand, with good looks and an enviable lifestyle, all the while becoming – announcing it! – an actor, a writer, a life coach, and anything else that expands the horizon of possibilities should the narrow path of mere classical music, which in all likelihood does not expand, remain hidden. The pianist in question is of a particular Southeastern European variety of younger male musicians. These are men who for all their musical gifts dedicate a considerable portion to channelling popular music through classical means, an act where no worn-out radio hit is beyond consideration for repertoire, where music videos and musings, posts and talks of ‘reaching for our common goals’ are parts of a sacrifice to the god of commercialism, the plate that is served to the concert-goer, safely wrapped in rediscovery, enthralled, excited, but never yanked, never forced to leave the comfortable concert hall seat or the reaffirmed reverence – in other words, where art isn’t. When an opportunity is presented to a handsome, desired, gifted young man with strangely no spouse to speak of, can it be that even the homosexual will leave his secret behind and join (there is that word again) a television program? What is – and this is the only question – homosexuality South of Ukraine? Have we now accepted it all, as we would like to think, or is it really there, in the media, in celebrity, in musicians and artists (where it must be) and in the brands that people under 30 and under 40 are now constructing with an almost feverish dedication? When the brand is being changed as violently as it now is, with forcefully awakening and recasting, diversifying and opening a mouth only to speak in a universally acceptable tone, is it not possible that this acceptable behaviour hides within it those that must eventually talk the talk? Where has the female-marrying homosexual gone or has he indeed gone anywhere, and in his marrying is he not bringing forth the mystery of sexuality? Is it not the anti-political nature of sexuality we are witnessing here? The homosexual who for all his blessings will never own the world and because of this can only join in, through the political door, through the door that is socially acceptable, endearing even, but never through his innermost mystery, sexuality. And there we see him, still under the boot of his country, still lost and outside of it, forced to leave and become ever more perfect, finally reclaiming, but closer, so much closer now to the central behavioural pattern, slightly more freed by the boredom of a newly awakened younger heterosexual, the gatekeeper of acceptable change. If he didn’t agree, and worse still, if he was indifferent, there would be no change that the homosexual could truly call his own, even when he was living it. Only momentum creates societal change, and now at the moment of an unforeseen battle for attention, when much is disputed and much is falling by the wayside, never to be discussed, the only way toward a central experience is to elevate a response to a level where everyone can understand it. And here at the crossroads of cultural unity and individual life is where we are still existing, however more digital and fleeting.

Not much can be seen on the big screen which is still very much there. Still the greater story and the vision that is uniting people across cultures. Essentially there are two ways for a filmmaker to go. Either you choose technical achievement over substance or substance over technical achievement, but you cannot have both, as far as the global market is concerned. On which the emphasis now lies is fairly easy to see. One of the greater developments within the technical is cinematic content becoming more serious with each passing year. Nothing is truly out of place anymore. There is no Arnold Schwarzenegger, no real camp in the disguise of a major film, certainly no intellectual properties outside of the public opinion, nothing is old and nothing is new, and much seems to have been replaced by the race for intellectual and its particularly ironic dominion. This doesn’t mean that there was necessarily anything light-hearted about cinema before. What we are talking about here is a seriousness that keeps evolving. Whereas before there was nothing to compare the experience to and therefore the viewer had no choice but to accept what was being distributed, now the comparison is the experience, the mind cannot shut down the intellectual forces that are bombarding it in every moment, and the activity becomes one of trying to rise above the uncontrollable stimuli and urges and have a cerebral hold on the experience. To remain intelligent amidst stupefying forces is a task itself, and against a mass-produced hegemony of social understanding which absorbs not only forms of entertainment but responses to them, there is no discernible internal counter measure.

When the enemy cannot be won it must be absorbed in body and soul. When we get too close to the danger of self-realization, that is not the time of yielding in embarrassment but of multiplying, of stretching beyond the limits of understanding with all the unsolved, burning hurt that will always find hope in another person and in the person after this. Procreation in body and in spirit is what keeps survival in its place, and the unquestionable human forces that make us work, forget, suffer and begin anew, these are meant to unite us, to bring us together, always together, never to remain foreign to anything. When the moment of horror has passed with what used to be called cinema now translating to franchise, no-one is lost to the change nor outside of it. The word has been adopted and the modern viewer has taken the intellectual leap to overcome an impotence caused by a sea of entertainment absolutely outside of control. To join is the only way, the only dream left worth dreaming. What we are talking about here is a battle for the mind, the consumerist brain that is filled to the brim and yet yearns for more. Any signpost, any recollection is now acceptable material for another season of entertainment. Anything will be watched. Anything can collect a critical mass to ensure its survival in a global market, and if it has not been believed before, the greatest hit of them all can now be manufactured, from conception to final result, with great manpower behind it, aided by the dangerously fearful wind of never being able to work again. Someone always says yes, someone believes, and to come to see that criticism is also a display of a kind of belief, the mystery simply keeps unfolding.

Nobody was talking about franchises twenty years ago, hardly ten years ago, and now they appear as the only thing left to talk about. The crucial thing about a franchise is that it is a mental package of something. The consumer by and large knows what will be experienced and enjoyed and can prepare for the moment well in advance. The speed at which this change has happened can be seen in the wave that refuses to crash, that sweeps within any individual product and swells as something self-contained. Entire film series sink into the greater mass of warm water, as happened to innumerable superhero films and a later trilogy of Star Wars films that seems to have come and gone without much cultural impact to talk of. Why are franchises so successful now? Why are films as a rule making more money than was ever conceivable in the 80s or 90s? Partly this must be because markets have grown bigger, and much more of the rest of the world, as it were, has been conquered, not only in entertainment, but international business, marketing, tourism, entrepreneurial operations, by visiting the same restaurants and cafés, by shopping, and most importantly, with the spread of common thought and behaviour. But to have access to a hundred years of forever existing stream of images is to soon want to control this stream, and the most effective way to do so is to start by acknowledging the intellectual hold the recorded past has on the modern person. Going back, whether in an effort to correct it or simply make it technologically better, might be the side product of a digitalisation of moving images and the similar feeling many still get when scrolling down an article instead of looking at it on a physical page, that there is something ultimately unreal about the experience and therefore defenseless. What remains real is the relationship to the product, the helpless simplicity by which we are now surrendering to it, when no element in the chain of production is understood anymore. It matters not what the outpourings of limitless global content are now doing to generations of consumers, because what must be answered to, in the end, is the fear of losing as well as being left out of anything that constitutes as the most enjoyable way of spending one’s time. The likewise exploded distribution through more and more channels, however internet-based, requires entire nations (i.e. markets) to take action to secure the consumption of their citizens.

It is no wonder that a battle over ‘cultural rights’ emerges online. What can be considered appropriate cultural work is being debated now in such a way that the outcome of this conflict may turn out to be the very intellectual culmination of our age. It is likely that the myriad of differing opinions continues to be the case, and simply through exhaustion and the acceptance of the impossibility of the world will anything be resolved. To be frustrated, i.e. angry, is to continue to have some hold on the world, a perpetually doomed attempt at explaining to the rest of the world how things are and how they might be changed, all the while the global population drifting to an unreachable and thereby unbearable distance. To join in anger, if nothing else, is still something worth doing, if only a glimpse of a battle one might consider telling future generations about. How there was so much stupidity and I alone could see through it all. How I finished victorious, if not in wealth, if not in importance, then at least by keeping my convictions, the citizen at long last awarded by the affirmation of how futile the entire effort had been.

To be angry at the state of cinema and television is to feel something, which is strangely an outcome of the very thing the everyday critic is subjected to by that which consumes him and to which he remains the consumer and very little else. Appeasing the mob is out of the hands of film producers, as can be seen, and yet not entirely without their approval. The numbness of ‘the great take on culture’ as it is presented by a worldwide web has presented demands for marketing departments and indeed shifted some models for good, but mostly it is the actors, the lucky and coveted ones, who get thrown into the pit. The life of an actor, in essence, has not changed, and culturally speaking this is an era of the actor, of the acting presence, like none that we have seen. Perhaps because of our sympathy towards them, however subconscious it may be, they are not to be blamed for the most part, rather it is the machinery behind them, the imagined, although in many cases surprisingly manifested, group of those that hold the reins and become the target for most of the hatred felt by the cultural internet warrior. On the fighting side we see the protectors, those who assume to know the ins and outs of entertainment so well that over time the illusion has grown to such proportions that many now believe that the actual production of drama somehow depends on their opinion. When at the dawn of the internet era there was perhaps a brief moment when it did seem like the current of culture could actually be controlled by a mass of outsiders, and when their main channels of communication were yet not monetized or degraded to a afterthought of the mainstream, this no longer remains, and now the truth-seeing crowd is nowhere near a powerful position. Even if there were a million of them, it would not be enough to shake one pilar of the culture-producing construction that has long since taken over. Now the latest financially successful product of mass entertainment – which is, of course, all we are interested in – and those that oppose it and try obstinately to reveal its flaws are simply things that happen, with isochronous timing. Everyone from the casual consumer to the angriest off-warrior is chained to the same helpless existence, all surviving, all dependent on it, all with as much and as little at stake in the greater scheme of things. The unconquerable wave of produce is rushing to every corner of the earth, and all anyone can do is to get angry about it.

What remains essential is the physical reality of film production. To be aware, even partly, of what is physically happening in artistic production is the only way of having some sense of what will shape the upcoming years of consumption. How much will simply be rolled over, how much seemingly corrected, ridiculously on the surface, and then, how much of bad behaviour will continue to go on, wrapped in the mystery of ‘the artist’, forever justified by the urgency of his task. In times of political change such as ours, when an entire societal front is being put through a painful facelift, artistic freedom is one of the first to disintegrate. Simply put, there cannot be political change and artistic freedom happening at the same time. The well-behaving human that has now been erected as the only monument worth aspiring to is a latter attempt at putting the artist to his place, reminding him of the simple truth he still refuses to surrender to: good behaviour first. That there is so much bad behaviour that doesn’t seem to diminish – far from it – is in its fresh form enough evidence of that badly drained phrase the human experience, especially when it comes from those that have been wronged and feel entitled to let the rest of the world know all about it. There was a time when art had a resonance with its surrounding society, it revealed more than what a debate club could, and a comment on the times came naturally from someone dedicated to artistic expression. It held this position in part because of the control of information and the scarce avenues for an ordinary person to get to the core of the experience. This position is no longer expected from art or the artist. Art is present, make no mistake, but in its place to take part in astonishingly enormous discussions the outcome of which is clear to anyone with any sensitivity left to consider it. In actuality it is expecting the fatigued Christmastime-customer to sit for three hours in pure fantasy and confront the ever-lingering question: what can the 15-year-old family-oriented American understand?