The folly of 'likeability' versus 'unlikeability'

"The tale of royal triumph through a commoner's efforts expurgates the story in order to render its characters more sympathetic, whereas the depiction of Mark Zuckerberg as a lonely and friendless genius (when, in fact, he has long been in a relationship with one woman) serves the opposite purpose: to render him more ambiguous, to challenge the audience to overcome antipathy for a character twice damned, by reasonable women, as an 'asshole.'" — Richard Brody, The New Yorker*

And that is superior to what The King's Speech does — why exactly? This seems to be exactly symptomatic of what is wrong with the indie sector and the aesthetic consensus that supports it. We all know for example, that every so often, art must delve into the darkness if it is to be representative of our lived experience. We know, from that experience, that a great performance sometimes must refuse to give a hoot about 'likeability' in order to sound out certain depths of the human psyche. The artist's aim is higher than such trivial categories as 'likeable' or 'unlikeable,' 'pleasurable or 'unpleasurable.' He or she is simply pursuing their vision, and let the chips fall where they may. Let the critics divvy up the amount of light or dark in their work. It would be as trivial for an artist to pursue 'likeability' as an aim in itself as it would for perverse for them to pursue 'unlikeability'. Imagine! Imagine if there ever was to arrive a group of artists and critics who pursued unpleasantness as an aim, not because they found life unpleasant but because they found the people that found it pleasant objectionable? What peevish opposition that would be, what petulant self-circumscription. Except we don't have to imagine: that mindset is exactly the one Brody is describing. It is the reigning aesthetic consensus of the day. In Darren Aronofsky and David Fincher we have a pair of twin dark princes for whom life is misery and pain and unpleasantness not just every now and again, but all the time. Black Swan is virtually a primer on developing-your-own-dark-side, in much the same spirit that teenagers take up smoking to annoy their parents, but presented as if this represents the loftiest of artistic aims. In The Social Network, it is not enough that Fincher portray Zuckerberg as he is. He must go out of his way to render him more unlikeable than he really is — "to render him more ambiguous, to challenge the audience to overcome antipathy for a character twice damned, by reasonable women, as an 'asshole.'" And it is this that makes his film art and not "pap", "invigorating" and not "anesthetic." Why, except for the pleasing sense this gives some audience members of their own superiority to Hollywood norms - the sensation of being able to wriggle beneath the self-imposed hoop that they've decided will best demonstrate their own double-jointedness? Since when did that become a legitimate artistic aim? It's just snobbery, an elite congratulating itself on completing a challenge designed to demonstrate its own broadmindedness: crossword enthusiasts completing puzzles they have themselves set. God, how many indie movies that describes, with their deliberate smudging of plot, their studious crosshatching of moral ambiguity, their "challenging" subject matter, even if they are only watched by the people least likely to be "challenged" by anything they see, having long since imbibed the liberal piety of pretending to be offended by an artist within a 200-mile radius, just to make him feel better about his latest collage of squashed fruit flies or multi-media slide-show of duplicating Ebola cells. Enough! It's almost enough to make me glad that The King's Speech is going to clean up.

* Brody has augmented his comments somewhat:—

He thinks I’m complaining about pleasantness, and about viewers who enjoy “The King’s Speech”; not at all. (He also writes that my post is “exactly symptomatic of what is wrong with the indie sector and the aesthetic consensus that supports it”; it’s true that there are some films that sell grimness as others sell cheer, but they’re not the distinctive province of any one industry sector, whether independent, studio, or foreign.) “The King’s Speech” is pap, but I have no argument with the people who enjoy it. I’m not against the film’s existence or the audience’s pleasure, I’m against giving it awards for any supposed artistic merit. Because, as it turns out, my point of view regarding character in art is one that has some precedent. It is, in fact, the core of what we call Western art: inducing the audience to overcome feelings of repugnance or derision (i.e., prejudices or settled moral values) and enter into sympathy with people who, despite (or even because of) their virtues, make themselves into monsters (in tragedy) or asses (in comedy)... In any case, an overemphasis on characters is one of the abiding pathologies of film criticism, since much of the power of the medium comes from images, ideas, and the abiding presence, just beyond the edge of the screen, of the director, whose character is the one that counts most.

It's true, I did think he was complaining about pleasantness. (He totally was!) There's less to disagree with here, although I would still shiver slightly at the prospect of artistic merit so cleanly expunged of "the audience's pleasure." I guess I put more store by that. If it's pleasing an audience, it has some artistic merit in my book. And the whole "challenging" thing — films being better because they "challenge" their audiences — still fails to grab me as much as I know it should. Why is it that the people who talk of films "challenging" audiences are never the same bunch of people actually being challenged. (They couldn't be, because they are expecting the challenge, and thus not challenged at all. It is part of their smoothly-grooved set of expectations about what will happen to them in the presence of a work of art.) It's always some other sod, or bunch of sods, the speaker has in mind as targets to be challenged, preferably the ones who don't know that art is supposed to be challenging, so the idea can hit them square between the eyes just seconds after they've parted with their hard earnt cash to see a pleasant piece of nonsense about a stuttering king. The shock is always supposed to be good for them, or jolt them out of doltish false consciousness or some such, although I've never heard a single person exit a movie theatre going "well.... that was challenging" and mean it in a good way. I've never heard it said in a bad way. I can imagine it said in a sardonic way, though, and will use it myself the next time I sense a filmmaker trying to impress me with the exact breadth, depth and width of their dark side.