On Letting Go
- Zbigniew Herbert[1],
trans. Alissa Valles |
|
Humanity has created some amazing works of art, particularly in the domain of storytelling. Homer, Grimm’s fairy tales and Journey to the West are all sterling examples of how stories can stand the test of time, both in their own longevity and in their ability to affect and ingrain themselves in our cultures.
But as we create these works, we change. The best made meal spoils eventually and the tallest buildings are always surpassed. Nothing lasts forever, including stories.
With that in mind, I’d like to talk about letting go of stories and media.
Why Did We Love It
We love stories and the media that communicate them for many reasons. Some are incidental, like nostalgia. We encounter a book or film at a particular age when we have not encountered a cliché 1,000 times yet so the story seems innovative. Or it is innovative but will likely not remain unique for long. Sometimes the piece of media just hits us at an age when we feel deep emotions over anything that we connect with. Sometimes we are going through a special or difficult time in our lives and the book, film, game, etc connects with those emotional memories.
Nostalgia happens for many reasons but the result is always the same: years later we feel an emotional response to a piece of media that is far stronger than the work’s quality suggests[2].
Beyond nostalgia, we love many items of media because they are, in fact, good. Or good enough. Every story has its flaws and we often love stories in spite of their flaws. Sometimes we are fond of a great work which has a few small flaws. Sometimes we love a good work with major flaws because it contains one or two virtues that are of particular importance to us. They can represent our identity in a way that is infrequent in our culture, or present the fulfillment of a wish that is dear to us.
In any of the cases above and many others, we often find ourselves accepting flaws in works that we love. We make a judgment that it is okay to allow these flaws into our media diet[3] because the good (in our eyes) outweighs the bad. I believe this is inevitable. No work is perfect. But all too often, we make this judgment once and never revisit it.
Do we need to? Can the acceptability of work change over time?
Why Does It Fail?
Fail is perhaps a strong word but here I would like to mean ‘has enough grievous flaws that we do not celebrate it or keep it positively in the social consciousness’. As said, every work has flaws so the question becomes when are there too many? Which flaws are worse than others?
The most obvious type of flaw are a lack of quality. It’s probably the most attacked and, if we’re honest, the least consequential.
A family of flaws that is rapidly being more talked about are social issues reflected in media. For example, Gone with the Wind is well known for glorifying slavery[4]. It is also widely considered one of the most ‘classic’ Hollywood films. Another example would be any work that indulges in harmful clichés such as the damsel in distress.
A particular version of this flaw is when a work covers a controversial topic less than gracefully. In comedy, there is the idea of ‘nothing is sacred’, that ‘you can make a joke about anything.’ It’s true, you can. But should you? It might be possible to make an appropriate, funny joke about rape. But are you the one who is talented, thoughtful, experienced and compassionate enough to do so? Is making that joke more important than possibly cause deep pain and hurt to other human beings?
The same holds true for storytelling. If you include something possibly controversial or problematic in your story, is it worth it? When people are advised that they should not cover a topic, they chafe, scream censorship and double their resolve to write (poorly) about it. But often, this is not censorship but just plain good advice. There are more than enough topics to write about, do you need to write about this one?
An Uncomfortable Truth
My entire purpose in this (already rambling) article is to say this:
Just cause a piece of art is good doesn’t mean we have to keep celebrating it,
even if we love it. Many beautiful things have been lost to time. Humanity soldiers on just fine.
That doesn’t mean we must forget about the piece of media. It will most likely be archived for history and understanding. But when we review a story that we previously approved of and find it lacking in merit according to current concerns, why do we feel such a compulsion to defend and continue promoting that work?
This tendency is particularly strange when we consider the expanding amount of new content that is being produced by people all over the world each day. Yes, Roman Polanski’s films have garnered a lot of awards and are probably high quality works. Get Out[5] is also a high quality work and more such works are coming out all the time. Why defend the works of a sexual criminal on their artistic merits when we can safely ignore those works and watch movies like Get Out instead? We’ll never run out of high quality works. We can be picky in our standards for who makes the media we consume and what messages that media contains without lowering our standards of quality and still have plenty of things to watch, read, hear, etc.
A photo of a sunrise is beautiful, but the world does not hinge on its preservation. There will be another sunrise tomorrow. Not exactly like the first but just as unique and valuable. We have a greed for uniqueness, for moments. But we cannot have new moments if we do nothing but wallow in old ones.
Corollaries
From the basic purpose statement above, we arrive at some important and useful ideas.
Everything Has its Time
Culture changes. J.R.R. Tolkien’s the Lord of the Rings series are a template for many fantasy novels over the last 60 years. But its characterizations are simplistic, its plot is slow and the social connotations of some of its depictions are cringe-worthy.
Harry Potter and Game of Thrones write fantasy in different ways, each addressing the issues above to the degree they can, and they are hugely popular. We do not need to measure current fantasy based on Tolkien’s work anymore. The genre has progressed and will continue to progress. Just because a genre has a past doesn’t mean it must remain in that past.
It’s worth noting that Tolkien’s work was unorthodox during it’s time. To hold a genre to a set of classics or templates is to deprive it of the very thing that has given the genre its past and its success. It is also to deprive the genre of it’s future.
Binary Thinking
When we engage with a piece of media, it's like a relationship with a person. We have to accept from the beginning that it has flaws. Some are obvious, some will only come into view once we have grown as people. We don’t have to see the flaws, just accept that they exist.
If we do not, we get stuck in binary thinking where everything is either 100% good or 100% bad. We think (not consciously), this piece of media is perfect and thus wonderful. Then once we see the flaws after years of loving it, we become irrational. We think the piece of media must actually be horrible. Or worse, when someone tries to show us there are flaws, we lash out at them because we see the media as a part of ourselves. Or worst, we think because the story had flaws, we must be flawed and horrible ourselves.
By allowing the work to be flawed from the beginning (and all works are flawed), we allow ourselves to grow and still love what we loved about the work. To allow the work to be flawed is to allow ourselves to grow.
This is true of our own works, perhaps more so. If we demand perfection, we will never create anything. And when we look back at past works, if we don’t notice any flaws, then we haven’t grown.
An important thing to remember is that forgiving a flaw or action is not the same as condoning it.
Critical Childhoods
In recent years, there’s been a sort of rallying call when a piece of media is criticized years later, the “you’re ruining my childhood” response. The new Ghostbusters film, starring a predominantly female cast, is a prime example[6].
As stated above, criticizing a work or remaking it is not attacking the people who enjoy that work. Every work has flaws so everyone is guilty of consuming flawed works. It does not make us bad people. People criticize works in order to make the world better, not to condemn the audience of that work.
When one analyzes it too deeply, Star Wars is kind of dumb. Most movies are. And any work that stays in the public consciousness will be looked at deeply. Thus, it’s a testament to the good qualities of the work that it is critiqued. The good parts gave it a long enough public lifespan to reach to point of criticism. Movies like Star Wars have those good qualities that have kept it around long enough for the rose-colored glasses to fall and allow us to see the questionable parts. And that’s okay.
And again, if a favorite movie is shown to have problems, there are hundreds more great movies to take its place.
At some level, we all need to accept that our enjoyment of a work has a limited relationship to its quality. Often, the most powerful factor in our love of a work is the moment in our life when we encountered it. We may find a book eye-opening not because of its innate quality but because our eyes were closed. A movie might be particularly comforting because we needed comfort when we saw it.
When we assume we are completely rational, we cannot engage in real criticism or dialogue of any sort. We can do little more than scream at one another in the void of public discourse, never listening to one another’s words or even our own. “Know Thyself” is a maxim that always yields benefits[7].
No Artiste or Oeuvre is Above Criticism
I touched on this earlier with the mentions of Roman Polanski and Woody Allen, not to mention the legions beginning to be exposed by the #metoo movement. But it cannot be said enough times:
No piece of art or entertainment is worth more than a human being.
La La La La La
Ignoring the truths about history doesn’t make then go away. We should preserve works that have flaws so that we can learn from them. Back to Gone with the Wind, pretending racism doesn’t exist does not end systemic discrimination of African Americans.
We must accept our past self and move on from it. Not accepting the past is delusion and a denial of the lessons which lead us to today. White people pretending that racism does not exist today in order to separate them from the awful past only disables them from confronting modern racism. If we accept but do not move on, then we glorify the ugliness of the past and destroy what beauty did exist. Or we accept the past and live all our lives in reaction to it, like white guilt, with nothing but self-contempt and a denial of what we could be. And no future.
Innovation
Which leads us to innovation. Anything good we’ve loved in stories is from the progress humanity has made from previous stories. Do you love stories? Then be willing to let the old ones go.
No matter how great they were, there are more and better stories on their way. I promise.
Footnotes:
- [1] From Why the Classics. Herbert was writing defending classical literature, but with regards to cowardly, capitulative works at the time in Poland. He was arguing for depth and quality, not for classicism for classicism's sake.
- [2] If our emotional reaction, no matter how strong, was merely appropriate to the story’s quality, it wouldn’t be nostalgia. It would just be a normal response.
- [3] We are what we consume.
- [4] Critical reception
- [5] Wikipedia
- [6] Reaction
- [7] Background