The (Spiritually Significant) Emperor Has No (Spiritually Significant) Clothes
Via Jim at Stones Cry Out, I have discovered this list of the "Top 100 Spiritually Significant Films." Worse than the fact that an incoherent snore of a movie (2oo1: A Space Odyssey) made number 2 on the list is the fact that American Beauty and Breaking the Waves were ranked in the top ten. Now, maybe I'm just in a curmudgeonly mood today, but those two movies are about as spiritually significant, and as aesthetically pleasing, as a liverwurst sandwich. Let's start with American Beauty, the darling of the "I-prefer-to-have-my-assumptions-go-unchallenged-and-I'll-call-any-work-that-fails-to-challenge-my-assumptions-a-masterpiece" crowd. As the outstanding film/drama/music critic Terry Teachout has pointed out, American Beauty is a "smug film" that offers "easy answers to loaded questions (that's why it won so many Oscars -- Hollywood gives prizes only to movies that tell us what it wants to hear)." I have seen American Beauty called a satire, which is a designation meant to forestall the complaint that its characters are one-dimensional. It's true that satire often deals with types, but American Beauty commits two sins that good satires tend to avoid: it's not really very funny; and its social critique, like its characters, is entirely one-dimensional. Thus the movie's themes can be expressed in simplistic formulations that exhaust the interpretive possibilities:
structure + discipline + the military = Nazism = repressed homosexuality
reverting to adolescence and its puerile preoccupations = courageous opposition to bourgeois values
bourgeois values = empty conformism, wealth acquisition, and consumption
American beauty = white trash bag swirling in the wind = garbage
drug dealing/video voyeurism = ironic distance from bourgeois culture and authorial transcendence of cultural limitations
I could extend the list, but I'm beginning to nod off as I write. . . . Look, I don't think ambiguity is always the highest value in a work of art; there are great works of art that are relatively unambiguous, but it's very difficult to create great art that lacks both ambiguity and complexity, and certainly any work that is spiritually significant must be willing to grapple with profound questions in ways that are more than just complacent incantations of the prevailing orthodoxy. And then American Beauty doesn't even have the courage of its convictions, since its finale is a mawkish cop-out that plays false with its "protagonist" and ends up reinforcing some of the values that it just spent two ponderous hours attempting to subvert. I'm struck, for instance, by the scene in which the Kevin Spacey character decides against sleeping with his daughter's high school friend because he discovers that she is a virgin. The "sexism" and "paternalism" that's implicit in Spacey's gesture -- and that I would have expected to see deplored in a movie like this one -- is presented as nobility and tenderness, and it's not only antithetical to the character, but it also, in a strange way, shores up rather than shatters the creepy Humbert Humbert quality of Spacey's character. And then there's Spacey's sentimental closing monologue, which offers transcendence on the cheap, a sort of "Madonna does Kabbalah" version of spirituality that Hollywood seems most comfortable with.
Compare American Beauty to You Can Count on Me, a truly brilliant and spiritually significant movie that won far fewer awards and doesn't appear on the "Top 100 Spiritually Significant Films" list, and you'll be forced to wonder why the poverty of American Beauty's vision won so many accolades. Pondering that question is a spiritually significant undertaking, and it's the only kind of profundity that American Beauty is going to provide.
[This post has gotten too long, and I'm tired. Breaking the Waves will have to wait for another time. Besides, I've got to build up my screedy reserves.]
structure + discipline + the military = Nazism = repressed homosexuality
reverting to adolescence and its puerile preoccupations = courageous opposition to bourgeois values
bourgeois values = empty conformism, wealth acquisition, and consumption
American beauty = white trash bag swirling in the wind = garbage
drug dealing/video voyeurism = ironic distance from bourgeois culture and authorial transcendence of cultural limitations
I could extend the list, but I'm beginning to nod off as I write. . . . Look, I don't think ambiguity is always the highest value in a work of art; there are great works of art that are relatively unambiguous, but it's very difficult to create great art that lacks both ambiguity and complexity, and certainly any work that is spiritually significant must be willing to grapple with profound questions in ways that are more than just complacent incantations of the prevailing orthodoxy. And then American Beauty doesn't even have the courage of its convictions, since its finale is a mawkish cop-out that plays false with its "protagonist" and ends up reinforcing some of the values that it just spent two ponderous hours attempting to subvert. I'm struck, for instance, by the scene in which the Kevin Spacey character decides against sleeping with his daughter's high school friend because he discovers that she is a virgin. The "sexism" and "paternalism" that's implicit in Spacey's gesture -- and that I would have expected to see deplored in a movie like this one -- is presented as nobility and tenderness, and it's not only antithetical to the character, but it also, in a strange way, shores up rather than shatters the creepy Humbert Humbert quality of Spacey's character. And then there's Spacey's sentimental closing monologue, which offers transcendence on the cheap, a sort of "Madonna does Kabbalah" version of spirituality that Hollywood seems most comfortable with.
Compare American Beauty to You Can Count on Me, a truly brilliant and spiritually significant movie that won far fewer awards and doesn't appear on the "Top 100 Spiritually Significant Films" list, and you'll be forced to wonder why the poverty of American Beauty's vision won so many accolades. Pondering that question is a spiritually significant undertaking, and it's the only kind of profundity that American Beauty is going to provide.
[This post has gotten too long, and I'm tired. Breaking the Waves will have to wait for another time. Besides, I've got to build up my screedy reserves.]
posted by Kate Marie | 6:00 PM | Permalink
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6 comments
6 Comments:
Dear Kate Marie,
I hate to throw water on a good rant, but "American Beauty" only comes in as high as it does because the list is in alphabetical order. I liked it better than you did, but I'll grant you that it probably doesn't belong on a list of the "100 most spiritually significant films." Such a list COMPILED BY FILM CRITICS was a recipe for pretension from the get-go.
Ooops . . . well, the list was only an excuse to rant about the movie in the first place. And it doesn't belong on the list AT ALL.
Ummmm . . . so there!
I don't blame you for not catching it, especially since "2001" was second on the list instead of down with the "T's" where it belongs. When did it become standard practice to dump all the titles with a numerical beginning at the head of an alphabetical list? Have people forgotten how to spell the number "2?" I only realized how skewed the order was when I got to about page 4 and realized that "Schindler's List" came in WELL after "Groundhog Day." Said I, "Now wait a minute...."
Haven't checked the list...Did "Porky's" make it?
American Beauty was neither.
The list was updated in the survey process last year. You'll be thrilled to find that AB dropped off the list. Way off. The list is also now ranked by score, rather than alphabetically.
It's available at artsandfaith.com/top100
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