Art and Social Change
By Jo Eberhardt | April 7, 2018 |
Nostalgia by Flickr user TMAB2003
I’ve been feeling nostalgic lately. If the popularity of books and movies like Ready Player One, as well as the constant stream of remakes, reboots, and sequels are anything to go by, I’m not the only one.
It makes a certain amount of sense that we, both individually and as a story-consuming community, feel drawn to nostalgic books and movies. Engaging with the world right now often feels like death by a thousand keystrokes. It’s so much more pleasant to lose ourselves in the pleasant memories of a simpler time.
It wasn’t actually simpler, of course.
The world has always been a chaotic mess of inequality and resistance and fear and injustice. But, for most of us, the world felt simpler because we were simpler. Our problems were more of the “will my parents let me go to the movies this weekend?” kind, rather than the “how can my single voice ever make a difference to this gross injustice?” kind. So it’s easy to look back and think everything was easier — and, therefore, better — in those days.
But this is not an essay about the tricks nostalgia plays on the past; this is an essay about the tricks we can play on the future — a future where, undoubtedly, there will be people who look back on our current days and say things like: “Remember the good old days when you couldn’t spit without hitting someone making a superhero movie? Those were good times…”
Raymond Chandler
It may surprise many people who know me to find out that Raymond Chandler is one of my favourite authors. His way with words makes my skin tingle.
Hair like steel wool grew far back on his head and gave him a domed brown forehead that might, at careless glance, have seemed a dwelling place for brains.
Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form itself on the edge of consciousness.
“Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains. You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.”
Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.
But, here’s the thing.
Raymond Chandler wrote his books in the 1930s. They’re littered with casual sexism, racism, and homophobia. Hidden between the hard-boiled detective and the glorious prose, Chandler’s values are both obvious and discomforting.
And yet… I would still argue that his works are a joy to read. The language is beautiful, although the subconscious biases are not. But that was the world as it existed eighty years ago, and a sense of discomfort is, in its own way, a valuable teacher of empathy. (I say, as a white woman, fully aware that other people may have different perspectives.)
Raymond Chandler’s books are a product of their time, and thank goodness that time is over.
Star Wars
George Lucas’s Star Wars is the consummate space opera, full of heroes and damsels in distress; battles between good and evil; and a plucky band of rebels defeating an evil empire. Star Wars was a masterpiece of special effects and storytelling when it was released, and forever changed the landscape of movies. What’s not to like?
Well…. A lot, actually.
There’s the atrocious way Han Solo treats Princess Leia in the scene where he forces a kiss on her despite her telling him to stop half a dozen times. There’s the vomit–inducing lesson that comes out of that scene when Leia immediately falls in love with him — because there’s nothing more romantic than a man forcing himself on a woman without her consent.
But beyond that is the Jedi Order itself.
The first six movies present the Jedi as the heroes that we should all aspire to be like. There are very clear instructions given to both Anakin and Luke: never show your emotions, never let your emotions sway you, and never form close connections to other people.
Both Anakin and Luke are told they should let their loved ones die rather than help them, because disconnection is the Jedi way.
Both Anakin and Luke are shamed for feeling grief and fear when they lose their families.
Both Anakin and Luke are given the “advice” that showing their feelings is not only weak, but will lead them to the Dark Side.
Now, I don’t know about you, but the Jedi’s whole manifesto reads, to me, like a how-to guide for toxic masculinity. Push those emotions way, deep down, never cry, never admit vulnerability, and stay emotionally disconnected from the people who love you.
The main difference between Anakin and Luke’s journeys are that Anakin fully internalises this message and beats himself up when he can’t achieve complete detachment (his suppressed emotions eventually exploding in rage and violence), whereas Luke brushes off the Jedi teachings when he disagrees with them.
(YouTube’s Pop Culture Detective has a fantastic video essay on this subject that really helped clarify my thoughts. It’s well worth the watch.)
But, hey, those movies were made in the 70s and 80s…. and 90s and 2000s. That was before we really talked about negative effects of telling boys to hide their emotions. Now we have new Star Wars, with a female Jedi and a diverse cast and no more George Lucas at the helm. Things have changed, and that’s a good thing.
Lucas’s Star Wars was a product of its time, and thank goodness that time is over.
Game Over, Man
Last week, I had the misfortune to watch Netflix’s movie Game Over, Man. It is, to put it bluntly, the worst movie I’ve seen in…. possibly ever.
It’s billed as a comedy-action flick. Three geeky losers find themselves trapped in a hotel that’s taken over by terrorists, and they need to save the day and free the hostages, becoming heroes in the process. The description reads like a cross between Die Hard and a stoner comedy, and even the title of the movie brings a wash of nostalgia. What could possibly go wrong?
Um…. everything.
Leaving aside the fact that it’s a laugh-free comedy that relies on bad tropes and vulgarity, this movie is chock-full of racism, sexism, homophobia, and more outdated and offensive stereotypes than I have time to list them. For example:
1)
Our heroes are three loser white guys who have no interest in hard work, but nevertheless spend their time complaining about how they deserve fame and fortune. Not because of anything they’ve done–just because of who they are. They get sucked into a ridiculous terrorist situation, spend their entire time acting like the worst stereotypes of frat boys, and somehow manage to fall over themselves to accidentally save the day. Whereupon they’re rewarded (by a an old rich white dude who appears out of nowhere) with fame, fortune, and a yacht full of beautiful woman in bikinis. Just livin’ the dream, boys.
2)
There are exactly three female speaking-roles in this movie. (1) The fat woman we’re all supposed to laugh at, who’s on-screen for an excruciatingly awkward four minutes. (2) The modern-day femme-fatale who oozes sexuality, literally emasculates a man, and behaves in a more and more unhinged way before being defeated with a good old-fashioned impaling. (3) The meek, mild, and modest girl who is told to calm down, and that “boys will be boys”, and is rewarded for her quietness at the end of the movie with the offer of a promotion.
On the other hand, it’s got a terrible score on Rotten Tomatoes (I wish I’d checked before I watched it!) and both the critical and general reviews are scathing.
Game Over, Man is a product of its time, and– Wait.
This movie was released two weeks ago.
This movie is a product of its time, but its time is now.
Life Imitates Art
I’ve just talked about three completely different stories, of different genres, in different mediums, from different time periods. The time periods thing is important.
See, many of the people involved in writing and making Star Wars grew up at a time when Chandler and his contemporaries were writing, and when his books were being made into movies. Meanwhile, those people involved in the writing and making of Game Over, Man grew up with Star Wars and its ilk in their formative years.
I think that cinema and the arts are central in our lives because we grow up and learn about the world through our exposure to stories. Parents use them as a tool to teach their children fundamental truths and values, much as adults can view them to gain exposure to cultures and individuals that they’d never be able to view in their own lives.
— Forest Whitaker
We learn what the world and people are really like by reading books and watching movies. The stories we’re exposed to, particularly when we’re young, become part of who we are. They teach us about the world, about ourselves, about “the other”. They create our values and beliefs. They become our guiding principles of what’s right and wrong.
And that’s where we, as writers, come in.
We are the vanguards of tomorrow’s values. The beliefs and ideologies espoused in our books, and the movies that will inevitably be based on them, are the ones that will shape the formative years of tomorrow’s leaders. Every word, every sentence, every character we write will make a difference to somebody’s life.
I am feeling nostalgic. I think we all are. But rather than approaching our storytelling with nostalgia for a simpler world we half-remember from our youth, maybe we should approach it with a sense of nostalgia for today’s world, as we’ll look back on it in twenty years.
Everything we write matters.
No pressure.
What books and movies influenced your values and beliefs in your formative years? How would you like your stories to influence people?
[coffee]
Jo Eberhardt is a writer of speculative fiction, mother to two adorable boys, and lover of words and stories. She lives in rural Queensland, Australia, and spends her non-writing time worrying that the neighbor’s cows will one day succeed in sneaking into her yard and eating everything in her veggie garden.
Nice article, Jo, and it brought to my mind one of the challenges of being a writer: we only write part of the story, the reader writes the rest of it.
Communication is a two-person act, and that two people speak, say, American English doesn’t mean they communicate in the same language. Every word, every sentence, every story is meaningless until someone receives and interprets it, and the interpretation process always changes things. That’s more true for the written word than for stage or screen, since writing leaves far more to the imagination.
That final step of communication, interpretation by the reader, means that every reader receives a different story. As a result, we “never read the same story twice,” because we change. The stories we read years ago tell a different story to us today, not because the work changed, but because we did. And if I can’t read the same story twice, then it must be true I don’t read the same story that someone else does, even though we are reading from the exact same book.
So what can an author do? How can a writer make sure the story they want to tell is the story the reader, interpreting it through the lens of their own experiences and values, actually gets? Is that even possible?
I don’t know. Perhaps readers are too different.
Perhaps it’s easier to just concern ourselves with communicating with people like ourselves, who view the world though eyes like ours. But will writing for an echo chamber suffice if you’re trying to change the world?
I suspect not. I suspect that changing the world requires communication with people who don’t share the same points of view, and getting the message through to them.
Perhaps there are some common values and perspectives, ones that do not vary with the seasons of our lives, the politics of our times, and from one person to another. Perhaps that’s the key to bringing change.
Of course, a writer doesn’t change anything by writing solely about common values and perspectives. But if a writer is going to successfully communicating novel values and novel perspectives — novel to the reader, that is –perhaps piggy-backing them on the common values and perspectives is a way to get the novelty through the reader’s interpretation process intact. Bringing change by embracing what never changes. Writing for the eternal, instead of for the moment.
This is a phrase that I normally only say to myself, but… I think you may be overthinking this.
And that’s saying something considering you could say the same about my entire essay. :)
Yes, writing and reading is a two-way communication, and you never really read the same book twice. I’ve certainly experienced that weird disconnect when I try to revisit a book or movie I loved during an earlier part of my life, and am mortified to find that I no longer resonate with it.
Our life experiences and even our fictional experience change us, and a book that we really, really needed to read in our twenties in order to expand our minds can seem trite and reductive when we read it in our forties. I don’t think the answer to that, from a writer’s perspective, is to try to make our stories more eternal or generic — I think it’s to simply accept that our stories are going to resonate more with some people than others.
If your passion in life was in teaching children not to hit each other with sticks, you’d be very well aware that it’s not a lesson that you need to keep teaching them forever. Eventually the day will come when they’ve stopped hitting each other with sticks. It does no one any good for you to keep trying to teach them the same thing over and over and over for the rest of their lives.
You’ve also got to trust that once they’ve learned your no-stick-hitting lesson, there’s someone else out there passionately committed to teaching children not to throw rocks at each other.
So, yes, perhaps you can piggy-back new or uncommon values on the backs of more commonly held ones. And if that works for you, then go for it.
Or you can create characters and stories that people love, that just happen to be imbued with values that are more akin to what you want to future to look like than what you worry the present looks like, and just trust that readers will find your book (or re-find it) at a time when they need it.
This is super fascinating and I’m going to be thinking on it more. I grew up reading and watching Little House on the Prairie and Anne of Green Gables, so yeah. In my teens, I binge watched X-Files. You’ve given me some good stuff to chew on this weekend.
Thanks, Amy. That sounds like an interesting mix. It’s a long time since I watched X-Files… I wonder what underlying values are hidden behind Mulder’s belief that the truth is out there.
That was epic. I’ve had all these same thoughts and worries. It pleases me greatly when instances of that toxic masculinity you refer to are publicly examined. Moments like these are so new, they sparkle.
I continue to struggle with separating the artist from the art. Woody Allen gives me fits. Roman Polanski? Forget it. In the end, it’s a line we must draw personally. Like you, I can forgive Chandler’s casual misogyny, even Franzen’s. But not Allen’s.
Thanks, Stacey!
Separating the artist from the art — and whether we should — is a huge topic, and one I’ve wanted to write about for a while. But I haven’t even managed to figure out what I think/feel about the whole question.
Like you, i find it easier to accept Chandler’s misogyny, because he really was writing in a different time. But it’s much harder to forgive it from modern writers. And exactly where do we draw the line between “it’s okay, it was a different time” and “he should have known better”?
Great, thought provoking post. How are we as writers doing to be different? Thanks, Jo.
Jo, your post took me back to my earliest chapter books – The Bobbsey Twins. The editions I read as a kid were riddled with racism and sexism, though of course, we didn’t perceive it that way at the time. Now the editors have revised them to take out a lot of the objectionable material, so they can be read in today’s world.
One of the most influential writers of my younger life was a romance novelist, Emilie Loring. She started writing in the early 1920’s, right after WWI, and her books continued being published into the 1970’s. Her early books contained racism that wasn’t limited to how she portrayed members of the black community (who invariably were servants), but was broad enough to include indigenous peoples in Alaska, Hawaii, and Mexico, as well as Asian servants and Hispanic fishermen.
At the same time, she held in her mind/heart her personal manifesto that found expression in every book, and is the reason I still read her books today. This was the dedication in one of her novels, originally published in 1930:
“To the readers of my stories who, by spoken or written word, have recognized beneath the magic glamour of romance and adventure the clear flame of my belief that the beautiful things of life are as real as the ugly things of life, that gay courage may turn threatened defeat into victory, that hitching one’s wagon to the star of achievement will lift one high above the quicksands of discouragement.”
I can’t love her racism nor her chauvinism, yet the women she writes are not helpless or stupid creatures. “Gay courage,” however anachronistic the phrase, is the way her women move through their lives, and as a young girl of 12, I found that inspiring. I still do.
Thanks, Carol. I love that dedication — even without reading any of her books, it speaks of courage and strength. It definitely sounds like the kind of stories that girls and young women need.
it also sounds like she holds a similar place in your heart as Chandler does in mine. You can acknowledge and dislike the engrained bigotry of the day, but still see the beauty of the stories and the way she values courage and independennce.
Wonderfully insightful, Jo, thank you. I had never realized those things about Star Wars, but I think you’re right. And I’ve never read Chandler, and the excerpts you posted are excellent. I think your point is spot on–storytellers create the future with what they do now. I’m not sure how that will shape what I write, but it’s in the brew now. Thanks.
Nicely said. I hadn’t thought consciously about how much the books and movies I grew up on affect my views even now, but I’m definitely becoming more sensitive to all these issues in my entertainment. And thank you for saving me from watching Game Over, Man.
The more people who don’t watch that horrible movie, the more my 90 minute sacrifice was worth it. :)
This was a good one. Thanks for giving sharp examples of things I have pondered vaguely. We do have a responsibility to avoid cheap shots and easy targets. Even potboilers can provide lifelong lessons in how to be a human.
Thanks for reading!
Some of the most important lessons in humanity I ever learned came about through reading fantasy novels as a teenager. You don’t have to be writing literary fiction to make a difference. (In fact, I’d argue that the exact opposite is true.)
I wanted to write “thought provoking” but actually your article is more along the lines of “thought epitomizing”. I’m working on a futuristic tale and I’ve realized how tricky it is to NOT simply write a technologically advanced version of today. To challenge contemporary stereotypes/struggles/prejudice/misconceptions in building a truly visionary story world. And characters.
Thanks for the awesome insight on nostalgia and how it shapes our future (or is it the other way around? ;) ).
Yeah, no pressure whatsoever.
You’ve hit on something that I’ve long thought, Veronic, and one of the key reasons I don’t often write sci-fi. It’s not just a matter of thinking about how technology will change, but also how society will change.
But you’ve got this. No pressure. :)
This is the best WU column in years.
Fantastic essay, Jo! You write clearly and with great insight. I don’t watch movies, but I do read lots of books, and the same message applies to both. What we write can influence what others will write and think in the future. We need to write what we want to see there.
Thank you, Linda.
How inspiring. And terrifying. And humbling. And energizing.
Thank you, Jo.
Hello Jo. Thanks for again raising issues worthy of anyone’s attention. And God bless you for admiring Raymond Chandler’s prose, even as you acknowledge him, in his cringe-making prejudices and limitations, as a child of his time.
Certainly, those of us old enough to have started life before TV and social media were more shaped in our thinking by books and movies. I think this is reflected in a greater respect on our part for writing itself, the vehicle of words. Back in the day, best sellers reflected a much higher level of literary mastery than can be said for big hits today. I was strongly affected by authors like Walker Percy and Saul Bellow (although they’re really aren’t any other authors like Bellow). They wrote bestsellers, and were prose geniuses. The downside of being weaned on such authors is that it gets harder to find writers to admire.
And consider this: most how-to manuals for writers these days rely much more on examples taken from TV and film than they do references to books. It’s not hard to know why.
One more thing: It isn’t just the young who learn from movies. The films being made today teach me about what young audiences want to see. Far too often, what I learn is illustrated by the film you trash, Game Over, Man. An apt title, if ever there were one.
Thanks again. I always appreciate reading what you have to say.
“Gave over, man!” I know that line from Bill Paxton’s character in the Aliens (1986) movie.
Alien was one of the first sci-fi horror movies I saw with a strong female lead who actually survived (without a man) in the end.
The story behind Ripley is interesting: when Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett wrote Alien, they didn’t give any of the characters genders or first names. Ridley Scott was therefore free to pick anyone he wanted for each role, and he chose Sigourney Weaver for Ripley.
Aliens also features Jenette Goldstein as PFC Vasquez, one of my favorite characters, not the least because of this zinger she delivers while doing pull-ups:
Hudson: Hey Vasquez, have you ever been mistaken for a man?
Vasquez: No. Have you?