It was certainly pleasant to read this review before heading into work this morning, as it sparked several new directions of thought to pursue during my ride.

I tend to be extremely weary of the tendency of most modern Americans to ascribe any differences of opinion related to art to “mere taste”, which, such a judgment asserts, are essentially arbitrary and non-debatable. But some of your comments regarding your distaste at the “tried-and-true tropes” of the action movie and some of the weaknesses of Gibson’s dialogue left me wondering whether I wasn’t being forced to confront some small aspect of the reality of differences in taste. For me, most of the aspects that felt more like a standard action movie felt like comfortable signposts, providing a familiar structure of storytelling to a new and different story.

I, too, would not describe myself as a fan of action films, but perhaps that’s merely because I object so often to their content. I found the action in the second half of Apocalypto “thrilling” (to quote M. Esterheld), and the mere pleasure of watching a single human being triumph through ingenuity and prowess over a band of warriors was substantial. Gibson, of courses, adds touches of significance to this. (I suspect, by the way, that this is actually how the movie was written: Gibson began with the idea of a great chase, and began—in the writing—to develop it into something he thought would make the impressions more vivid and forceful.)

Gibson, by creating something based so much on the structure of an existing genre—and one not over-populated with masterpieces—created a kind of imaginative space for me, much as did Matrix Revolutions. Gibson’s didacticism, though certainly present, is not—to my mind—easily penetrable. He chooses to present horrifying and wonderful sights and sounds instead of making it abundantly what we are to think. This plays to the strengths of his art form; it also may have been impossible for Gibson to remove himself that much if he hadn’t picked such a distant setting. Certainly it sounds like he is anything but distant in Braveheart.

On the subject of the city, it continues to be difficult for me to decide what I think Gibson’s point is. Certainly we are shown awful images of the city’s effects (the cultivated corn field next to the field of bodies… the man covered in white chalk coughing up blood onto his chest…), but the quotation at the beginning of the movie really argues toward some particularity to this city. If we take its direction, it would seem to imply that we’re supposed to take this particular civilization as having “already destroyed itself from within”—which would argue that this is not the essential nature of a city. As such, I wonder how much of Gibson’s point is related to what we’re shown of a city’s vestiges—which, for Americans, would be many of the countries on earth that drill our oil, make our Nike clothing, and—now—grow our food. Those inside the Mayan city had an astounding quality of life, but one that relied on the machines at the city’s edges running on the fuel of expendable human life.

This, of course, might particularize some of the horror to the point of making it uninteresting. Gibson’s own comments (loathe as I am to introduce such evidence) indicate that he was thinking very much of specific criticisms of modern America (notably the Iraq war), which has always turned me off a bit.

HB,

I find it curious that you think character is what redeems the “action” elements of a story. What do you do with a univerally recognized great work of art which nonetheless is mostly action, with little “character” in the modern sense, and not much of a plot either? A work, for instance, like Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso?

HB failed to mention that the movie also convinced him that he needed to have seven children—to match, if not beat, Mel Gibson’s offspring who make that number.

Nate: I suspect there may be some level of subjectivity influencing our different reactions to seeing the tropes of an action movie in Apocalypto, but I also hesitate to call it something as amorphous as taste, especially since we agree about the general nature of action movies. It may be that I was less able to be thrilled by the second half than you and Mike were because I was at too great a remove from the action by that point. The sources of that distance were mostly due to my subjective state while watching the movie. Gibson’s presentation of so many vivid and seemingly important images, and the distance he engendered between the me and the movie, put me in a state to want more meaningful content than I got in the second half, though, as I said, he did a good job making much of the action meaningful in a way.

I would assert that this statement of yours in almost undoubtedly true: it also may have been impossible for Gibson to remove himself that much if he hadn’t picked such a distant setting. I am also coming to think that Gibson’s own point may be both about declining cities in general, not just the Mayans’, and less profound, for all its opacity, than we might hope. Certainly the generality of Durant’s line—“A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within”—could support my first leaning. And I suspect that Gibson may have forgone his even more didactic and topical impulses only by a gift from the gods. I certainly think that the characterizations he presents benefit from allowing the audience to read more into them than he’s explicitly projecting from them. The dispute we had about the emotions Zero Wolf has towards his son seem to me a good example. (I was objecting to jumping so quickly to the familiar and, to my ear, somewhat inaccurate word “love”.) I really don’t want to know what Gibson thought they were feeling, since I suspect his thoughts on this subject were trite and insipid. So much more am I grateful, then, that we get to see the expressions and read the translations of the characters’ words. I suspect the insights one can gain from this more elemental experience are subtler and more interesting than if Gibson had succeeded in making a point like, “see, they’re just like us.” Given his previous oeuvre, I know he’s capable of trying to say something like that.

Michael: To date, I have done nothing with Orlando Furioso. I too am surprised by my finding of character’s importance to making action interesting, though I admit that the terms could use some fleshing out (I certainly don’t know what you mean by its modern sense). Again, it’s not that I object to action per se, or even to the defining contours of the action movie genre. To use Nate’s language, I enjoy seeing an ingenious man triumph over others by means of his prowess. But I suspect that I would get bored pretty quickly by such exercises, whether of physical skill or action movie tropes, if they weren’t performed by human beings with some worthy moral standing. I don’t just mean that a character must be good, bad, or badass, though each of these characteristics can be entertaining for a while (see Jackie Chan for the last). I think it’s that action, in itself and somehow separate from plot (if we’re not mangling the Poetics’ distinctions), is just too insubstantial a thing to survive without being grounded in particularity. The plot of Oedipus Tyrannus has nothing to do with Oedipus’s character, and it needn’t. Running through the woods or fighting a guy with a double-bladed lightsaber needs something else to be interesting for more than five minutes. In the genre of action movies (and possibly in 16th-century epic poetry), which pretty much eschews interesting plots, character seems to fill that gap of meaning. Indiana Jones has his bumbling pluck, James Bond his sneer. Without their characters, action movies tend to be just shit getting blown up or cool swordplay. If there are works out there that consist of almost solely of such things, yet manage to be profound or even great works of art, I’d be interested to see what principles were at work in them.

HB,

what I mean by “character in the modern sense” is modern literary (and dramatic) criticism’s preoccupation with the depiction of the dramatis personae as “realistic” personalities with well-defined and carefully delimited individual traits; along with this goes the conception that the primary purpose of story is to portray “character arcs”, that what is interesting in a story is how the “characters” of the actors change and grow, etc.; so that the beginning, middle, and end of the story is the beginning, etc., of the character development. As someone put it, “They laugh; they love; they learn.”

Modern literature and drama (since Shakespeare and Cervantes, at least—arguably since Chaucer) has been particularly good at this, to the unfortunate extent that these qualities are how many of us judge storytelling at all. But I think that’s fallacious.

I won’t use the example of Ariosto, which is perhaps only illuminating if you’ve read him. But think about what makes a great kung fu movie. Not the plot: all the plots are stereotyped and more or less the same. Recent martial arts epics which try to jazz up the plot as well as the CGI are *less* dramatically effective in my book, not more. And certainly not the characters, which are all more or less flat stereotypes as well. And certainly not in any kind of “message”. No, the difference between a schock kung fu movie and a great one is in how they’re done. They’re both doing more or less the same type of thing, but one does it crappily and one does it really, really well. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Kill Bill come to mind as movies that do not deviate from typical models—each is a vast tapestry of cliches—as far as plot or character go, but transcendently kick ass because of how superlatively well they do what they do.

This is by no means to say that a story can do without characters and plot. By no means. They’re completely necessary, as every element is. But what makes a great work of art need not be in doing something new or original or even particularly noteworthy in these departments.

Michael,

Thank you for detailing what you meant about modern character. It’s helped me understand much of what I’ve found sometimes hollow and sometimes deeply satisfactory in the works you’ve listed. This now makes me want to read a lot more Shakespeare, and soon. Since I haven’t troubled you with my pet theory about Shakespeare’s romances so far, let me just say that I suspect them of not falling prey to the character arc flaw that I find somewhat disappointing in, say, Othello. See below for more on why I might find that play disappointing.

Sadly, we seem to have missed each other in another genre, as all I’ve seen of kung fu movies are one Jackie Chan flick, Hero, and a deeply forgettable movie that I watched with Nick Hudson one time, and I’m not even sure if any of these fall within the king fu genre. I did see half of Kill Bill, and remember being intrigued. The good news is that I can pretty easily remedy this deficiency.

Sadly, I feel something to be lacking in your description, “how well it’s done.” I in no way doubt your seriousness or good intentions, and I’m sure you’d admit that it doesn’t seem to be cutting the thing quite at its joints. Surely, it’s obviously different from my own amorphous term, which was itself just a description of why I found certain action movies pleasurable. Again, I don’t want to attribute too much (if anything) to taste, but I suspect from your statements that we might enjoy well-executed technique to different extents. This may well be an aesthetic flaw on my part; I tend to insist that a work of art take a worthy moral stand in addition to its technical merit in order to count the work good.

HB,

In many cases you’re correct—where the nature of the work seems to require a moral stand, a worthy one must be taken. But I disagree that every dramatic or narrative work must take one, any more than every musical or plastic work must take one.

It’s true that a work of art needs a moral dimension to be truly great-souled. A book like the Divine Comedy would be worthless without it. But I deny that every book or play or movie need have such aspirations. Novelty of technique and style working on already-established worthy material, without novelty of plot, character, or “message”, is a hallowed tradition in Western civilization, but a part of the tradition that gets neglected in the Program, unfortunately. Belonging to it are Ovid and everyone doing poetry in the Ovidian line (in fact most of the Romans generally), Chaucer, Ariosto, Malory, the Mozart operas, the early Milton, and so on.

Note that it isn’t the case that these works have no moral dimension, even a worthy one; but that they tend to simply repeat sentiments or themes that today would be regarded as trite or hackneyed or overdone. Recall that some of Mozart’s operas, for instance, have exactly the same libretto as operas by other composers—the music is different, while the characters, plot, moral, are all the same! The difference is in the superiority of Mozart’s musical craftsmanship and psychological acuity, not that he “says” something important that other composers weren’t saying. It’s only with the Romantic revolution that music and opera had to be weighty and pregnant with “meaning” specific to the oracular Artist.

Similarly any kung fu movie you like will probably emphasise virtues like tradition, honor, discipline, restraint, and so forth—they’re rarely simply a succession of choreographed fights, and the ones that are aren’t very interesting. After a few such movies you won’t expect to hear new things along these lines. What’s interesting, exciting, and moving is how the stock elements of morals, character, plot, production value, athleticism, and so forth, are woven together into a beautiful and satisfying whole which succeeds, or fail to cohere and form a disappointing mess.

It’s difficult to be more specific than this without getting into the details of craftsmanship. But in art it’s craftsmanship, and not having something original to say, that makes the difference in quality. An artist that uses his art simply as a vehicle for “expression” ought to be a philosopher or a diarist instead.

Michael,

Ah, but you misread me. I did not say that every work of art must have a moral stand, but that in my (possibly too-serious) aesthetic judgment, the work should have one “in order to count [it] good.” I will revise that statement, however, to read “excellent,” since it seems the more accurate recounting of my experience. Even then, I suspect myself of being something of a seriousness junkie. It leads me to prefer Catullus over Ovid any day, and your “hallowed tradition” tends to hold my interest for about as long as, say, very complicated and innovative stitching. Ask my wife how long that is. The exception to your list is Chaucer, though. He’s about a million times more profound than the Decameron.

We disagree strongly about whether music needs (or, I would say, can do without) a moral dimension. Bach’s got plenty of what I’m looking for in every work of his that I’ve heard, though of course in varying degrees. I couldn’t care less about Romantic injections of meaning. Wagner sucks, in large part, for his insistence on doing this. That you misunderstood me is evidence enough of my imprecision above; I’ll try to be more clear in the future.

“An artist that uses his art simply as a vehicle for “expression” ought to be a philosopher or a diarist instead.” I agree with this statement entirely (it echoes of my early criticisms of Baudelaire). Thankfully, I would never endorse the principle of expression in art.

HB,

I admit I don’t know what it would mean for a fugue to have a moral dimension. I would be happy to hear more.

It is certainly your prerogative not to like certain entire portions of the literary canon. But to insist that because of a lack of seriousness Ovid or Ariosto cannot be excellent seems to willfully deny the judgment of the great conversation. Even were I tempted to hold such an opinion, the mass of respectable judgment to the contrary would give me pause.

Pause, sir, is exactly what I was expressing.

Expression, eh? Not sure I like the sound of that.

I can think of no reason why you would distrust the act of putting into words, stating, or revealing, when, according to your own standard, it is done by a philosopher or diarist; we Monadologists might be hoped to share traits of both of these states. Though certainly for artists expression is a canard, for others it can be a useful word.

You’re probably right that craftsmanship is the overarching category distinguishing good art from bad; it seems that my inexact preferences for the weighty and profound would have to fit under it. I tend to divorce the “merely” technical from other elements that I imagine result in the profundity I prize. But if the artist is the ruler of his work, for a time at least, then the former must come always in service of the latter, and my distinguishing of the two is imprecise, since there must be some unifying excellence.

I’ll try to think more about what I’m getting at with the wretched term “moral stand.” I’m starting to think that it’s common to music and most other art.

I’m sorry—my last comment was completely facetious.