Gimme the Genius, Keep the Torture.

There is a widespread notion dating back thousands of years that creativity and suffering are inextricable, a notion that has spawned a sizable cult who romanticize the torturous genius and dramatic downfall of the Hemingways, Woolfs, and Van Goghs of art history. I’ve spent the better part of my creative existence living with the assumption that at any given time, I might become a casualty of my profession, and even at my not-so-advanced age, I’m starting to realize how very uncomfortable this makes me. Yes, I am not comfortable with this notion at all. Why can’t I absorb the gifts these artists have given our culture without having to fetishize their alcoholic, manic-depressive, suicidal lifestyles? Is it too much to ask for artists to be both brilliant and healthy?

I’ll concede right away that there is an inherent torture in being an artist in a society that is reluctant to embrace either art or artists. Having grown up in mass consumer culture, we shouldn’t blame any artist for the anguish they might feel upon discovering their art, like most art, isn’t cut out for mass consumption. We should thank the heavens for that, but it does leave us without a home, and you know what that can do for your sanity. Even with the support of an artistic community, we were raised to view ourselves in relation to a very giant, very un-local culture, and the lack of breakthrough success can leave us languishing in the ghetto of artistic homelessness.

We are also tortured by our contact with some form of ethereal inspiration, if not literal then at least tangible, and our dance with these spirits will confuse and frustrate us to at least the extent that it inspires us. If you’re bristling at the unscientific backwardness of these admittedly archaic terms, I would venture that you’re much more susceptible to artistic demons than those who would locate their genius outside of themselves. This was the dominant understanding in the days before the post-Renaissance Era of the Tortured Genius.

Author Elizabeth Gilbert posed an interesting solution for this dilemma in her fascinating talk with TED.com last February. She explains that in ancient Greece, inspiration came from being possessed by minor deities known as daimons. The Romans inherited the concept, but renamed the daimons geniuses. So rather than being a genius, you were possessed by a genius who literally lived in the walls of your room. She sees this not as an historical concept which has become irrelevant, but as a protective psychological construct to put distance between you and your anxieties, a barrier between the you who is doing the hard work and the you who worries about the implications and importance of that work. After the Renaissance, when human beings became the center of the universe, artists became geniuses rather than being inhabited by geniuses, which she sees as a huge mistake that has created unmanageable expectations and has been killing artists for centuries since.

To demonstrate this distancing technique with a more modern example, she relays a Tom Waits anecdote about a turning point in his career. A song idea found him in the middle of an L.A. traffic jam, and rather than internalizing the frustration of that monumental inconvenience as he had always done, he decided instead to look up to the empty sky, at nothing in particular, and say, “Can’t you see I’m driving? Couldn’t you have waited until I was somewhere I could write you down?” This might sound like a childish solution, but it could also be a sane alternative to the suicidal narcissism that cripples artists, crushing them beneath the weight of their own expectations. Isn’t inventing a phantom to blame for both your failures and successes preferable to becoming a casualty of your own tortured genius? And isn’t that our job as artists in the first place–to create a fiction that simultaneously illuminates and transcends reality?

The last issue that merits attention is hack artists who are content to mime the self-destructive behavior of their heroes rather than putting in the hard work and long hours that made them truly heroic. Getting drunk and mistreating women does not make you Bukowski any more than wearing a lab coat makes you a scientist. I’m ready to refashion my conception of artists around the simple folk I know who have taken up the monumental task of being an artist without using it as an excuse to be abusive or self-destructive. Our mental health might be the key to sustained artistic careers in the post-Tortured Genius Era, and that’s a welcome alternative to the flash-in-the-pan success and untreated illness that have gummed up the gears of human achievement in eras past.

Oblique Strategies

Brian Eno

In 1975, Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt designed a deck of cards containing cryptic phrases that were intended to break creative blockages. In Eno’s words:

“These cards evolved from separate observations of the principles underlying what we were doing. Sometimes they were recognised in retrospect (intellect catching up with intuition), sometimes they were identified as they were happening, sometimes they were formulated. They can be used as a pack, or by drawing a single card from the shuffled pack when a dilemma occurs in a working situation. In this case the card is trusted even if its appropriateness is quite unclear…”

Some examples of the sayings:

- Honour thy error as a hidden intention.

- Look closely at the most embarrassing details and amplify.

- Not building a wall; making a brick.

- Repetition is a form of change.

- Are there sections? Consider transitions.

- Try faking it!

Obviously the sayings are applicable to more than artistic slumps. Many recording studios still have an old deck lying around for inspiration. Oblique Strategies is in its fifth printing and can be purchased at Eno’s online shop, or you could just flip through the online version for free.

The Path of the Artist

I thought I’d kick off the new blog with some inspiring and provocative excerpts from film critic Ray Carney’s “The Path of the Artist”. Feel free to discuss and bicker. More gems can be found at his excellent website.

Never forget that to be an artist is, above everything else, to be a truth-teller, one of the few left in a culture seized in a death-grip by media-induced fictions and journalistic clichés. You speak secrets no one else dares to whisper. You exist to share your most private feelings and personal observations with others. They are where truth lies. Don’t be afraid of being too personal, too private. Your most secret fears, your private doubts and uncertainties are everyone’s.

It’s hard to see the truth because emotional clichés are everywhere, waiting to trap us. Most movie emotions are as unreal as the ones in pop songs. But fake emotions are not confined to the movies. They fill up the radio, television, magazines, and newspapers: All the things we pretend to care about but really don’t. All the things our culture tells us matter but really don’t. Make a movie about what you really feel, not what you think you are supposed to feel.

Leave the plastic feelings to the after-school specials. Leave the recycling to Hollywood. Our films have so many imitation emotions that if a real one ever intruded, it would shock us or make us laugh. Mike Leigh tells the story of the time a table collapsed on stage and, as the actors scurried to keep the dishes from tumbling, the sudden honesty of their performance revealed the falsity of the entire preceding play.

Cinematic clichés are everywhere. Any hack can create loneliness with a long shot and a little music. Danger with a hand-held, point-of-view shot. Fear with key-lighting. Surprise with an editorial jump. Leave the tricks to magicians. They are not life. If you are about to use a snappy, jazzy, exciting way to get something on film, it means you’re not really in touch with what is going on in a scene. You’re falling back on a routine, a formula, a shortcut for understanding.

You speak the most subtle language ever created–the language of art–a form of expression more nuanced than verbal language, more complex than a theorem in physics, truer than anything in the newspaper. The idea of photographing people and things does not go deep enough to capture the profound complexity of art-speech.

A work of art is not a mirror but a house of mirrors. It is not a tape recording but an echo-chamber of connected, compared, contrasted feelings and points of view.

To build your film around your main character’s decisions and choices, plans and goals (as virtually every Hollywood movie does), is to skim the surface of life. Go deeper.

Our intentions don’t ultimately matter. They are not the deepest part of us. We know this about other people, but forget it about ourselves. Our conscious thoughts, our plans and purposes, are probably the least important aspect of what we are. Capture the emotional and intellectual structures that make us what we are, even if we don’t know it. What we really are is almost always the opposite of what we think we are or what we intend to be.

Most movie characters have goals and follow a set of steps to achieve them. Life is not like that. It’s not logical. People outside the movies don’t have purposes and goals. We are not rational beings. Our moods swing wildly and unpredictably. Our lives are not logical. We don’t follow game plans, certainly not consciously. We keep changing our minds. We almost never know what we are doing or where we are going from one moment to the next. The only times we do know are unimportant moments, like driving to the dentist. All of the rest of the time, we just get by–one step after another. Make a film that shows how irrelevant our plans are, how they are a way of avoiding living. As John Lennon said, life is what happens when we’re making other plans.

The only reason these problem-solving, goal-driven, jigsaw-puzzle pictures are so popular is because they are so infantile. It takes no knowledge of life, no sensitivity to emotions, to understand them.

America admires brassy certainty. The main characters in most films are as cool, controlled, knowing, and cynical as the host of an MTV talk show. The toughness, swagger, and smart-ass witticisms of the characters in most movies represent emotional problems to be explored, not qualities to be celebrated. Allow your characters to have doubts and uncertainties, to be shy or embarrassed, to reflect on their lives. In this triumph of cockiness, the shyness and pudency of soul is snuffed out.

Hollywood movies tell us what to think. But they forget that explanations kill involvement. When people and events are explained, a viewer ceases to care about them. In being brought into our minds, they leave our hearts. When you watch Tarkovsky’s Stalker or Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence, you feel things precisely because you can’t quite understand them. Explanations makes us passive. Following directions is the opposite of thinking. Real thinking can take place only when we aren’t told what to think.

Why do we think film should be easier, purer, more idealized than life? Don’t spoon-feed the viewer. Don’t give him or her predigested bits of knowledge. The experience of a good film should be as demanding and raw and unassimilated as the experience of life.

The horrors of horror movies are too external. The real horrors are inside us–our need to have others support our fantasies of ourselves, our desire for praise, our idiotic quest to be successful, our bottomless emotional neediness.

All the important knowledge we acquire in life is slow, tentative, partial, and subject to revision. In Elaine May’s and Barbara Loden’s work, you watch faces and listen to voices for a long, long time before you understand even a little about them. You know things only by getting to know them. It’s the difference between knowledge as insight and knowledge as acquaintance.