Another interesting teaser-article from "Ryan Sauve", just short enough for me not to know what he really thinks or what he was really getting at. Interesting, though...

Plato was a prude. And if he and Aristotle disagreed on the value of poetry and plays, they both agreed that poetry and plays had major public effects; they just took opposite stances on them: for Plato the arts were corrupting (unless they were in praise of state heroes, or of the state itself), and for Aristotle the arts were therapeutic, purging, as they do, those pesky, pent up emotions - fear and pity - after which people could get back the business of not thinking about the political situation that they found themselves in (or under). Both Plato and Aristotle, for all their superficial differences, were looking for the same thing: public order.

I talked a bit about Plato and Aristotle on art in my article Art, Politics, Catharsis, and Alienation, and contrasted them with Bertolt Brecht's views on the public role of art. Brecht though art should be self-consciously artificial (to keep the audience reminded - and therefore thinking, aware, conscious - of the artifice and contrived nature of art, and by extension, the contrivance of all human-made structures in culture, politics and economics) and politically critical.

Even with all the "subversive" content in movies like The Wild One or Natural Born Killers (director's cut or not), I think there's a deeper issue that your article misses.

Whether it's The Wild One or It's a Wonderful Life, a mainstream movie is a mainstream movie. All are equally representative of the culture. Some movies just catch the prudes off guard along the way, granting any movie they protest against the aura of "subversive". But like you point out, "Ryan", it all seems silly, and not-so-subversive, what with our modern, anything-now-goes hindsight.

I hate to say it (again!), but this all goes back to The Rebel Sell, a book nobody I know has read, but one that everybody in my generation should. Movies from The Wild One to Easy Rider to Natural Born Killers are actually not, and never have been, subversive. They all fit nicely into the mainstream of American pictures, or soon did. This is a line I'm getting tired of repeating, but non-conformity is the most conspicuous form of conformity today. And this has been the case, increasingly, since the 1960s at least. The Wild One may have been ahead of its time, but it's of the same ilk, I think. It didn't take long in Hollywood for the morality codes to be subordinated (if they ever weren't) to box-office demands.

Anyway, I'm at the public library and out of public library computer time.

What do you think, "Ryan"?

Replying to Hogan:
First off, I think you should stop putting quotation marks around my name -- it's visually unpleasant.

Second, my profile is female, my picture is female, and my name is also used by females, so please rethink your pronoun usage.

Third, my central theme, as stated in the article, is that "One way of documenting change in North America's moral attitude is by watching North American film." Society is different than it was in the past; things have changed; the history-of-censorship summary was supposed to demonstrate this. I think you run into problems of repeating yourself because you continually use the same two or three ideas to cover everything that is somewhat related. Having one colour of paint is great if you're painting a school gymnasium, but I'm talking Warhammer models here.

You say it yourself when you write "(Ostensibly controversial movies) all fit nicely into the mainstream of American pictures, or soon did." It's the "soon did" part of your sentence that is significant here. Culture is not a static thing-in-itself; it is a continual creative process by members of society. The status quo is reinforced by certain forces -- including those that are packaged as subversive, as you have pointed out a number of times. But the status quo is also genuinely challenged by forces. The point is that what is normal has come about with time. For example, The Wild One has been a factor in creating the new standard of non-conformity as described in The Rebel Sell. It was released in a time when non-conformity was not standard.

It's also a matter of degrees. I get the feeling The Rebel Sell guys are talking about revolutionary, Marxist-style change. They want the financial infrastructure substantial change, as opposed to red shoes instead of blue shoes. I agree that Natural Born Killers didn't bring about the death of capitalism, but if you see society in the sense that a whole bunch of micro-changes eventually make a macro-change, then it is a part of a process.

I believe this is true because capitalism didn't always exist; it came about eventually. Small events and ideas came together to gradually bring it to the system we know today. (Whether capitalism is determined or not is another question.)

As for the Greeks, I think you have Aristotle wrong. He only used the word catharsis once in the Poetics, and left it largely undefined. I've read one scholar interpret it to be more of a "clearing up" of emotions, than a "clearing out", as you commonly refer to it. Therefore, the sensation allows the audience to empathize with the characters in a healthy and morally upright manner, and by extension become a more sensitive member of society, treating their fellow citizens as they themselves would like to be treated. Catharsis deals with finding the mean: not too much, not too little.

That's how I read it. End the dogma of your terms, Hogan.

Replying to Ryan_Sauve:
Points taken, Ryan. And my apologies for any offense or annoyance.

Where to begin, then?...

You're right, the authors of The Rebel Sell were attacking the grand, remake-all-of-society type rebellions (i.e.: political revolutions). They argue that everything we have that's good and democratic we got from slow, steady, incremental reform, not revolution. So they, and I, are with you there. I'm still not sure whether movies like The Wild One qualify as causes or symptoms of these cultural shifts, though. Maybe it's a bit of both.

I'm not sure who your "They" refers to in your fifth paragraph. Is it the Marxists or the Rebel Sell authors? It makes a difference. I'm also not sure you'd bother answering, sick as you are of my incessant repetition. But the point is this: The Rebel Sell authors are arguing for substantial change, but in the form of regulating capitalism through existing institutions; not overthrowing capitalism though revolutionizing people's consciousness, by, say, buying red instead of blue shoes - that is, by getting with the right state of consciousness. The Rebel Sell is basically arguing for a conventional solution to problems, rather than calling on "culture-jammers" to go beyond the "merely institutional" and affect some sort of "revolution of the mind". Also, the book is about the massive irony (making it nearly impossible to talk sensibly about political and cultural change, which is why I do all the time, since the most important things to talk about are often the most difficult to articulate, power controlling language as it does) that arises when we confuse anti-consumerism/capitalism with the mass-society critique; the irony that turns non-conformity into a sales-pitch.

Lurking beneath this all (for me, anyway) is Rosa Luxemburg's own distinction between reform and revolution. Reforms, she said, can only take place within the framework of the last revolution, whereas a revolution creates its own radically knew system - a paradigm shift, to use Thomas Kuhn's term; or an epistemic break, to use Foucault's; or a different final vocabulary, to use Richard Rorty's - that has its own set of possible reforms within it, but which don't go beyond the system itself, which is set up during the last revolution.

I'm not fully convinced by this scheme. I think human consciousness is fairly fixed (as it has been for, at the very least, 50,000 years), much like our bodies, literally and figuratively. We can choose to wear the appropriate institutional clothing over "the body" of our fixed consciousness; different clothing for different circumstances, goals, purposes. We may change our clothes radically - go from, say, a Libertarian, laissez-faire bikini to a social democrat wool sweater - but our bodies (or consciousness) stay the same. My point: revolutions go even less than skin deep; they're a matter of clothing (not underlying consciousness), and reform, to run with the analogy, is alteration and accessorizing. So I agree with you when you say that culture is "a continual creative process by members of society", rather than, if I can put words in your mouth (spit them out if you want), a series of monolithic, self-contained, mutually-unintelligible, revolutionary paradigms (determined or not).

Sorry, Ryan, if this is all repetitive again. I wouldn't repeat myself so if I didn't think that going over all this was life and death stuff for democracy. And being annoying and repetitive is, I dare say, a Socratic virtue.

As for having Aristotle wrong: "clearing up", "clearing out", is there really much difference here? My point, following Brecht, was that Aristotle's positive view of art (in contrast to Plato's negative one) derives from its social-calming function. Whether the emotions in question are purged, cleared up, or cleared out doesn't really matter, I think. The point is that the status quo goes on, undisturbed and unquestioned, since the energy that may have gone into criticizing it is "cleared up". The Greek polis was notoriously misogynistic and based on slave labor. Becoming, as you put it, "a more sensitive member of society, treating their fellow citizens as they themselves would like to be treated" (if that is indeed what happened to Athenians after watching a tragic play) may help people get along better, but it can only reinforce the very unjust status quo of the polis. What good is becoming a more "sensitive" member of society if it doesn't lead to positive social change? (That's a rhetorical question; maybe it does lead to positive change.)

Anyway. Hope I haven't been too dogmatic in my reply. Always good to see a new post by you, Ryan. If I criticize it's because I like what you write and how you think, and I only want more from you.