Re: opionated
Brendan McKennedy (suburbantourist@hotmail.com)
Sat, 02 May 1998 22:20:55 -0700 (PDT)
> When Schubert opens the Trout quintet with those two superconfident
> chords & arpeggios, he's simply saying: `There. THAT'S the way it
> is....' Which is what Cezanne is also saying when he starts laying
> in those heart-stopping tiles of colour that make the shape of the
> mountain. And when Ernest sends Fred Henry walking away from
> the hospital in the rain.
>
> And when Holden first fixes you with his baleful eye & begins
> telling you what happened.
That's it, I think: the ability to judge art upon its merits and not
upon a moral standard. While I don't believe it's possible to look at
something *entirely* without the filter of personal ethics (that's
subjectivism, isn't it? and there's no escaping that while you're
human), I think you must sort of transcend it and simply appreciate the
craft.
It's what terrifies me about the phenomenon of things like Pulp Fiction,
the film. It was, very simply, a brilliant piece of work. If you begin
to judge it ethically, though, things get dangerous. Then comes words
like Censorship and Banning. Or, on the other end, which I find at
least equally dangerous...Well, I just listen to people talk about the
movie, some of them, and I'm frightened by the way that they take it as
a sort of Green Light to violence, murder, and excessive abuse of very
dangerous drugs. Instead of watching the film as a pretty silly satire
on very serious issues, they watch it as a dismissal of the seriousness
of the issues. And now they've got me judging the film on morality,
which bothers me doubly.
While I don't advocate the general tossing out of Morality, I think it's
important to be able to look at art not for instruction, but because
it's art.
Brendan
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