I don’t know if any of y’all read Roy Edroso at all, but Roy specialises in making fun of the kind of rightwing meathead who only appreciate any kind of art if it’s propaganda for their cause. There’s a whole army of lowrent rightwing cultural commentators making a living by telling fellow wingnuts how conservative a movie is or not, who only value art for how well it adheres to their own political positions, and Roy is very good at showing up the absurdity of this. Roy’s basic position seems to be that when politics are put above art, art suffers, so only fools want art to be nothing more than propaganda. And he’s right of course,there’s nothing quite as awful as art that is mindlessly political (Ian McEwan’s Saturday springs to mind).
But at the same time, art, good or bad, always has a political dimension. Even art that says it’s apolitical has one, if only in the refusal to engage openly with politics. How an artist, a novelist sees the world informs their art and politics is always a part of it. And it’s the subconscious politics that are the most interesting, when it’s not put in there for purpose, but because that’s the way the author thinks the world works.
An example, Wag the Dog, that 1997 film about a president who two weeks before the elections get involved in a sexual scandal, for which his advisors fake a war to get him out of. It’s surface politics are trite and predictable: you can’t trust politicians, they will do anything to keep their job, you can’t trust the media because they fake everything blah blah blah. But behind that surface lie much more interesting politics. This is a movie that wants to present itself as cynical and knowning, but seen with a decade of hindsight, it just looks incredibly naive and, well, dumb.
Dumb because the cynicism at the heart of it is fake, a Hollywood idea of how politics work. A war with Albania is faked to distract attention from the president being accused of sexual assault. How is this done? By getting a movie producer to fake this war, who gets in a lot of other people to do this with them and it’s all swallowed by the great unwashed. In the end the producer, once he wants the credit for his success of course has to die to keep it all a secret, but the president gets re-elected and nobody is any the wiser… Nobody innocent dies, the phony war is so phony that nothing happens outside a television studio and it’s all smug bullcrap. We’ve seen what really happens when wars get faked and the endresult is a lot less neat than this movie suggests. We’ve seen that presidents do not hesitate to kill thousands of innocents for the sake of their own career, without the need of Hollywood advisors to help them on their way.
That’s right, Wag the Dog actually sugercoats the real truth, its cynicism is fake. And I think it is because it’s actual target is not the corruption in Washington, but corruption in tinseltown. It’s all about a bunch of Hollywood liberals playing around with things without once considering their impact on the real world. It is in fact a very conservative criticism of Hollywood, despite the fact that supposed liberals like David Mamet have worked on the movie.
And that’s what I mean with the subconscious politics of a piece of art.
