On 6/13/07, BklynMagus <magcomm at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> > This started with you asking why people like the Sopranos
> so much. I've been trying to answer that. I think what's
> important about the show has little to do with what you're
> talking about.
>
> I realize that, but what I find fascinating is many people
> (not you Dennis) accord THE SOPRANOS a status of aesthetic
> greatness based on their perception of significance with
> regard to non-aesthetic attributes of the show. It is this
> transposition from non-aesthetic to aesthetic that I find
> interesting (from an anthropological point of view).
Brian,
I will reply later, to your more complete thoughts. But here you and Jordan (I think he was trying to be funny) bring up something important that I can reply to. But first let me emphasized, as I will explain more fully below, that there are no "non-aesthetic" attributes of a work art. If it is part of the work of art, somehow, someway -- even if people express these aspects in the nonsensical babble of "sociology" or "psychology" -- then it is part of the aesthetic universe created by the work of art. This is true of good art as well as bad art, and I think it is a fundamental area of disagreement between us.
You are correct, this is not a thread on THE SOPRANOS, but on the way we experience and come to love and hate (1) art in general,(2) stories as a species, and (3) television and film in particular. THE SOPRANOS is a jumping off point, and an illustration.
So, between ourselves, we have to be careful not to give the impression that I am trying to convince you to see the strengths in THE SOPRANOS as a story, or that you are trying to convince me that the lack of visual artfulness, destroys THE SOPRANOS as a story. You do not see the artistic power in the stories that THE SOPRANOS tells and I do. This is partly a matter of taste. I think that unfortunately Jordan got the impression that we were beating each other over our respective heads because you like clams and I like oysters or vice-versa.
What makes this difference between ourselves interesting (at least to me and I think to you) is that we have substantial areas of agreement on the infelicity of THE SOPRANOS and yet we disagree about its artistic value. I think that THE SOPRANOS is a series of connected stories, powerful and engrossing, with a unifying narrative-consciousness, creating a fictional universe of characters who reveal to us an alternate world of experience where we can effectively feel our own self-loathing, reveal our own moral failings of attraction and repulsion, and distance ourselves from ourselves because of the "aliveness" of this hypothetical reality, that we call these stories of THE SOPRANOS. You think, to put it bluntly, that THE SOPRANOS is bad film making, with a prosaic style, that constantly interferes with anything interesting in the stories or compellingly obsessive about watching the characters in the story. In short for me THE SOPRANOS is a living story (an alternate world, I can live in) and for you it is a dead cliche. The interest comes for me where I agree with so much of your criticism and observations, and yet insist that you are not even seeing the story, or acknowledging it. Further you don't seem to acknowledge that "story" is not the same as the plot, and that plot and story are not the same as narrative. You also don't seem to want to acknowledge that making living-stories is important to all of the narrative arts in what ever medium.
Thus you commented on opera.
"But if you choose to tell a story through a visual medium, why ignore the tools you yourself have selected? When I experience Don Carlo I listen to the music since Verdi is telling his story through the music. I think it would be odd to hear that a peson goes to the opera for the story and not the music. Why watch movies/television if not for the possibility of visual pleasure?"
Well yes, when I go to the opera I listen to the music, and if the story is bad, and the music is good, I don't enjoy the opera as much. And if the music somehow doesn't "make" the story appear as a whole, I don't enjoy the opera as much. What I am trying to get you to understand is that sometimes the story can "make" music. The "story" as a whole can make what would otherwise be maudlin-sentimentality into a great artistic experience.
For me the great example is Puccini. Puccini writes music that is often sickly-sweet and sentimental, without being sensitive. As far as Puccini's music is concerned, he is the Barry Manilow of opera composers. (Now I am quite willing to accept Barry Manilow as camp, but ....) I have a hard time listening to the "great" arias of MADAME BUTTERFLY, for instance, without thinking to myself, oh come-on this is just bad pop music. No wonder Andrew Lloyd Webber stole so much of it for CATS! Even Anna Moffo's wonderful voice does not overcome this feeling for me. But if I imagine the story, or better yet, see the story in a good performance, on stage, the final great aria is simply magical. My heart breaks. And I am constantly amazed that these sickly sweet songs, and this rather cliche plot-line, when put together in any decent performance become truly great art, art that brings me to tears, art that creates a world of emotion, and character, and narrative experience that I can play with, imagine, and feel from within.
So when you say "many people ... accord THE SOPRANOS a status of aesthetic greatness based on their perception of significance with regard to non-aesthetic attributes of the show." I want to say to you: There are no such phenomena as the "non-aesthetic aspects" of the work. The whole of the work is part of the "aesthetic" aspects of the work, and in works that are specifically narrative, the _experiential-whole_ of the work is what I am calling our experience of the story. If people experience the alternate reality of character and society; the alternate reality of aspects of specific people they know; of specific "reflections" and deflections from their own social experience if they experience all of this as aspects of THE SOPRANOS that they watch, then that becomes part of the world of stories that the work of art has created. The creators of THE SOPRANOS have created this world, and somehow this is part of the story, and for me part of the power of the story.
The fact that you insist that there are "non-aesthetic aspects" of a work of art, and by implication aspects of a work of art that are specifically "aesthetic" is precisely what I am objecting to. And it is precisely what I objected to in Nabokov's analysis of Dostoevsky when I first read it 25 years ago. More specifically, you take the rather nineteenth century view, that 20th century auteurist swallowed whole, that there are aesthetic aspects of art that are specific, particular and exclusive to that art's medium. Thus if the work of art does not measure up to the aesthetic standards of the medium specific to it, then that art must be judged lacking. It is because THE SOPRANOS does not live up to your visual standards, that you condemn all of us for experiencing the world created by the stories, through good acting and great writing, as a compelling work of art.
Again let me emphasized, (for Jordan's sake) that we are not arguing over "taste" here, but we are arguing over standards of aesthetic judgment. And I am arguing (and I know you will disagree with this) about the possibility of openness to the full experience of the narrative arts and how predetermined aesthetic rules or theories can _never_ provide for this openness.
So let me end by quoting Nabokov on Dostoevsky (and switching from addressing Brian in the second person singular to calling him out by his name):
__"At Varvara Petrovna's the author, with all the gusto of a playwrite tackling the climax, crams in, one after the other, all the characters of THE POSSESED, two of them arriving from abroard. It is incredible nonsense, but it is grand booming nonsense with flashes of genius illuminating the whole gloomy and mad farce.
"Once collected in one room, these people trample one each other's dignity, have terrific rows ... and these rows just fizzle out as the narrative takes a new turn.
"It is, as in all Dostoevski's novels, a rush and tumble of words with endless repetitions, mutterings aside, a verbal overflow which socks the reader after say, Lermontov's transparent and beautifully poised prose. Dostoevski as we know is a great seeker after truth, a genius of spiritual morbidity, but as we also know he is no a great writer in the sense of Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Chekhov are. And, I repeat, not because the world he creates is unreal -- all the worlds of writers are unreal -- but because it is created too hastily without any sense of that harmony and economy which the most irrational masterpiece is bound to comply with (in order to be a masterpiece). Indeed, in a sense Dostoevski is much too rational in his crude methods, and though his facts are but spiritual facts and his characters mere ideas in the likeness of people, their interplay and development are actuated by the mechanical methods of the earthbound conventional novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
"I want to express again the fact that Dostoevski was more a playwright than a novelist. What his novels represent is a succession of scenes, of dialogues, of scenes where all the people are brought together -- and with all the tricks of the theatre, as with the scène à faire, the unexpected visitor, the comedy relief, etc. Considered as novels, his works fall to pieces; considered as plays, they are much too long, diffuse and badly balanced."__
I can just hear Brian. Why is Chase using the medium of television? Why isn't he writing a novel, or presenting a series of plays?
Now the thing is I agree with most of Nabokov's criticisms of Dostoevsky and Brian's of chase. But I also believe that there is something that they don't get. Nabokov because he has too much invested in the art of the novel-qua-novel and Brian because he adheres to the aesthetics of the cinematic-art-qua-cinematic-art. In Nabokov this lead him to very weird judgments at times.
Nabokov's criticisms of Dostoevsky are interesting, and, at least here, he teaches us something about Dostoevsky's novels that we should keep in mind. But he misses so much that is compelling in Dostoevsky's perversity and in the very bagginess of his novels. He misses "the devil" in Dostoevsky's novels because he can only see "the divine" in the creation of art. The devil -- the perverse representation of/attraction to evil -- is always compelling in Dostoevsky's novels and often form the heart of "the story" being told, as opposed to the Gothic-mystery plots that Nabokov continually criticizes and makes us laugh at. It is precisely Nabokov's proclamation that Dostoevsky cannot be a great artist because he ignores the specifically aesthetic aspects of the novel-form, that I find so perverse. It is partially Dostoevsky ineptitude in the novel form (especially when compared to _Anna Karenina_), that makes the weird tight-rope of the stories of his novels so compelling. I cannot separate Dostoevsky's ineptness as a novelist from his greatness as a story-maker, especially in THE IDIOT and THE POSSESSED the two novels of Dostoevsky that Nabokov hates the most.
Similarly, with Brian's criticisms of Chase. I cannot separate the ineptness of camera work from the strength of the story he tells. Most people might not want to see (or might be untrained to see) the ineptness of the camera-work. But that is why people like Nabokov and Brian are around, to train our eyes to see and our imaginations to perceive such things. But the reason why people of the likes of Edmund Wilson are around is to bring us back to ground, so that we can see the power of the stories, the characters, the argument, the action, the emotions, not only in-spite of the ineptitude but as a part of it. (Or at least, as between myself and Brian, so that one of us can argue for _the possibility_ that the power is not in predefined aesthetic "theories" but rather in the experiential value of the work as a whole.) There are no aesthetic-techniques that are specific to any art-medium so that if an artist doesn't follow those aesthetic techniques she/he should just stop working in that art medium.
And this brings me to my final point. Nabokov overestimated the techniques specific to making a novel-qua-novel; thus when judging the aesthetics of the novel as a whole, he could over-value some novelists as well as under-value others --- not only Dostoevsky, but Dreiser, and Faulkner, and the Brontes. One novelist he overvalued is a novelist I also enjoy -- Alain Robbe-Grillet. Robbe-Grillet is not one of the great novelists of the century in my opinion, but he was in Nabokov's opinion. He is good and interesting, but often I feel his stories fall short because they are mostly hidden beneath the novelistic-techniques that they so-perfectly illustrate.
Similarly, Brian grossly overestimates the movies made by Douglas Sirk, as do most people enamored by the auteur theory and the notion that there are qualities of cinema that are specific to the cinema art and thus when those qualities appear praise must follow. The mise en scène of "Imitation of Life" is fantastic. I can point to specifically the scene in the hallway and on the stairs where Steve Archer (John Gavin) proposes to Lora Meredith (Lana Turner) and they end up in an argument on the way down stairs, after being interrupted by a man trying to squeeze by in the hall and a phone call from Lora's agent. But the movie as a whole is simply sentimental tripe, sentiment and pathos, substituting for sensitivity for the most part. Most of the reasons for this were beyond Sirk's control. It had to do with the star power of one of the worse Hollywood actresses Lana Turner. She was wooden, she had a tin-ear for every line she said, either reciting the lines in a monotone because she didn't know how to convey them, or giving us false emotions at all of the wrong times. John Gavin is even worse in his scenes and the less said about him the better. Unfortunately the screen-play does not help the actors at all.
It is full of the usual banal 1950s soap-opera safe platitudes. The script does not even have the courage of its "tragic mulatto" theme. (See footnote below.) The acting of Juanita Moore and Susanah Kohner soar above the pathetic script, and they together with the brilliant directing of Sirk in their scenes together, almost save the movie. But nothing in the end can save this script from Lana Turner and Sandra Dee. If I were to condemn anybody to cinematic torture I would have them watch these two over and over again, in their scenes together, scenes that manage somehow to be hysterical and wooden at the same time. One tends to think that the splashes of color in these scenes, beautifully displayed by Sirk, were put their to distract us from how truly excruciating they are to listen to and watch.
And yet because Sirk is so "cinematically" astute in his use of visuals, there are some (Brian among them) who declare this movie a great work of art. Well, perhaps Sirk could have made it into a great work of art if it wasn't for the presence of a badly constructed script, with sentimentalism substituted for emotion, with cardboard cliche ridden dialogue substituting for interesting voices, and if something could substituted people who could act for Lana Turner, John Gavin, and Sandra Dee. It is my belief that Brian sees IMITATION OF LIFE as great film-making for the same reasons that he sees THE SOPRANOS as bad film-making. He primarily sees what he believes are "cinema-specific" aspects of the the work, and he doesn't see the strength and weakness in the stories.
(Footnote: In this respect the 1934 version staring Claudette Colbert with a script by William Hurlbut and directed by John Stahl, is much more courageous. And again this has nothing to do with the specifically "cinematic" aspects of the movie but rather with the script itself and the casting of the movie. Production wise it apparently had to do with presence of Claudette Colbert and not with the the director John Stahl. The 1934 version has a better script and better acting and is in many respects the stronger story overall. So why do we always watch the 1959 version and not the 1934 version. Partly this is the politics of reputation and the fact that Sirk was made into an auteur. Stahl's directing is simply pedestrian, neither good nor bad. But overall the 1934 version is simply a better made story, mostly because of the presence of Colbert and the absence of Lana Turner. But also the script does not have the very silly "actress" makes her way up the ladder plot, that the presence of Lana Turner imposed on the movie. Colbert was a business woman, and her exploitative relationship with her maid (Deliah Johnson in the "34 version) is more honestly dealt with in the movie. Also the "blackness" of Peola Johnson (in the 1934 version this was the character's name, and she was actually played by a black actress, unlike the 1959 version where she was named "Sarah Jane Johnson" and was played by a white actress, the fantastic Sarah Kohner who made too few movies, but shined in most) is dealt with honestly, is in fact emphasized, in the 1934 version. But the real reason we don't watch the 1934 version but we do watch the 1959 version is the cowardice involved in the politics of cinematic reputation. Douglas Sirk became an auteur, so we overlook the fact that the movie actually conformed to the Hays Code about "miscegenation". The 1934 version, on the other hand was shot pre-code and the first release was a pre-code version. Thus the movie was destined to be re-edited and to be disappeared for reasons of censorship.)
Jerry Monaco
> Dennis:
>
> > Speak for yourself.
>
> I am doing just that.
>
> > Talk about mise-en-scene or auteur theory leaves me pretty
> cold and I didn't find myself distracted by visual incompetence.
>
> Seems logical to me. If mise en scene is something you do not
> respond to, then incompetence in that area would not be
> distracting. Since I care about mise en scene (and visual art
> in general), I did find its abuse distracting.
>
> > Not to mention Chase didn't direct even close to every episode.
>
> But here we run up against Jerry's claim of a Sopranos house-style.
>
> Jordan:
>
> > Ok, OK we get it! You didn't like it.
>
> I am saying a lot more than that. I do not see any need to be nasty
> toward me. If you are uninterested in a thread on aesthetics just
> press the delete key.
>
> Brian
>
>
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