David Lynch's "A Goofy Movie"

Offered without commentary:

The (f)Utlilty of Art [UPDATE 1]

During a long weekend of camping, I can lose myself in thought about things I don't normally get to think about during work. This weekend, I've been turning over something about art and creation that I read on SA last week. In the thread discussing Inland Empire, someone commented that Lynch's latest movie was nothing more than "masturbation" - a charge I've often seen leveled against art in many forms, be it movies, poems, abstract sculpture, whathaveyou. It's also something wielded in more academic circles (and those Puppeteers who run in such circles have a much better concept of this than I do, to be sure), with the label "academic" or "intellectual masturbation."

This label is something used almost exclusively as an insult, as it was originally used in the SA thread about Inland Empire. But this got me thinking about something near and dear to my heart as a writer, and one working in a creative field: what does "artistic masturbation" mean, and why is it an insult?

Masturbation has a lot of negative connotations, and this post isn't designed to be a discussion of sexuality and whether those connotations are deserved or not, so I'll leave it at that. But it's a selfish, solo action designed (most of the time, I'll grant you) for the pleasure of the person doing the deed. It's for no one else; it's (again, usually) a private affair and one that specifically pleases the individual nature - likes and turn-ons - of the masturbator.

So what is a movie created as "artistic masturbation?" Read the definition again, but instead of imagining some scary guy with his hands down his pants, imagine a painter standing in front of an easel, and replace a couple of sexually charged words. "It's a selfish, solo action designed (most of the time, I'll grant you) for the pleasure of the person doing the deed. It's for no one else; it's (again, usually) a private affair and one that specifically pleases the individual nature - likes and taste - of the artist."

Isn't that what we want from our artists? How many times have we heard the refrain "well, he's sold out. George Lucas sold out with the Star Wars prequels. Billy Corgan sold out when he released the new Smashing Pumpkins album without two key band members. Cormac McCarthy sold out when he went on Oprah to promote "The Road."

So which is it? Do we want artists to create art solely for themselves, or do we want art that "sells out?" This was a conflict I ran into at WizKids quite a bit: what role, if any, did the marketing department play in game design? On one hand, I heard game designers claiming that marketing interfering with the game design process ruined the process, the "purity" of it. On the other hand, if a game failed, it wasn't because of bad design, it was marketing's fault for not selling it correctly - even if marketing raised some serious concerns about the game.

I suspect the answer lies somewhere in the middle, for a multitude of reasons. You may not be "selling out," but you have to pay your bills. You may not be "selling out," but if you're working for a game company, it makes sense to work with marketing to make a game that will sell so you and the fine folks over in marketingland will both continue to work for said game company. Should you write exclusively to pay your bills, or design exclusively to sell? No, because that invites a kind of cynicism that ruins the "spirit" (for lack of a better term) of what you're creating. Something designed only to sell will sell, but it's the Backstreet Boys compared to the Smashing Pumpkins. Seven years later, which would you rather listen to?

And to loop it back to David Lynch, making movies like A Straight Story, Dune and The Elephant Man give him the leverage to make the movies he wants. True artistic "masturbation" is a luxury afforded only by the rich (or the financially sound), the absolutely principled, or those too poor to give a fuck. For the other 95% of us, we have to continue to ride that middle road. But just as the principled and the rich should consider that we're putting food in our mouths when we work, so too should we consider that the principled and the rich are doing what the fuck they want. Neither "sell out" nor "masturbation" should be wielded in weaponlike fashion as they are; both can be compliments, or at least signs of respect.

Update: Roger made an excellent and informative post in the comments worth repeating here, both for context and fact:

"Intellectual masturbation" is nothing more than a reactionary non-argument against a work of art because the one making the argument can't connect to it. I never listen to those arguments because they are self-affirming prophecies. There is no argument that can counter an "intellectual masturbation" claim.

The phrase was first coined, incidentally, by Byron when he was first reviewing Keats's poetry. Keats's poetry, to him, was "a sort of mental masturbation" and he thought that Keats was "frigging his Imagination." Byron also referred to Keats as the "self-polluter of the Human Mind." Leon Waldoff argues that Byron was reacting to not only the language of Keats's poetry but to the fact that Keats was trying to rise from his working middle class background and become a leisure class poet like Byron. Not surprisingly, "intellectual" and "mental" masturbation is often an argument reserved for lower class or young upstarts who are trying to enter into the inner sanctum of the art world.

Ironically, after Byron used the phrase against Keats, it was eventually used against him by reviewers in a literate middle class who was tiring of poetry in general and turning to the form of the novel. Poets started to be labelled as "highly sexual" producing work that did nothing and created desires that were hardly kosher with the increasingly conservative values of the proto-Victorian world. The novel emerged as the literary form for the working bourgeoise and poetry became increasingly marginalized, a process that continues today.

David Lynch On Product Placement in Films

Although certainly not being discussed at the moment in the same way PR efforts are, marketing and advertising efforts to place products in films and TV shows is a far older discussion. If you can spot a product in a movie, chances are the company paid to put it there.

My favorite director weighs in:

Via MeFi. Incidentally, the interviewer is wrong: this isn't a "growing trend," it's been going on for years.

By the way, one of my favorite solutions for a movie that couldn't receive any product placement offers, Repo Man:

Image comes from an interview with Repo Man director Alex Cox, which contains the story of the awesome generics.

INLAND EMPIRE

So last week Angela and I took in a screening of INLAND EMPIRE, David Lynch's new movie. I've been holding off writing about it because I wasn't sure what I thought yet. I'm still not sure what I think, but I'm going to write about it anyway.

Bottom line: I thought the movie was good, but I'll be the first to recognize that David Lynch movies aren't for everyone. Local bloggers Seattlest didn't care for it that much. As this interview in the Times says, "it's about ideas." And that's exactly what it was about. Ideas. Feelings. Impressions.

Lynch's movies have always been interesting to me, because narrative is often secondary to the "art" of the film. Lynch was trained as a painter and sculptor first, and found film only as a way of experimenting with "moving paintings" or "moving pictures," much as film was originally intended to be used. His earliest short film, from his art school days, was projected in an art exhibit like a painting but with sound. Fair warning: it contains a siren that can be very repetitive.

Moreso than any of Lynch's other feature-length films, INLAND EMPIRE is a member of this group. It's a three-hour-long moving painting. Is there narrative there? Yes, but it's also one of the first real examples of a working "metafilm" that I've seen - as in, it involves things that aren't happening on the screen. It involves the audience. I would go so far as to say that the audience is a character in the film, if not the main character.

EMPIRE is about watching and performing. It's about audience. It's pure voyeurism, and even though it needed an editor, I liked it. It's certainly not going to appeal to everyone - this is probably the very definition of art film - but after thinking a lot about it, I liked it. And I will very likely see it again.

Just to clutter up this post with some more video, here's a new trailer:


In heaven, everything is fine.

Well HELLO There!

The official trailer for David Lynch's new classic film, INLAND EMPIRE, is out.



Expect to see me blogging more about this in the coming months.