PROBLEM 0005: In Praise of Indifference

In which the author looks at Problem 0004 and decides it could use a little help. In which that help comes from movies he recently saw and felt uncertain about. And where indifference eats all of his potato chips and doesn’t say thank you. It is, however, invited back to the party.

A PROBLEM WORTH REVISITING

Problem 0004 was getting a little long and ended up being a little too much. It was about our tendency to like/dislike something rather than critically think about something, and who wants to think about that? Well, I do, but I’m not the only one here. I still think it’s an interesting topic, and below is an example of how this recently played out for me. Since my head goes up into the brain clouds every once in a while, this is my attempt to weigh it down a little.   

I think most people (myself included) are absolutely a-O.K. with moving on from a work once it has done its damage. Like a dull vacation stop, we don’t snap many pictures and the ones we do don’t make it into the family scrapbook. But in the back of my head, where I assume the subtler brain parts are, I think about the hard work that went into a project and the ease with which we dismiss it. Take Monsters University: lots of hard work, but not a great movie. Loaded with the baggage of its masterpiece predecessor, it couldn’t fulfill expectations. Also, it probably wasn’t intended to be more than entertainment, but that’s another story. For the sake of argument, it was a work of art that immediately didn’t work for me. [Note: the ingenious character development of Sully and Mike shouldn’t be dismissed so quickly, though]

(The following movies straddle the line between strictly entertainment and art.)

MOVIES THAT RECENTLY LEFT ME AMBIVALENT IN MY RESPONSE, ILLUSTRATING THE PROBLEM

1. The Master, P. T. Anderson. I generally really like P. T. Anderson’s films. They’re good stuff. They’re for adults, have a sense of humor, and leave one feeling a certain amount of profundity.

2. The Great Gatsby, Baz Luhrman. I have a fondness for Moulin Rouge, which may discredit me to some, but it’s a movie I genuinely like. 

3. Red Desert, Michelangelo Antonioni. Another filmmaker I really admire. La Notte, L’Eclisse, and L’Avventurra are some of my favorite films, largely for the storytelling style and what they do to my brain. Subtle stuff. Good for thinking. Hard to get friends to watch them on a movie night, though.

FIRST. None of the above films were instant decisions for me. I couldn’t honestly say that I liked or disliked any one of them. I leaned towards liking The Master and Red Desert but felt the opposite of The Great Gatsby. I paid good money to see it and had a babysitter for the afternoon, so that might be part of the problem. I’m more forgiving when I don’t spend a rare few hours out with my wife on a movie that leaves me ambivalent.

SECOND. I love good craftsmanship. It’s hard to do and those that pull it off have my admiration. It’s especially hard in a film because you have several skill-wranglers who are trying to give their artists the freedom to work while not getting out of control—the nightmare discipline involved in making a film is tantamount to building a small pyramid, which nobody does because they’re not as fun. The photography, editing, and acting in each film was excellent. But these do not lead to instant liking or automatically compel one to critical thinking. However, because of the craftsmanship present in all three films, I felt obligated to spend more time with them (The Master and Red Desert also had great storytelling, but the stories themselves are curious to say the least). 

Of the three, The Master posed the greatest difficulty in relation to Problem 0004. The acting was of the highest caliber across the board, the photography and editing are brilliant, and the general narrative was very human and therefore interesting. However, it is not a typical story. Like the James Bond movie Skyfall, it was about foster children struggling with their foster parents. Or maybe The Master was about two men in contentious love. Or maybe it was about drinking, anger, and motorcycles that drink while angry. Who knows? Regardless, I couldn’t decide whether or not I actually liked it. 

Now, this isn’t a problem for most people, but when someone hears that I watched The Master, they want to know (for wonderfully selfish reasons) if I liked it (a vastly different response to my announcement of reading, say, The Iliad: they usually ask, “why?”). My ambivalence is qualified by the notes above, but if I truly want to engage the film, I need to spend some time critically thinking about it. I did not do that. I did not watch it a second time. I had to go to the water park the next morning. I watched Skyfall the next night (hence the weird coincidence of storyline). I've done lots of other writing about art but not about The Master. Three weeks later, it remains off the continuum altogether, appearing only now when I begin thinking about my own behaviors towards works of art. 

THIRD. Does a movie made by a master filmmaker deserve to drop off the continuum? [The continuum of Liking Something vs Critically Thinking About Something] That is a stupid question, Brian. Nothing deserves to be on the continuum at all. It’s a movie. It’s a film. It’s a work of art. If it didn’t do it’s job, remain indifferent and move on.

What would the value be to reenter the continuum?

Now, nobody is saying we have to like something or be critically attuned to it. Indifference is a completely acceptable option. Indifference is usually the ultimate in negative responses. It encourages nobody to see the art and depresses the artist. But could indifference have any value for artists?

IN PRAISE OF INDIFFERENCE

Much of my past artistic engagement could barely even be called “engagement”. I liked something, loved something, hated something, or was indifferent to something. Though I never would have said this before, I now suspect that the truly valuable response in that list was indifference. Indifference has a much longer tongue than its stumpy-tongued brethren, expressing more without words than they. Indifference walks softly through a gallery and horrifies the artist, who could at least respond cleverly to hatred or lack of understanding. Indifference requires presence, thought, and finally rejection, a turning of the back on the thing which failed to meet whatever hidden or subtle criteria were built up in the brain over its internal centuries. Those who witness indifference feel a cold chill that doesn’t enter their spines because their spines do not exist when indifference is in the room. Indifference is powerful, but it leads to something richer than Liking/Disliking: it leads to an event of thought for the observers. The best thing to do in the presence of indifference is to talk to it. Then you can see a mind working.

The instant we engage indifference, we must access thought processes that are rarely exercised. In the course of good conversation, the continuum is entered and sways towards critical thought and like/dislike simultaneously. I like this. It’s a land mine in art. The only problem is time: if too much time has passed from the moment of indifference, it is nearly impossible to engage. Other things have entered and engaged the mind. For indifference to have any effect at all, it needs to be engaged the instant it occurs, otherwise the only result of indifference will be oblivion.

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