The "Sea Peoples": American Philistinism

Edgar Degas, "David and Goliath"

"Philistine" is a lovely pejorative that has unfortunately gone out of fashion -- or at least out of the common ken.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a "philistine" is "3. ... An uneducated or unenlightened person; one perceived to be indifferent or hostile to art or culture, or whose interests and tastes are commonplace or material; a person who is not a connoisseur."

Perhaps the very reason for the mysterious disappearance of such a germane descriptor is that we are so inundated with Philistia that we cannot see it, like a fish in the sea. Only a Noah will float.

One has only to review the "reviews" of Terrence Malick's To the Wonder to discover the inane blatherings of our very own American philistian moviegoers, who apparently equivocate between animal stimulus and good art. Take, for instance, this particular jewel presented graciously to the Amazon passer-by's innocent perusal. Please try to read this comment in its entirety, considering it a spiritual exercise in order to "know thy enemy":

"I'm educated, I went to college. I can appreciate works of 'art' and I have done. However, to watch this movie is to waste time and money on a kaleidoscope of someone else's brain vomit. If I hadn't read the synopsis, I very seriously doubt I would have had a clue what this movie was about. Scattered images and very little dialogue thrown together in a pathetic attempt to seem 'arty' [sic] when, in fact, it comes off as very contrived and forced. When filmmakers come up with this tripe, I can only imagine that they have simply forgotten the 'point' which is to entertain the viewer. I was not entertained. Only shallow people attempting to exhibit nonexistent depth are even going to pretend they enjoyed this viewing experience. However, if you marvel at seeing wonderful actors spin around in the sun and actually NOT act (or even speak audibly); if you enjoy watching a movie presented very similarly to a dream I had last night; or, if you are out to impress that cute blond in your liberal arts classes by feigning intellectualism -- then by all means, go for it."

Thank you, Kellie from Miami. You were very entertaining. I feel less shallow now. "Are you not entertained?," says Maximus. I was entertained. Are you entertained?

That the idea of the beautiful in a piece of artwork and the idea of entertainment held by many Americans are not synonymous, I think you will agree, but in the interest of culture I will provide some delineations. In doing so, I accept the risk of appearing to be one of those "shallow people attempting to exhibit nonexistent depth." ;)

Entertainment. When we seek entertainment, we are usually relying upon someone else's effort to make us laugh, smile, gaze in wonderment, recoil in mock horror. In so doing, we are asking that person or other entity to satisfy our expectations, to fulfill our pre-conceived notions of what will make us happy or afford us some distraction from the weariness of life. Entertainment never transcends the sphere of the immanent.

Ms. Kellie from Miami seeks the same. She would very much like to have all of her instinctual desires recognized and catered to by the filmmaker. She refuses to be brought out of herself in order to encounter a mode of experience that is superior to her own. No. That would make her uncomfortable, and we cannot have "educated" people being made to feel uncomfortable, especially if they have attended "college" and thus understand how to appreciate "'arty'" things.

Sorry, Kellie. Art is ecstasy.

Culture. When we seek culture (and I am referring to the Arnoldian scheme when I say "culture" -- see the final paragraph of "Violence and Cinema"), we are seeking something beyond ourselves. We are seeking something we have not attained, and in this seeking we accept that we must toil with difficult ideas, with difficult perspectives that will at first confuse us when they seek to liberate us from the animal and the mundane.

To take up the banner of Culture is similar to the Christian ideal of taking up the cross. It is a way of intellectual perfection that always looks for the more potently significant in life, even at the expense of the comfort and pleasure of an easy romance or a gratuitous battle sequence. In truth, the way of Culture is the way of the spiritual, of understanding the world and oneself as realities infused with spiritual magnitude, and of seeking to understand the meaning of that magnitude. The way of Culture, of perfection, is infinite, as humankind is infinite.

Thus, to the "'point.'" To be a philistine is to pin down, to ground, to crush things into a swallowable morsel for one's disposal. Yes, to be a philistine is to be a consumer both of products and of ideas -- to dispense with them, to put them in their place so that whatever small-minded existence one possesses may continue without disturbance.

(The idea of philistinism is thus easily pinned down -- it hardly wriggles -- while the ideas expressed variously in such a film as To the Wonder are not so easily placed, nor should they be.)

I dare say Ms. Kellie from Miami has put Malick in his place. For her, the eminent filmmaker with a long and fascinating career as an artist offers the world nothing but "brain vomit."

The person of Culture disagrees.

He can see for her the waves of the Florida sound begin to rise in tumultuous clamor, washing further and further their dross upon the shore. They will take her up with the zombies that dash toward the sealed ark, and she will float for awhile in a hell of thrashing bodies and silted water until she sinks, unaware like a fish in its sea.

But then again, she is a person ... with the sort of infinite potential displayed by Malick in his exploration of human capacities. She can change, though she be Delilah of the Sea Peoples.

Violence and Cinema

Part I: The Death of Boromir

It is an obvious enough cultural fact in America that movies often gain attention for their thrilling action sequences, displays of prowess in war, and, of course, for the streams of blood extracted from a stylized severance of human limbs – Cf. “300.”

Short of displacing all violence from some puritanical desire to save the virgin eyes of children – short of creating the idea of some farcical utopia in which there is no suffering – it is beneficial to discuss the proper place of violence in art. In this post, we will focus specifically on the motion picture.

However, ancillary to this discussion is a clarification that still remains unclear. Many aesthetically educated folks – and here I include myself, if only as an acolyte – detest utterly the idea of an association of art with morality. In the case mentioned above, concerning an irrational fear of violence for the sake of preserving an unreal innocence, we might refer to the early days of the Focus on the Family reviews of newly released films. In these reviews, the question was whether or not the story had a good “moral” at the end or whether it had too much “sex” or “violence,” not whether or not the film was “beautiful.”

Apparently, there is a social separation between “morality” and “beauty.” The separation arises from bad “Christian” – scare quotes – films like “Fireproof.” “Fireproof” is supposed to be a morality tale about a married man addicted to pornography who has a “come to Jesus” moment. But I think it is immoral – both because it lacks beauty and imagination and because it has a design upon the viewer that has little to do with love. The filmmaker seems to have been more concerned with telling everyone that “pornography is bad” whilst wagging his pulpit finger at a bored and tired audience than with producing a beautiful work of art in the Western tradition. Obviously.

It is this understanding of morality that gives pause to the aesthete as he attempts to reconcile the two. But when he realizes that morality is something far other than moralizing, that virtue defies his attempts to contain it, he has no problem with admitting a trinity: goodness, truth, beauty.

And so to violence.

In order not to reduce violence – oh and the excitement! – to mere hacking and thrashing, I would like to proffer an example from Terrence Malick's “To the Wonder.” This latest of the Texas filmmaker's accomplishments portrays the relationship of two lovers, one a young Parisian mother, the other a Kansas environmental analyst. They meet in France, go to Mont Ste.-Michelle, fall in love. She follows him to America. They live in a builder home in the grassy fields under a Kansas sky. The relationship is fraught with cultural tensions, doubtful romance, the utter brokenness of these individuals as they strive for fulfillment and meaning, attempt to find it in each other.

At one point, the woman encounters another American man to whom she is drawn – a tradesman type, a rough. She sleeps with him in a seedy motel. She never smiles. It seems almost a moral experiment.

As an invested viewer, I watched this sequence in a fit of soulful agony. I could not bear the pain of the moment, but my eyes remained open. My heart clung to the asphyxiating beauty of the woman, of that beauty that seemed consummate in the love of the first man, and which was utilized like a well-greased tool by the second.

After the fact, she does not know what to do. She begins to walk confusedly on the side of the highway. The Kansas man finds her, finds out. In Malick's lack of verbal exchange, focus on physical expression, fragmented, frantic cinematography, the psychological struggle is an exquisite strain, as if someone had a grip on your veins.

But in all of this what is expressed? A beauty of wrecked potentiality. A beauty that must be sought and yet which is accessible if one will only choose to see. A beauty that cannot otherwise be portrayed to any believable extent.

We do not know perfection, and thus perfection must be shown by degradation, destruction, desolation. By opposites. Malick implies the possible anthesis. At the end of the movie, though a sort of reconciliation is achieved, the lovers part. We are forced to think of the alternate, but in homage to Malick, I will not state it here. It is the unspeakable, incomprehensible reality whereof this present life is but a shadow and a lie. If there is a lie, there is truth.

So what of violence in cinema? This too:

Boromir's brave breast went forth to meet the serrated point of the Uruk's shaft. Valor can have no expression without violence. And valor is beautiful. Violence is a foil to beauty, and like a foil it falls aside to reveal purpose behind it's veil.

But what if it cannot do this?

Part II: The Death of the Zombie

Violence without meaning, such as in the zombie thriller or the horror film – where guts and limbs and heads are split and crushed and splattered – lacks all imagination whatsoever.

What portends that visceral pleasure we experience when a gaping humanoid drags its festering top half across a field in pursuit of the not-yet-zombified protagonist? What is the significance of our cultural taste for violence of all sorts, especially mutilation of the human form?

→ The idea that all can – and so must – be subjected to our perusal for the selection of what brings most pleasure, excitement, artificial stimulation of the ego. Like masturbation. Violence in every instance is a display of misused power.

When Rick's group in “The Walking Dead” attempts to extract a bloated “swimmer” from a water well, the creature's body simply disintegrates and it's entrails fall one by one and plop into the water. The scene has no overarching significance. The group simply finds another water source. Thus, we must imagine that the design of the director was to draw upon some capacity for sadistic pleasure in his audience. Sadism by its very definition is an expression of a darker form of lust: the desire to have both the physical gratification available from sexual excitement and complete and utter power over the object of that excitement – in this case, a mutilated human form.

And so when scenes of violence – e.g. battle sequences – are placed before our eyes, such as those in Braveheart, where bodies are gratuitously mutilated for the visual feasting of the spectator, we are led to question the effectiveness of that human creation in reaching a manifestation of the beautiful or the sublime.

Sublimity through violence is a sort of intellectual damnation. When we are brought to such a state where our endorphins rush in a whirlwind of ecstasy at the sight of ruptured corpses – especially if we can figure ourselves in the place of the protagonist who ruptures them – then we blunt our ability to experience beauty, to experience the ultimate contrary of violence, which is the dizzying complex of the human person in all of his or her yearnings.

Meaningless violence, then, is ultimately an expression of self-loathing.

Therefore, the filmmaker who employs violence without implying its counterpoint is an enemy to culture, which is, after all, a human enterprise, the pursuit of the best that has been thought and said. In the representation of a violent annihilation of the human or the humanoid, the project of culture is annihilated. Self-loathing takes its place, a mis-anthropology that encourages the collapse of society, and all art with it.