Culture, Digested: The Creation Plot

Poor Artists, My First Film, and The African Desperate

At the end of Normal People, rather than tying things up with a wedding in her Jane Austen way, Sally Rooney rewards her character instead with entry into a prestigious MFA program.

The great mass of twenty-first century content has been about the creative professional. Books and films about artists, novelists, poets, professors both adjunct and tenured, designers, composers, actors, and editors. For them, getting married is not the pinnacle of achievement – if anything they are likely to be hitched unsatisfactorily. Domesticity for protagonists of all genders is a drudgery and a trap. Our “geniuses” write about grinding it out, making that word count, doing whatever it takes to reach that pinnacle of creative achievement.

I’ve noticed this in more and more properties. From the acclaimed HBO/BBC series I Will Destroy You to the well reviewed Mubi documentary Grand Theft Hamlet, whatever depression, trauma, setback, or disappointment our hero faces, it is all worth it when the book deal comes through or the film award is bestowed.

Unlike stories about artistic creation of the past – your Amadeuses, your Andrei Rublevs, your Tragic Muses – the goal of the contemporary story of creators is not to create something good but to achieve success, loosely defined. In these books, films, and so on, we rarely see our hero engaged in work directly or indirectly (in research, in appreciation of others’ works, etc) and instead follow them through business meetings and grant applications.

The African Desperate

In the film African Desperate, a film about a black woman named Palace’s last day in an MFA program, the artist’s work is handled as a bit of a joke, as art tends to be treated in these texts. It’s the culmination of her training as an artist, and ultimately, she nor anyone else seems to have any idea why she’s here or what she was trying to achieve. She speaks of her work to her instructors in embarrassed jargon, meeting the expectations of the institutions, but under the academic theorizing there seems to be no sincere feeling toward the work.

But how can any of these artists actually achieve greatness when their work is inevitably compromised by the dictates of late capitalism, white supremacy, and/or patriarchy? The compromise is a given and in most cases it is the entire point. Both creator and audience knows, or is supposed to know, that the critics are snobs, the gatekeepers are biased, and the audience is stupid. So manipulation is required, because they are inevitably biased, corrupt, or stupid. It’s just part of the hero’s journey.

The importance of creative achievement is always handled as a given in these texts, no one has to explain why it’s so important to get into an MFA program, get a book deal, etc. The creative life is the only meaningful life, and by that I mean the professionalized creative life. It’s not enough to toil in obscurity or in the margins, doing work you believe in. No one really seems to believe in the work they’re doing anyway. But being a creative means being special, and ultimately that is what is important.

I’ve written before about how “creativity” became enshrined in American culture via Cold War maneuverings. In order for the United States to prove that the free market was the best possible way to order the world, it had to parade the most creative jazz musicians, abstract expressionists, and bomb makers on the global stage. It built up educational infrastructure with government cash, flooding the university system with aspiring writers, academics, and artists, and then, when the Cold War ended and the government’s need for creative greatness in the humanities ended, the aura of the creative life remained. Except now instead of being paid by the government to pursue these aspirations, via the GI Bill and government grants, the students themselves bore the cost in the form of debt and massive tuition bills.

I’ve also written before about how as resources like attention, literacy, and leisure time become more scarce, as the field of content creators becomes more competitive, people rely on the idea of a “calling” to justify taking up space in a diminishing space. They simply couldn’t be anything else, they were called (by god? do you really think god cares about your book deal?) to be writers, to be artists. Think of the Project Runway contestant who, when asked why they deserve the big jackpot prize, replies that it’s because I have worked so hard no one wants this more than me. In the marriage plot version of this, this is where the bookish, shy, or awkward brunette is outshined by the bimbo blonde. Sure, it might look like our romantic hero might be tempted by the more beautiful option, but unfortunately for her our heroine is this guy’s soul mate.

In Poor Artists, the co-authors Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad establish this calling by showing the protagonist Quest Talukdar in an art museum as a baby, instinctively aware that this place is her fate. “I believed I had an innate passion for creative expression and that belief was enough encouragement.” The authors are aware of the absurdity of this, so they wrap it in irony and “satire.” And yet the message of the book, of one artist’s climb through the art world ranks through deception and fraud, is ultimately, I feel I am entitled to the glory of artistic success and fame. Ambition is cringe! But also, again, it’s not artistic ambition or the drive to make something great. It’s aspiration. The desire for social mobility, celebration, and financial reward.

Talukdar cannot find acceptance in the art world, because of its already anticipated biases and difficulties. So she creates a fake persona, makes soulless art, and becomes a giant hit. And maybe this would affect the reader if Talukdar seemed capable or interested in making art that wasn’t soulless while also being good, but the authors are too busy showing every layer from schooling to representation to festival as hideously corrupt, so we have to take them at their word that Talukdar has something else to offer.

How truly, deeply unfair it is that success eludes these artists, despite them not caring about the art itself. And there the answer must be that it is structural oppression that keeps them from glory. Because taking in the possibility that a) life is not fair and b) maybe you’re actually just not very good at this is intolerable, so the answer to disappointment must be external.

They want the privileges and the advantages provided to the top content creator in our culture and the glow of specialness that comes with that, but they reject any notion of responsibility or obligation. When these characters do make art, it is all autobiographical – like Destroy You’s traumatic story about a rape, or Grand Theft’s story of creative blockage compounded by midlife crisis. It’s gifted kid discourse redux, how dare the world not acknowledge my superiority, what cheek for society to refuse to reshape itself to the exact specifications that would enable my flourishing.

My First Film

In My First Film, Zia Anger tells the story of making a movie that nobody saw. It opens with her pitching an idea to a website for a short film, which they turn down. She responds with indignation, not that she didn’t get chosen but that they insulted her by thinking this would be good for her career. Don’t they know this job is beneath her? Don’t they know she’s an auteur, who has created an entire film?

The tragedy at the heart of My First Film is not that she nearly got her actor killed after getting him catastrophically drunk for a scene out of some concern for authenticity – she humbly acknowledges after this incident that she needs to do better and “I still think about how we can take care of each other” – but that her film is rejected from every film festival she submits it to.

Anger creates layers of self-representation. In one, she is an individual with a personal story that needs to find expression. In another, she is a creative professional, looking for recognition and community within her industry. In another, she is a woman who represents all silenced women, who knows intimately “the pain of being female,” by which she means abused, ignored, and misunderstood. The character of the boyfriend who casually interferes with her work with his demands for attention is not just a boyfriend but a symbol of Men, Patriarchy, and Misogyny. In the final scene of this unseen film, Anger directs her character – a stand-in for herself, as she reminds us repeatedly through the film – as she gives birth to a child. She tells us that directing this film was like “giving birth to herself.” If she can’t make a movie, if she can’t find success with that movie, it’s like she doesn’t exist. She needs to be seen as an artist more than she needs to make something good.

Underlying all of this – usually unsaid, but some texts like Poor Artists are much more didactic – is the belief that it is important for people from historically marginalized demographics to make art. We have to fill up the blank spaces, because of all the people who came before who did not have access to the resources and institutions we have today.

And all of this would be true if any of these products were art. But they’re not. They’re hagiography. They are devoted to turning the author into a sainted artist, toiling away for the good of mankind. As Dubravka Ugresic writes in A Muzzle for Witches, “Literature itself, in its mainstream, is being wittled down to a single genre, the hagiography (autobiography, autofiction), and so it is that the author, fraught by a fear of disappearance, nullity, the loss of the importance of their work, the reduction of their efforts to laboring on an assembly line, step back from their text and become their own text.” For the good of branding, for the good of representation, one must document one’s creative work instead of creating a creative work.

The fear of an extinction-level event, a fear of disappearance and irrelevance. There’s a pervading sense that time is about to run out on culture, on human life on this planet, on a life that makes sense, and one has to make one’s mark before it is too late. It is fundamentally unfair to be born in a time of decline, in conditions that don’t support the celebration of us, decades past the time when the CIA was funding literary magazines and philosophers were invited onto television.

When people become afraid of the “disappearance” of “white men” in publishing, what they are expressing is not a fear that men are not able to create art. They’re angry that they are not able to share in this glow of the creative glow with their own hagiography. (And of course this isn’t even true – the reigning leader of contemporary hagiography is of course a white man, Karl Ove Knausgaard.) It’s not about the work, it’s about the awards, the success, the glow of specialness. The proof they use to show men’s alienation is all in the statistics about awards, big advances, journal inclusion. They want us to know: they can write about creative professionals, too.

But because there’s no art here, there’s no real glow. Just a reflection of a reflection, bouncing off windows and mirrors and institutional white walls, the bouncing aura of our refracted time.

Recommended:

• Tillie Olsen’s indispensable collection about artists who don’t make art, and who is not allowed to work, Silences

• I reviewed that Jake Tapper/Alex Thompson book that everyone is freaking out about. I read it twice and I still don’t understand why it was called Original Sin.