How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Messages in Art
Order Your Shepherds Today While Supplies Last!
As a viewer/reader/looker I am generally opposed to messages in art.1 More precisely, I am opposed to messages which dominate the artwork, rather than remain an element of the artwork’s initiation.
For example, knowing that Michelangelo’s David was intended to be the equivalent of the Michelin Man for a powerful guild of 16th c. Florentine wool cloth merchants, I can still stand in awe before the David and encounter something transcendent. Time, cruel eraser of the inconsequential, has obliterated the memory of the Operai del Duomo for nearly 100% of non-Italians.2
So I can live with messages in art if they were the original motivation for creating the art, but I struggle if they persist in a didactic stance to correct strangers for having other ideas.3 There were likely some atomic-bomb- and Mutually-Assured Destruction-related messages at the core of Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, but it is unlikely that those messages persist in the modern viewer’s mind after the film is over.4 Instead, what remains is an experience, an encounter, an act of cinema, a series of delights and surprises, or questions regarding the nature of humanity. The only message Dr. Strangelove confidently transmits to the viewer in 2024 is auteur Stanley Kubrick’s perception of humanity circa early 1960s, and Time is working to erase that message as well.5 At some point, it will simply retain be a degraded message about the soul of humanity told with orthogonal mise en scene and cold comedy, sans message but still relatable.
Continuing with Dr. Strangelove, I am convinced that, while artists sometimes begin with a message (either via commission or a moment’s passion or a book adaptation), the greatest artists move through that message to something more complicated than the simplistic equations of the message itself. In fact, what begins as signal becomes noise.
“Hire great shepherds today,” is a fine message for the Operai del Duomo, and one can imagine Michelangelo saying, “Sure, yeah, I can do that, when do you want it by?” then getting to work. Three weeks later, finally thinking about it, the first shepherd to come to mind is the boy David, and the message is soon forgotten, other concerns rise up, and the sculptor addresses the medium, the block of marble. The wool cloth merchants peer intently for their message, and Michelangelo convinces them it’s there, you just aren’t looking right. The wool cloth merchants shrug.
When an artist is receives a message, it’s a message from outside the closed system he operates in, but, needing the cash, he accepts the intrusion and moves on to create something sublime out of the seed of that message.
If afterwards Michelango had stamped, “Support your local chapter of the Operai del Duomo” across the torso of his David, the work would have lost something ineffable, as the message drowned the art in a storm of worthlessness.
Easier said than done. It’s taken me a very, very long time to stop putting them in my own art and writing.
Except that I, and Wikipedia, have reminded you. Sorry.
The film In Cold Blood, whose horror-show psychology is serviced by a marvel of graphic cinema and fabulous performances, confounds its blatant murderers-have-reasons-too message with a web of author-subject eroticism that calls into question Capote’s motives for making his appeal against the morality of the death penalty. (Then again, is that enough to recuse the film from the death-penalty conversation?)
I.e. no one is going to advocate against nuclear weapons after viewing that film.
Over time, the high-temperature, useful energy of Kubrick’s vision comes into contact with each later viewer’s low-temperature, less useful energy, creating a relatively uninteresting temperate energy. Not so in 1964, when more viewers would be sensitive to the specific messages Kubrick was transmitting. Is it possible that in 2024, each viewer encounters Dr. Strangelove as essentially a closed system Markov process, a film with no past other than the sum total of the viewer’s Now?