Such a conviction isn’t new, but can be traced to Aristotle, and his insistence on the importance of catharsis in an audience’s experience of art, which, beyond the primacy it gives to the emotions, speaks to a conception of humankind as an entity that retains the features of its primitive nature.
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But just as abstract expressionism can be understood as a reaction to, or a complicating of, that ‘suspension of disbelief’ that has characterized the rapport between artist and audience for millennia (and that has survived that long for good reason), the aspects of postmodernism that dwell in irony and self-consciousness can likewise be understood as a reaction to the sincerity and dreamlike nature of representation, which is, I would wager, if not more fundamental to art than is the former, then more capable of holding the interest of an audience.
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What I ought to say is that it helped us broaden our conception of what art can do, in the same way that abstract expressionism did when we moved painting away from the easel, and allowed the formal elements of a work to function as if they were subject, which they can be.
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I would guess that postmodernism in the arts was something like a blip. A necessary or inevitable blip, but a blip nonetheless. Though to call it a ‘blip’ might be to imply that its value to art history isn’t great, which I do not mean to do.
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Meaning, no artist need exclude the tropes of postmodernism from their work out of fear that these tropes cannot be integrated with what I guess I’d call the more romantic or conventional approach to art (the approach that does not see the artifice of art as a subject in and of itself). I imagine this integrating might be one of the impulses for what has come to be known as the New Sincerity (or post-postmodernism).
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And, anyway, it is true that an artwork that is explicitly postmodern, in some respects, can depart from that mode of expression in others, and integrate itself with the more direct or ‘conventional’ ways of communicating with its audience. The fiction of David Foster Wallace is an example of such integration. So too, I would say, are the paintings of Basquiat.
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Though I suppose there is a kind of artist, especially of the postmodern variety, that might take issue with this claim, insofar as the deconstruction of narrative, and a drawing of the audience’s attention to the artifice of the work, and the instability of language (all of which belongs to the postmodern concern), have more to do with intellectual ‘play’ than with pathos, and the touching of an audience’s emotions. Perhaps one might even maintain that such play is not gratuitous, but results in a heightening of the consciousness, insofar as the consciousness is stimulated through it. Which most works of art would be happy to be able to do.
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Which I do not mean as a celebration of philistinism, but only as an acknowledgment of the fact that our encounter with art does not, I don’t think, begin from a wish to admire an artist’s intelligence (even if, sometimes, we might be gratified by taking the measure of it), but to witness the artist’s construction of a moment or situation that is capable of moving us emotionally, and perhaps even spiritually.
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I’d rather, anyway, love an artwork and not be able to explain it, than be able to explain it and have no love for it. Art is processed by the brain but is felt by the heart.
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And yet even in saying this I feel a twinge of regret for not acknowledging, in the same breath, the performances of the two guys who act alongside her, for I can’t imagine anyone other than them playing those parts either, now that I think of their faces, and the particular things that they say and do, and the circumstances that reveal them to us at their most helpless and afraid, and even the moments when we see them laugh. I guess I love that movie too much to find in it anything to criticize. And I feel protective of it in some way that I wouldn’t know how to explain.
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I have always thought, additionally, that without the casting of Heather Donahue in the role of the female lead, with her particular sincerity, the churchiness of her voice, and the way she channels her terror and dismay (controlling it only for so long, before letting it overwhelm her), that this movie would not have achieved its identity, nor its iconic stature, for she seems to me irreplaceable in a way that actors and actresses in low-budget, independent movies do not always seem, even when the movies are exceptional.
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I suppose it could be said, now that I’ve put it in those terms, that The Blair Witch Project is less the work of an auteur than it is a fortuitous meeting of talent and chance that would not repeat itself, and as such is something of a novelty, insofar as the directors (there were two), while credited with starting the ‘found footage’ genre (or for legitimizing it, and setting off a wave of imitations), are not widely known, beyond that movie, for a recognizable style, or a thematic sensibility, or the profundity of their collected works (though it’s true that, separately, they’ve continued to make movies that may have been overlooked). None of which I mean as a slight against them, for I admire them, and feel grateful to them, and would even say I have been influenced by them, but only that what they did in that instance was special, and perhaps inimitable, even for them.
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Which might seem a strange thing to say, in reference to a horror film, but only insofar as we are accustomed to thinking of horror too narrowly, which is to say as a genre that does not participate in the realm of the auteur, wherein a vision of personal, aesthetic significance that exceeds the conventions of any particular genre (while never completely departing from them) is constructed, and imparted to the viewer, usually due to the virtuosity (some might say megalomania) of the director.
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I started watching that movie again last night, after my mentioning of it here had brought it to mind, and paused it about halfway through, because I thought I was on the verge of falling asleep, though after I’d turned it off and had closed my eyes I remained awake for some time, thinking of the predicament that the characters were in, and what I knew was going to happen to them, in the arc of the story, while they themselves, at the moment that I’d quit watching, were unaware of their fate, which made me feel sorry for them in some very specific way, as if the fiction I knew they were inhabiting, and the artifice of the movie, made of that sorrow a thing tinged with beauty, which I suppose is what it was meant to be, insofar as it was not an accident that I was feeling it, but was a consequence of the filmmaking, and of its formal elements, whereas if the story had been relayed to me in some other way, as a recounting of the plot alone, say, or as a summation of its details, I might feel the sorrow, but I would not necessarily see any beauty.
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Which is why horror films often depend, for their effect, on the concealing of a monster’s identity, visage, and nature, even while revealing that monster’s actions. A compelling example of which is, to my mind, The Blair Witch Project.
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Meaning that horror, as a feeling, can survive only so long as the person subjected to the phenomenon that is inducing it persists in a kind of imaginative fugue, wherein the facts of a situation are overwhelmed, and made insensible, by the associations (irrational, but not unfounded) that the individual brings to the processing of those facts, and that can cause that person to almost lose their wits, and to succumb to a paralysis of the will.
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For the experience of horror, at least as it relates to the uncanny (which afflicts us in mind, more than in body), arises from the inability of the person to fathom something which ultimately is fathomable, insofar as that very something is a phenomenon that manifests in reality, and thus can be observed, quantified, and measured, and so, to an extent, subdued.
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Though I would maintain that this reaction to such a spectacle, this turning away in horror, from the sight of a pattern that seems excessive, or impossible, would reveal less about the reality of the event, and the profundity of its threat, than about one’s psychological makeup and one’s imagination, the failure to control which can result in a lack of fortitude when a decisive moment is at hand.
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The tendency to which reaction, among humankind, the divine is aware of and makes use of, as is evidenced by the spectacle of a plague, or a pestilence, when its origin is providential and when its purpose, in part, is to awe, though of course such an event will function not only as a spectacle, but as a means to an end, as we learn from Exodus, when the Israelites are delivered from slavery in Egypt after Yahweh sends, in terrible numbers, flies and locusts and frogs, and so forth, to punish Pharaoh for failing to heed the words of Moses.
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And yet there is also something terrifying about repetition once it reaches a certain scale, even in the case of things we might otherwise find attractive. One or two ladybugs might be a welcome sight, if I happen to like ladybugs. But if I was to enter a room whose walls were covered in ladybugs I might turn away in horror, as if they amounted to a grotesquerie.