Dear editors,
Let’s get one thing out of the way: anyone who thinks it is possible for art not to be political is kidding themselves. Firstly, many examples of undeniably great art have political content, and this content is essential to their greatness. Apocalypse Now, my vote for the finest film ever made, is nothing without its unrelenting critique of the Vietnam War. Or imagine Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly, perhaps the greatest album of the twenty-first century so far, without its political commentary.
Second, even if art is not made with deliberate political intent, art is made by humans about humans. Thus, the inherently political nature of man means that we can always extract political implications from art. Claude Monet painting the same pair of haystacks dozens of times in different conditions would appear to be as distant from politics as one can get. However, as intellectual historian Peter Watson recognizes in The Age of Atheists, Monet’s haystacks embrace perspectivism, acknowledge our ignorance of the Thing-In-Itself (here, the Haystack-In-Itself) and recognize, like the ancient philosopher Heraclitus, that you never see the same haystack twice. Because they embrace the haystack as an experienced phenomenon and thus reject essence in favor of existence, these works have tremendous political consequences. They capture the philosophical grounding of the collective unconscious of their time and simultaneously reintroduce it into that public, creating a feedback loop. Philosophy therefore grounds ethics and politics: only in Monet’s perspectivist context does the emancipation of those who don’t fit into the dominant conception of what is “natural,” or the rejection of natural law in favor of legal positivism, make sense.
Thus, art is political, some art should be political, and I would argue this is often obvious to us. Still, it seems to me that we ask “Must art be political?” because we have a sort of uneasiness regarding political art. What is the source of this uneasiness?
Bracketing out those who don’t like political art simply because the politics it expounds disagrees with them, I believe what truly bothers us about some political art is what bothered Nietzsche about the tragedies of Euripides. Nietzsche recognized that, just like the haystacks of Monet, the ancient Greek tragedy contained inherent ethical and thus political value. Through the transfixing power of music, as well as through the fact that citizens of varying walks of life sat in equal standing in the amphitheater, tragedy encouraged a sense in the audience of the disillusion of the self: the idea that, as the Hindus say, we are all parts of the singular Brahman. This capacity, to mentally go beyond mere egoism and find identity with others, is the basis of all morality. Additionally, for Nietzsche, tragedies affirmed life’s value for the viewer in spite of and through its suffering, instead of through false promises of utopia. Tragedies were a crucial part of maintaining the cultural health of the Athenian polis. Clearly, then, the tragedy’s existential implications yield political consequences.
Euripides, however, made his tragedies “problem plays,” or opportunities for Socratic deliberation on an issue. By forcing the message on the reader, instead of approaching it with sufficient nuance and taste, Euripides’ message is not delivered at all. Thus for Nietzsche, Euripides was the turning point in the decadence of the Athenian state, as he perverted the capacity of the tragedy to serve its cultural purpose. To demonstrate Nietzsche’s point, I end with a comparison of two filmmakers. Consider Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up, an overtly political satire which was derided by critics, even though McKay had made a successful political film before. This was The Big Short, in which McKay’s clever weaving of journalistic and cinematic elements and his devotion to the complexity of the characters produces the artistic merit of the work. In Don’t Look Up, McKay acts as a modern-day Euripides, setting up a fictional world where journalistic integrity is unnecessary and cartoonish caricature is possible. Our minds recognize the connection to our world, but our souls don’t buy it. Compare this with Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin, a seemingly innocuous drama between two friends set during the Irish Civil War. The film contains bottomless layers of political and moral nuance. The prodigious playwright achieves this by not “trying” at all: when he sets up a situation between developed characters and does his due diligence, the political emerges of its own accord. Any truly human story is innately brimming with the political. Thus, to those who would make political art: do it in an artful and subtle manner.
Artfully,
Ahan Raina