Letter #204: An Art Form Dies

It's Wiser to Mourn Than Sneer

Mine son.

The other day I wrote a piece for our friends at the Daily Wire on this year’s Academy Awards ceremony, where “films no one saw about issues no one cares about were celebrated at the level of popular works of cinematic genius like 1942’s Casablanca and 1972’s The Godfather.” Once the gaudy but mesmerizing Super Bowl of American culture, the Oscars have become an utter irrelevance. The same is true of the art form that dominated the last century. It has been gutted of power by “a philosophical zombie-ism” that has turned Hollywood into “a city of beautiful buffoons.”

The response to my article in the comment section was exactly what I have come to expect from conservative comment sections. Who cares? I haven’t watched the Oscars in decades. I don’t even go to the movies anymore! Why should I, when I can watch old films on TCM, which I also never do? By God, I’m proud to say my soul is a complete cultural wasteland, unstained by any art form whatsoever!

I, on the other hand, am sad to see the movies die. There is no grander product of the human soul than art. It is the spirit of creation moving in mankind. Fractals, as you say. The pattern of God in the pattern of mind. The pattern of the Trinity in metaphor, which becomes language, story; art.

That tiny fragment of brain you saw on the Science website, galactic in its magnitude: it’s a mysterious gizmo. Our pal Ross Douthat writes about it in his new book Believe. “Why should capacities that evolved because we needed to hunt gazelles and avoid predators also turn out, mirabile dictu, to be capacities that enable us to understand the laws of physics and of chemistry, to achieve manned spaceflight, to split the atom, to condense all of human knowledge onto a tiny piece of silicon?”

Or tell stories? Why should a brain that evolved on the savannah be able to create a Hamlet that speaks so deeply into the spiritual condition of man? Mere “fictions,” our autistic idiot-geniuses keep telling us. Mere human organizations of reality.

But are they? Think what happens when you read a story, see a movie, stream a series. How you look for patterns, themes and meanings. How you understand that no one character speaks for the author, who himself can’t fully comprehend the design of his inspiration.

Stories, a gift of the spirit, give us training in how to understand spiritual life. How to look for meaning and themes. How to understand that your vision is only a fragment of the creator’s. Why should narrative be any more a human creature than our maps of the brain or the solar system?

It is a sad shame we’ve lost the movies to a fierce miscreed. The spirit will outlive this little death. New arts will come. But it is foolish to sneer at the tragedy of it. Wiser to mourn.

Love, Dad.