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.
Yes, it is much wiser to mourn than sneer at the death of film for the loss of good visual storytelling means a part of us fails to learn and grow. As a psychotherapist I'm using stories & metaphors constantly when I meet with clients. At times, I even read children's books to my adult clients since their ability to think outside the box, that is their mental health prison, seems so poorly developed.
Engaging with stories is necessary to develop and strengthen a moral imagination. And a moral imagination is required to learn & grow in the virtues. The toughest individuals with which I work are those utterly lacking in a moral imagination; people who have no connection with Theological and Cardinal virtues – Faith, Hope, Love, Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance. My thoughts are inspired by G.K. Chesterton who wrote, in Tremendous Triffles:
“Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.
"Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him for a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear.”
If you want good mental health engage with Stories. And mourn the loss of film as one of the ways we may learn to conquer our dragons.
Art and Beauty are a way for the divine and the mundane come together. As far as I know only God and humans can create beauty. I hope Hollywood can come together and make great art again. Until then, I guess I’m stuck with rewatching or reading.