I can’t tell you exactly when I stopped being surprised to hear people say that the best American art was being made for TV. Intellectuals started saying this in the days of The Sopranos, and much of the general public appeared to agree. It’s the closest thing to consensus our fragmented culture can claim. And yet I admit that I still find it a bit curious when I hear this assertion, or a variant of it, voiced by a prose writer.
It happens often, and almost never with the self-deprecating air you’d expect. Prose writers proudly consign their chosen art form to relative insignificance, as though expecting to be showered with praise for recognizing the futility of time spent arranging words into sentences. The implications of the TV-is-best statement often don’t sink in, however, because the writer’s interlocutor is so quick to assent, to gush over a favorite program, to name favorite episodes. Such a conversation raises the spirits of all concerned.
The oddity here is not the fact that these writers enjoy TV shows but the unnecessary insistence on TV’s inherent superiority, as if television were unable to share a culture with other media but must smash all potential competitors, The Incredible Hulk-style. Perhaps I’m reading too much into what most people would simply call small talk, but to me it’s understandable, thus unnerving, when artists repudiate their vocation in order to liberate themselves from its loneliness.
Compared to the hijinx that must transpire in the writers’ room on a TV show, hours spent alone at a laptop trying to get a description of a character’s dining table just right seem so lame. But once you’ve traduced your own art form, even if just in small talk, what happens when you return to that laptop? Can you write in the same way?
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This question of loneliness is at the heart of Garth Risk Hallberg’s Jan. 13 New York Times piece “Why Write Novels at All?” The essay argues that many of America’s prominent youngish contemporary prose writers — among them Zadie Smith, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Jonathan Franzen — have resolved the crisis of “literary aesthetics in the age of the iPad” by means of a common, overarching imperative: to make people feel less alone. Hallberg accurately describes how these authors turned away from modes such as the comedy of manners and “various postmodern formalisms” to embrace the anti-loneliness mandate, or what Hallberg calls “the problems of the human heart.”
But all is not well: According to Hallberg, in some of these writers’ books there are “characters too neatly or thinly drawn, too recognizably literary, to confront us with the fact that there are other people besides ourselves in the world, whole mysterious inner universes.” If readers of literary fiction, ostensibly a sophisticated lot, actually require such a reminder, it might just as well come in the form of a crisp slap in the face. And assuming such narcissism really is out there, how can writers hope to combat it by making loneliness the enemy? It’s fair to assume that anyone who has spun out of words a living character has also spent some time exploring his or her own mysterious inner universe, and there aren’t many non-lonely ways to plumb those depths.
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Alexander Payne’s critically acclaimed film The Descendants offers unsettling evidence that the crisis Hallberg explicates isn’t confined to literary fiction. Based on the novel of the same name by Kaui Hart Hemmings, The Descendants shows Payne refusing his usual social-comedy mode (1999’s Election was Payne’s pinnacle) for straight-ahead family drama. In its thematic structure, though, it’s not much different from his other movies. Here we have another protagonist — this time played by George Clooney — besieged by a perfect storm of masculine woes. Personal and professional misfortunes work together to undo his stability.
The key to the film is the Clooney character’s comatose wife Elizabeth, whose Schiavo-like persistent vegetative state is diagnosed in the first reel. Elizabeth’s “mysterious inner universe” is completely closed off to us, as Payne doesn’t dare attempt anything so unfashionably old-school as a flashback. The few facts we receive about her — her infidelity, the “Do Not Resuscitate” order in her living will — reflect unexamined social and political shibboleths.
The Descendants is more a compendium of ideological reflexes than a discrete vision of a family’s collective grief. Clooney’s moral dilemma (whether to sell 25,000 acres of pristine family land in Kaua’i to a developer for millions) resembles a New York Magazine feature article calibrated to incite acquisitive envy. Moreover, Clooney’s dull, expository voice-over, in which he rants against the prevailing notion of Hawaii as paradise, hits an authentic, petulant tone of bourgeois complaint. Shailene Woodley, the movie’s most praised performer apart from Clooney, plays teenage daughter Alexandra, a character embodying the only type of adolescent with whom well-heeled audiences seem to want to identify: promiscuous, half-naked, and angry.
The film’s final image crystallizes Payne’s Hallbergian crisis. The prolonged shot of Clooney and family silently sharing a blanket on the sofa as they watch TV is supposed to leave us with a sense of understated (cuz it’s “real life,” y’know) togetherness. Confronted — spectators to spectators — with our Hollywood mirror image, we’re clearly meant to feel anything but lonely. But this ending, with its capitulation to entertainment technology, made me think of Hallberg’s concluding query: “Even as you read this, engineers in Silicon Valley are hard at work on new ways to delight you…As long as there’s juice in the battery, we won’t have to feel alone. But will we be alone?”
Doesn’t it frighten you that Payne and his intellectual admirers never even considered that question?
From February, 2012