I have already written on this blog, in “Dark Academia, CRAPHEAD and Khoury Review,” how my book Bernie Bros Gone Woke contained an error that Elias Khoury did not fail to mention in a sensationalistic review for the International Journal of Žižek Studies that is replete with disingenuous criticism unworthy of further comment.1 What I did not remark in this posting is the fact that the number 57, which I failed to notice during my editing of the book at proof stage, was very likely hacked into the book. My writing has been hacked in subtle ways since around 2008 and this has become a routine occurrence at even the copy editing and design stages. Judging on innuendo that transpires elsewhere, this is common knowledge. The reason for this number mistake may or may not be, but is very likely, the fact that around the time I was editing the book, I had bought my sister an apron for her 57th birthday. The item is a vintage Heinz 57 Varieties apron I bought on eBay. It was the first time I had bought her a gift in more than four years, being estranged from her for some of the same reasons I’m estranged from nearly everyone else: a widespread public secret that involves surveillance, torture and efforts to regime change my sex life. The hacking of this personal information into Bernie Bros Gone Woke by conservative and self-aggrandizing trolls who do little more than exploit a criminal situation tells us something of what is wrong with the anti-woke films Tár (Todd Field, USA Germany, 2022) and American Fiction (Cord Jefferson, USA, 2023), namely, the presupposition that the 1960s feminist slogan “the personal is political” has something important to say about the repressive desublimation of culture and politics in today’s creative industries and authoritarian neoliberal polity. In the following I rely on reviews of these films by Slavoj Žižek and Eileen Jones to elaborate on this insight.
I recently emailed some colleagues to ask them whether they were aware of any works of art that deal critically with today’s woke political correctness, giving the television series The Chair (2021) and the films Tár and Sorry to Bother You (2018) as examples. I would mention also that the artist Sam Kerson, who continues to petition the censorship of his murals as the Vermont Law School, has created a series of watercolours that chronicle the shameful debacle and address the current climate of woke censorship that is now in contradictory macropolitical neo-McCarthyist mode in relation to Palestine solidarity.2 Only one person replied to my email, likely due to the fact that in the context of DEI policies, quotas and the centring of racial justice, etc, there are very few artists who are tackling these issues in anything more than a peripheral manner. That’s true even in the case of Tár and American Fiction.
Regarding Tár, Žižek writes that the subject of the film is the parallax between the heroine’s sublime beauty and monstrous brutality.3 Cate Blanchett is no doubt attractive, but the main themes of the film are better defined as her mastery of the art of composing-conducting and her unbound ambition to succeed. While Žižek compares Tár to the films Persona (1966) and Breaking the Waves (1996), the films that I would compare it to are Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro (2009) and Alejandro G. Iñarritu’s Birdman (2014). Lydia Tár’s professional and personal life is marked by episodes of confidence and betrayal, many of which come to a head as the film finds her replacing her assistant conductor and her lesbian lover, while also denying responsibility for the suicide of a former student lover. Although Žižek describes the many melodramatic threads that are somehow supposed to add up to a portrait of the artist in the age of TikTok, the film is book-ended with what is arguably the meaning of the film, like the sled named Rosebud in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941). This of course is Lydia’s love of art, which we find out she honed by following Leonard Bernstein’s televised lectures, and which she “defends to the end,” first, when she chastises a woke African American student who refuses to play what he considers to be white supremacist music, and second, when after losing everything, she finds herself in a South Asian country happily conducting Mahler’s Fifth Symphony for a PlayStation game and performed for a live audience of afficionados of who knows what. She treats both with the same seriousness and devotion, Žižek remarks, which detracts from the view of Lydia as a monster who pays the price for exploiting the people around her. The question then is which of these two themes is the most important: the need to be a good person, or to be a good artist?
This dilemma that pits humanist competition and achievement against morality, which is at least as old as Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, would seem to provide some insight into the workings of contemporary art. Unfortunately, as is the case with Maestro (2023) and Rustin (2023), that’s where the film fails completely. Although the postmodern, anti-humanist theme of the death of the author would seem to provide a more up-to-date treatment of this problem, wherein it is neither possible nor desirable to be an exemplary subject or an autonomous artist, the film nevertheless wallows unconvincingly in the continuing promise and potential of both. Hardly a novel topic for reflexive modern art, the pressures of the capitalist marketplace and public spectacle that distort creativity and subjectivity play well enough to audiences that are afforded yet another petty-bourgeois bildungsroman, with some social critique thrown in for good measure. What makes this work somewhat timely is not just the problematization of the canon, which mitigates any concern with avant-gardism as well as postmodern rejections thereof, but its cis-hetero and Eurocentric trappings, leading film critic Richard Brody to condemn the film as “conservative button-pushing.”4 For Žižek, these questions are instead what makes the film compelling, bringing us to ask: Can classical music like this be made today? Can we derive guilt-free enjoyment of such work? Žižek follows Karl Marx’s line of thinking to answer no and yes to these questions, adding that great art is universal and cannot be reduced to its context and circumstances. It is the anti-historicist absolute standpoint on a work’s greatness that troubles contemporary “materialist” sensibilities. This does not limit historical works to one view only but allows them to be re-read and translated endlessly.
Žižek credits Lydia with being in touch with the “eternal” dimension of the music she loves. Her commitment to her art is what redeems her otherwise failed relations to the people around her. The same cannot be said of the legendarily sophisticated members the Nazi SS, for example, who were more committed to genocide than to Ludwig von Beethoven, or to pessimistic postmodernists, who would rather depict Western civilization with its pants down as a matter of misanthropic humiliation than as a critical reflection on moral problems. In the era of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences diversity quotas, a Blanchett performance like this one, or a Bradley Cooper (Maestro) version of the same but with a gay man in less a progressive era, these films that push buttons and pull strings in a rather formal manner are tailor made for the industry, satisfying uninformed audiences and amusing bored critics alike.
I had high hopes for American Fiction as an antidote to all of this, but it turns out to be a pared down version of the same. The difference is that this film at least has a few worthwhile observations. One of these is the fact that intention and context matter in the use of words – like the use of the N-word by Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison’s (Jeffrey Wright) brother and the reference to “my little monkey” by his mother. One would not be forgiven to wonder how this part of the screenplay made it past the draft stage, given the atmosphere of fear and loathing that today causes people to flip out or get fired at the mere sound of a word. Such liberal white hyper-vigilance is spoofed well enough by American Fiction, which like Tár has less to say on the subject than it could have because it is viewed primarily from a conservative place – the main character is a Touré Neblett or John McWhorter-type buppie universalist. This adds an anti-woke twist to audience imaginings of how artists are built up and torn down by the spinning wheel of fame and fortune.
Like Tár, this film hinges on the motifs of artistic ambition and personal relations. This is represented in this story by all of Monk’s relationships but perhaps most crucially his relationship to his lawyer girlfriend Coraline. In one scene, Monk is shown in an oval mirror, somewhat distant from his newfound love and self-absorbed, as is typically the case, until she enters the mirror – the fantasy frame of his ideal ego – while holding a copy of one of his books. Her appreciation of this novelist-professor’s writing unravels after he discovers that she also likes a book that he secretly published under a pseudonym, first titled My Pafology and then changed to Fuck, to mock the type of work produced by his rival, Sinatra Golden, author of We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, who challenges him by contrasting the “ought” of progressive optimism with the reality of what “is,” thereby confirming her equally conservative yet more prosaic endorsement of (black) capitalism, which Monk denies has any relevance to his serious work. The pseudonym for his work is Stagg R. Leigh, a play on the legendary Stagger Lee Shelton, a nineteenth-century African American pimp, murderer and member of the St. Louis business underworld.
As Eileen Jones observes, Monk – and by extension the director, Cord Jefferson, and the writer of the novel that the film is based on, Percival Everett – has had it with double-talk about allyship that panders black “trauma porn” to white liberals, with an entire slavery-entertainment complex now added to the Holocaust industry. Frustrated by his rival’s success in selling politically correct ghetto stories to the print establishment, Monk writes and publishes a parody of her work that quickly outperforms his serious work at the level of sales. However, as Jones remarks, most of the film is about his family relations.5 The criticality required for autonomous art no longer satisfies audiences, and so the true artist finds himself confronted by the banal honesty of a writer who sells out without apprehension. He decides to sell his satirical ploy to sharks in the entertainment business so that he can afford his mother’s elder care. Why it is that a full professor has money problems is not addressed in the film, except through the suggestion that like his plastic surgeon brother, who aspires to a glamorous metrosexual lifestyle, an above-average middle-class income is not enough for someone who must maintain more than one mortgage, etc. It’s getting harder to be middle-class these days. For good and bad his trick is successful and earns him close to a million. The story resembles the real life story of Boris Vian, whose 1947 novel J’irai cracher sur vos tombes was written in two weeks and intended as a best-seller after the commercial failure of his more serious work.
As in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981) and Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021), the film offers three different options to resolve what has built up to a scene in which Monk comes clean after winning a prize for the book he intended as a bad joke. The added twist is not only that Monk pretended to be an ex-convict to make his pseudonym more authentically black, but that he sat on the literary prize committee whose other members awarded him, much to his dismay and efforts against it, the prize for the commercial rubbish they do not know he authored. In other words, Monk has become judge, jury and executioner of American fiction. At the award ceremony, he walks to the stage to receive the award for Fuck and opens his speech with “I have a confession to make.” The three options that follow act as “play within the play” meta-comments on the film itself. In the first scenario, Monk is discussing with film director Wiley how to adapt American Fiction to the screen, accepting that the film will not be resolved and saying he likes the ambiguity of not writing a closing moral to the story. In the second scenario, based on this same conversation and on Wiley’s insistence that this ending is inadequate, Monk is shown after the ceremony returning to the beachside community and patching things up with his girlfriend, apologizing for “not having been myself lately.” The camera pans out to black. Wiley finds this unresolved as well, saying he wants something real and not a romantic comedy. In the third option, police burst into the ceremony with the goal of capturing the (fictional) fugitive Leigh. His trophy is mistaken for a weapon and he’s riddled with bullets. Wiley is thrilled, much to Monk’s dismay, who utters under his breath: “fuck.” Monk walks out of a Hollywood studio hangar and nods wistfully to a black actor in a Huck Finn costume.
Jones laments the fact that the film is not funnier. A few gags here and there produce the kinds of guffaws that Spike Lee might use to place white and possibly black audiences in a moral corner, as if to “reveal” social problems that are nevertheless readily available to consciousness. She writes: “American Fiction started to scale that mountain of bullshit before detouring into personal drama, making the ever-popular move from systemic to individual problems.”6 It would be more accurate, however, to say that this film that is ostensibly about art and life, and that moves from individual career problems to individual personal problems, is simply more neoliberal than those American films from the 1930s, 40s, 60s and 70s that she mentions could ever have been. The black comedies of those days not only engaged is satire based in social realism, but they were created before postmodernism, before the discourse of the end of meta-narratives produced a corresponding litany of petites histoires in which the endless minutes of fame allotted to every online prosumer remade the personal into the personalized. It is this ability of everyone to indulge not only in celebrity culture but in online mobs and cancel culture pile ons that has created the conditions for characters like these, where the countercultural cachet of a serious writer publishing trash has been thoroughly subsumed. The demotic effects of social media are added to the crises of global capitalism – which are otherwise ignored by both films – in such a way as to make the moving contradictions of petty-bourgeois identity politics the background of reified creative capital. Rest assured, there’s nothing revolutionary to see here. No crazy words, as Bernie Sanders once said about socialist democracy, just some interesting content about some interesting career possibilities that even most artists and university graduates in today’s culture and knowledge industries have learned to forget about.
Notes
1. Marc James Léger, “Dark Academia, CRAPHEAD and Khoury Review,” Blog of Public Secrets (June 24, 2023), https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/02/10/czcp-f10.html. See also Léger, Bernie Bros Gone Woke: Class, Identity, Neoliberalism (Leiden: Brill, 2022).
2. See Sam Kerson, “The Muralist Imagines the Destruction of His Work,” available at https://dragondancetheatre.wixsite.com/underground-railroad/imagined.
3. Slavoj Žižek, “Tár’s Parallax,” in Mad World: War, Movies, Sex (New York: OR Books, 2023) 77-95.
4. Brody cited in Žižek, “Tár’s Parallax,” 84.
5. Eileen Jones, “American Fiction Is a Scathing Satire of Representation Discourse,” Jacobin (January 27, 2024), https://jacobin.com/2024/01/american-fiction-film-race-representation.
6. Jones, “American Fiction Is a Scathing Satire of Representation Discourse.”