I read Anne Bogart's A Director Prepares this summer. She's one of those artists I catch in conversation and pretend to know a lot about by repeating snippets of information I've heard before. As Kristen knows, I'm quite good at it. Hell, I'm still throwing around a lot of bullshit about "viewpointing" now even though I'm still not really sure what it is. Fortunately, I usually catch up to my own bullshit and learn something about it before I get called out. My roommate, thanks to her obsessive book purchasing, is very good at supplying me with sources for that, so I pulled the Bogart book off our living room shelf. I liked it a lot. But if you've ever read it, you know that there's that one part where she describes Steven Spielberg's E.T. as manipulative, and thereby bad, art.

That kinda broke my heart. Especially because, like I said, I liked Anne Bogart a lot until then. I didn't want to have to kill her.

Here's an excerpt from a lecture panel she was on. It's not exactly from the book, but it's close, because apparently she totes E.T. around quite a lot in her arguments.

I'm interested in the creative role of the audience. My frustration with a lot of theatre is that all the answers are given and there's no room for the audience-and I think that comes, again, from film and television. There are two ways of thinking about the audience. The first is to want everybody in the room to feel the same thing. I tend to think of that as what Spielberg did in E.T. You cry at all the right places, but everybody else is crying at those places, too, and at the end you feel like a manipulated rag. It's actually easy to make a whole audience feel one thing. It's also called fascism.


The second way is to create a moment onstage that triggers different associations in everybody in the audience. It's much harder to do that. I try to set up contradictions on the stage. In between those contradictions lives something very bright. I try to think of the audience as detectives; I'm leaving clues for them. The older I get, the more I try to do the least I possibly can onstage, so that the most happens in the audience's head.

And you know, I see her point. Rather, I admire her for dedicating her artistic work toward giving wiggle room to think and rethink the contradictions of the work. On the other hand, I don't think there isn't a place in our culure's art for a few tearjerkers (and comedies, for that matter). And E.T.'s fascist like Osama bin Ladin's "Islamo-fascist." But I get her point. After all, I once compared Rob Reiner's The American President to Riefenstahl, didn't I?

Bogart's ideal art respects the audience enough to let individuals draw their own conclusions and insert their own associations. But she doesn't respect the audience enough to judge a work of art in terms of its value to larger society. That is, I can watch The American President and get swept up in the romance and the comedy and the Michael J, but I have to set up a few barriers when the movie brings in politics. Not that I disagree with those politics. But they're argued in a manipulative way. The movie's stand on gun violence isn't argued by a story about the consequence of gun laws, but on the likability of the characters who believe in them (and the dislikability of one Richard Dreyfuss).

I can enjoy E.T. relatively guilt-free, because I don't think that it's pushing a political message on me too much. The movie wants me to like the alien and distrust the government agents who want to put the alien in those plastic bubbles. At worst, Spielberg is selling a bourgeois middle-class sentimentality via cute little Drew Barrymore, but E.T. ultimately doesn't affect my political or social action in the world (a later question: should it?). But that's not what Bogart's hang-up is, really. It's in the very experience of being manipulated by mass entertainment, "mass" being the four-letter word. She experiences a genuine distaste for feeling what she is "supposed to" feel, which sounds like guilt or embarrassment.

Now that I think of it, I don't relate to that feeling. Maybe it's because most of the films and plays and TV shows I see, despite her truism that it's easy to manipulate people, really don't move me like they're intended to. Maybe it's because I can only count on a handful of movies at the theater to tell a story that doesn't leave me bored by the third act. When something sweeps me away, I'm really impressed. I leave the theater giddy, trying to reconstruct how the story made me feel the way it did. If anything, I'm astounded by how difficult it is for stories to manipulate me anymore.

To manipulate in art is really to move an audience by relating a fiction to certain human touchstones: humor, love, friendship, loss, triumph, etc. I don't believe there's anything inherently wrong with arousing these feelings unless it's for the end of something immoral (like Nazi propaganda; or, in the drawer of the less sensationalist, a financial profit. You could accuse E.T. and every commercial American film of this, but you'd have to be pretty cynical to define it as their entire raison d'etre). What's wrong with a little collective experience? Mob psychology and movie audiences might have some attributes in common, but I think it's important to consider where each one originates.

That said, I do think that far greater art is accomplished by crossing the wires of those touchstones and granting the audience Bogartian contradictions (or Brechtian alienation). By pairing triumph and loss together, say, or undermining the notion of love... those are provocative premises, and moreover, they promise an innumerable shades of experience that simply hitting the audience's funny buttons doesn't. That's actually a really simplistic breakdown of the realm of art, but I liked the book because that made sense to me. I would just replace E.T.'s badge of "fascism" with "low art" or the less accurate but more appealing "popular art."

As it turns out, Richard Linklater was also present on that panel with Anne Bogart, and he had this to say to her comment:

I would say I'm really old-fashioned, and I still believe in catharsis. If there is an emotional moment on the stage that triggers an emotion in an individual in the audience, then that emotion sheds light on the condition of that individual. And it's highly unlikely that you'll get everyone crying at the same moment.