COMMENTARY
‘Off in our own ghettos'
Art, once a unifier, is having trouble being heard
Our screens and phones fume with righteousness. Social media taunts have poisoned our political discourse and disfigured our reality. Our superheroes have forsaken us, and our fictions pale against our headlines. We have become an angry, fractious lot, a “Game of Thrones” for a digitized and unsettled century.
Much of our vexation arises from the insecurities of white working and middle classes threatened by a country reimagined by Wall Street, globalization, technology and changing demographics. The backlash has agitated racial tensions and identity politics that played out in the populist presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders but also reverberated beyond our borders to a world shaken by financial crises, Britain's vote to exit from the European Union, waves of Syrian refugees, and terrorist attacks in Paris, Brussels, Baghdad and San Bernardino, Calif.
The anguish seems to be only accelerating. The recent killings of black men by mostly white police officers — many caught on video in a new and disturbing cinema — have reignited rage in African-American communities. A woman in Minnesota this month live-streamed on Facebook as her black boyfriend, Philando Castile, lay slumped and bleeding in a car after being shot by police. A day later, five police offers were killed during a protest march in Dallas by a gunman police said was seeking vengeance.
The canon of art is to make sense of such seminal times, to pull insight from extremity and find meaning in uproar. Art speaks to the universal, but our predilections have turned tribal, as if a once common language has broken into coded dialects that separate us from the other. Decades ago, three TV channels, a dial of radio stations and family-owned movie houses shaped popular culture.
But today we're plugged into endless options spread across multiple platforms. Our invective is searing, and our common ground is shrinking in a competitive and often sordid media landscape that refracts and fuels our worst instincts.
Where are the signposts and what are the cultural descendants of Neil Young's “Ohio” or Jimi Hendrix's assaultive rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner”? Where is Bob Dylan's “The Times They Are A-Changin'?” or Marvin Gaye's “What's Going On”? Where are Archie Bunker's rants, Paddy Chayefsky's screenplay for “Network” or Norman Mailer's “The Armies of the Night”?
Fragmented audiences
We do have works that arouse and amaze, but in many ways they speak to narrower audiences. Beyonce's “Formation” at the Super Bowl was a cross-cutting of fashion and radical message staged in a venue that epitomized America's commercialization and status quo. Ta-Nehisi Coates' “Between the World and Me,” a best-selling meditation on being a black man in America, is, along with Kendrick Lamar's Grammy-winning “The Blacker the Berry,” among the most profound expressions on race. Last year's film “The Big Short,” an examination of the greed and hubris that led to the 2008 financial collapse, is an indictment of a Wall Street culture.
“Why hasn't any artist done the job of a crazy politician from New York?” Charles Randolph, who wrote the screenplay for “The Big Short,” said in reference to Donald Trump.
“Art is so fragmented. We're off in our own ghettos,” Randolph noted, adding that social media and other platforms offer few galvanizing touchstones, such as the original 1977 television miniseries “Roots,” that resonate across race, economic class and culture.
Writers and artists have long faced such dilemmas. Philip Roth, in a 1961 essay, was perplexed over how to decipher a nation entering a decade of turmoil: “The American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.”
Even the most socially attuned artists would have been hard-pressed over the last year to conjure anything as dramatic or revealing as the moods and faces at rallies for Trump and Sanders. The presidential campaign, notably during the Republican primary, has given us populist passions in a real-time mash-up of a “Saturday Night Live” skit and an updating of novelist Robert Penn Warren's political masterwork, “All the King's Men.”
“I'll say this about Trump: Anger is an addiction. We like it. The brain likes it. And now you've got a country full of addicts,” Paul Simon was quoted as saying by Billboard magazine. “And the media and certain politicians are the dealers. So everybody's angry all the time, and they're all juiced up. I'm not saying there's nothing to be angry about. What I'm saying is you can't make a calm decision when somebody's got you in a rage.”
Frightening narratives
One wonders how Archie Bunker would view today's America from his living room in Queens. A bigot and a racist who wore white socks with black shoes, Archie (Carroll O'Connor) was the embattled everyman of the 1970s groundbreaking television sitcom “All in the Family.” With his flag-pin patriotism, Archie, as politically incorrect as a man could be, clung to a past that was vanishing around him. But everyone knew the joke was on him; his insufferability allowed him our sympathy or, if not that, at least our understanding. It's hard to imagine that attitude of amused tolerance for a character like Archie today.
Talk radio, reality shows and legions of blogs tap into and stoke today's anger. The era of hashtags and selfies has given rise to political expression and art that are immediate and fiercely personal. Facts matter less than egos; swift thumbs and eviscerating texts have little time for context. A similar reckoning for cultural and political forces roiled civil rights protests and anti-Vietnam war marches of the 1960s, but except for pockets including the South, there were moments of shared purpose amid the many convulsions.
“Bobby Kennedy sat with Cesar Chavez. You had Woodstock and a racially multicultural effort that was the impulse of the '60s,” said Dawn Porter, documentary film director of “Gideon's Army” and “Trapped.” “But today we're more separate, and you have to cross a line. It is very dangerous. People at Trump rallies — it's pretty scary stuff. I don't see someone (an artist or musician) speaking to a multiracial audience. It's odd. I can't see a Trump supporter sitting with a person from Black Lives Matter. Who would be their headliner?”
Visceral and at times frightening narratives run through our popular culture. We get abrasive, if clever, comics like Amy Schumer; Batman and Superman — once the extensions of our better selves — battling each other in a grim rain; meth and degradation in “Breaking Bad”; beheadings, dragons and wars for supremacy in “Game of Thrones.” Such shows are not necessarily political but reflect the darker elements of our natures at a time when our realities seem more perilous than our make-believes.
This year's two big Tony winners reflect these separate realities. The multicultural cast of the Broadway sensation “Hamilton,” a musical about founding father Alexander Hamilton, embodies the nation's diversity.
Playing not far away is “The Humans,” a potent rendering of the dashed expectations of the white middle class, including a line that crystallizes our economic fears: “Don't cha think it should cost less to be alive?”
Our rage these days often cuts deeper than our sense of humor. There are fewer agreed-upon pathways that allow us to examine together our transgressions, foibles, prejudices and fears. Our shared humanity has been demarcated on smaller and smaller screens that often brim more with quicksilver judgment than open-mindedness. The lines have hardened. The terrain is vast and splintered, and as the lyrics of Lamar's “The Blacker the Berry” suggest, self-loathing may bristle beneath the rancor.
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