What art owes to art

I am sometimes guilty of overanalyzing  or wrongly analyzing  art. Or at least popular culture that masquerades as art. I think I look for some kind of integrity there that’s clearly absent in the real world. The real world has no truck with art.

Everyday examples are commonplace. The fact that people are so divided over resurfaced accusations about Woody Allen’s behavior. This kind of situation creates a weird  awkwardness in the places where art and the real world interact — such as the recent BAFTA Awards held in London, where best actress awardee Cate Blanchett went out of her way to heap praises on deceased thespian Philip Seymour Hoffman, yet seemed to purposely avoid acknowledging the director who helped put her on the BAFTA stage: Woody Allen. Will Allen be the 600-pound Manhattan gorilla in the room that nobody will talk about on Oscar night? Tune in and find out.

Art is a complex thing. It takes many contradictions to create something beautiful. Take for example the song Space Oddity, recorded by David Bowie in 1969. If Bowie had written only this one song his whole life, his résumé would be solid: it’s a great tune and probably one of the few songs directly influenced by Stanley Kubrick’s A Space Odyssey. The song particularly dwells on Major Tom and his first steps outside his “tin can” into space. Ground Control is none too pleased when they learn his circuit’s dead, there’s something wrong. As the line “Can you hear me, Major Tom?” repeats, the chords travel backwards — from D to C to low G — indicating sonically that Major Tom is drifting off, away from contact. One can’t help think of the scene in 2001 where astronaut Poole is cut off by HAL, floating away into inky darkness.

Well, this complex piece of pop gets used in the recent Ben Stiller movie Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and I’m not sure if Stiller really appreciates the fuller reading of the song, or even cares. Stiller likes to namecheck popular culture so glibly, it’s possible it’s just a throwaway for him, a popular song a lot of people (from his generation) might think sounds “cool” on his soundtrack. When his boss (rightly) points out that Stiller’s character is kind of a space cadet, or “Major Tom,” his enabling pal Kristen Wiig says something like, “Don’t listen to him, Major Tom is a brave and bold explorer of the unknown.” It’s meant to sound empowering, like advice to encourage a timid soul. But we all know what happens to Major Tom. In the later Ashes to Ashes, Bowie lets the cat out of the bag: “We know Major Tom’s a junkie.”

This seems harsh. Bowie was probably reflecting on a generational loss of innocence, the gap between ‘60s idealism (fueled, in part, by drug-taking) and cold, gray hungover mornings of the ‘80s. But it’s not really fair of Bowie to dump on his previous creation like this.

 Nor is it fair for Stiller to glibly use a song that clearly is not a “feel good” song for a “feel good” moment in a movie. There’s a longing in Bowie’s song, but also a feeling of dread — a sinister mood created by the martial drums rat-tat-tatting against the Spanish-flavored acoustic guitar intro. There’s a palpable sense of loss, of someone floating off into oblivion in Bowie’s forlorn crooning. And it ends badly. In short, Stiller overlooks the full impact of the song, simply cherry-picking what he wants for the purposes of the film. It’s another example of the awkwardness that results when art and the real world collide.

This stuff shouldn’t bug me so much. But it does. It suggests that people, especially in Hollywood, are willing to use art and pop culture for whatever means suit them. I have a different view of art, though. Art owes allegiance to only one thing: art. Put another way, art wants what art wants. Not what Hollywood wants. (This is very different from the pronouncement Mr. Allen tossed around ages ago, when the press asked him why he was dating Mia Farrow’s teenage adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn: “The heart wants what the heart wants,” he kept saying glibly. It seemed a cold syllogism back then. But not nearly as cold as what art wants.)

Martin Scorsese also caught flak for rendering the real-life Wall Street exploits of Jordan Belfort in too attractive a light in The Wolf of Wall Street. But I would counter that Scorsese is not in the biography business, he is in the “making movies” business. If Scorsese is going to refrain from investing his movies with all the enthusiasm and crazed energy that he can marshal, then I am going to stop watching his movies. His only obligation, to me, is to make a movie with his auteur imprint. Art wants what art wants.

On the other hand, watching Saving Mr. Banks the other night, the Tom Hanks movie in which Walt Disney (Hanks) runs up against the formidable creator of the Mary Poppins books, P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson), I couldn’t help seeing something sinister in the way Disney — played with the usual avuncular Hanks charm — wheedled Travers into allowing the studio to adapt her book. He convinced her that it would “save” the reputation of her father, who according to the film was actually a drunkard who repeatedly addled her kid’s mind with tall tales and fantasies before dying unpleasantly in an Australian backwater town.

In one of the remarkable transformations that occurs in art, Travers took something almost unthinkably sad and crafted from it an enchanting kid’s tale that scrubbed away all the deeply disturbing bits. In short, she preserved a “happy ending” for her father, for herself, for Disney, and for legions of Mary Poppins fans. And this is a remarkable thing that artists are capable of: an alchemy in which misery becomes a lesson learned, a beautiful morning dreamed of, a bright side of life discovered.

When I carped about what I took to be Walt Disney’s sinister appropriation of a work of art — something he could then simplify and turn into mass entertainment — it occurred to me this is what the world of Disney was built upon: taking complex literary works like Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and turning them into innocuous cartoons, or recasting Mark Twain’s dark examination of racism, Huckleberry Finn, into a theme park ride.

But I was informed I was wrong: the new way of thinking is that you “save” your memories from a bad childhood experience by “reclaiming” them and giving them the spin you want them to have. One in which you emerge a winner. So by signing over Mary Poppins to Disney, Travers was allowing herself to “move on,” feeling that her childhood memory had been turned over to a trusted caretaker.

All this was thrown on its head by the sight of Meryl Streep calling out Mr. Disney’s real life memory on a real life stage (at the National Board of Review Awards months ago), branding Old Walt anti-Semitic and “a gender bigot,” the type of guy who was generally uninterested in the opinions of women. Again, I felt that odd sensation of art and the real world colliding (awkwardly) on a stage.

But then again, maybe it’s just awards season.