Shiraz Janjua

Back in my university says, as I’ve mentioned before, I bristled against the self-importance of artsy film students who made boring (and therefore ignored) works of self-indulgent art. I was happy to make things that entertained because although moving an audience is a difficult thing, an unmoved audience is an audience that you don’t own, that doesn’t respect you, that forgets you as artist.

The most pretentious film in my view was therefore 2001: A Space Odyssey, which purposely sought to lord its own extraordinary intelligence and impenetrability over the audience. I’ve since cooled down and have come to appreciate 2001 more, especially in light of my love of impenetrable works of modern and postmodern fiction like those of Thomas Pynchon, or the romantic appeal of painter Jackson Pollock. io9′s Charlie Jane Anders sums it up in her great essay “Escapism is the Highest Form of Art”: “Realism is like art that attempts to be purely representational: it can’t show any deeper reality beneath the surface, nor can it reflect all of the stuff that’s happening just beyond the frame of our perceptions.”

So “good” art has to be challenging and non-representational, says I. But I have the opposite pole that says art has to be irresistible, mesmerizing, enrapturing. I have to enjoy it, in some sense. But that’s all light fluff, right? It’s not serious. Schindler’s List will always be more important than Up, right? Anders again: “We have a bias — myself included, on occasion — against works that allow people to burst out of the bonds of unpleasant reality. They’re automatically less smart or interesting than works which seek to confront you with the real world’s unpleasantness, to impress on you how unsavory our world really is.”

But as Alex Ross said beautifully in The Rest Is Noise, talking here about the state of serious post-war classical composition and those who struggled against it: “Proximity to terror does not obligate the artist to make terror his subject.”

Later, talking about 20th Century composer/intellectual Theodor Adorno, Ross says that Adorno “saw modernism and kitsch as polar opposites, yet even he admitted that modernism can bring forth its own kind of kitsch—a melodrama of difficulty that easily degenerates into a sort of superannuated adolescent angst.”

That adolescent angst is exactly what I was reacting against in university. It’s still important to me, something I’ve written about time and again in my blogging, and it’s a central theme in my book, too. Anders also plugs Michael Chabon, the highly respected Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay who also wrote what was, arguably, one of my favorite reads of the past year: the unapologetically escapist genre novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. Seems he also edited two anthologies of “mock-pulp science fiction stories,” which is precisely the kind of thing I was tempted to write earlier this summer (but have yet to come up with a convincing idea for). I’m definitely going to have to check that out sooner rather than later.