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Aśvaghoṣa, Clement Greenberg, drugs, existentialism, film, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, kitsch, Martin Heidegger, Milan Kundera, Preston Sturges, religion, Theodor Adorno
Preston Sturges’s splendid old Sullivan’s Travels is a wonderful film with an important message. (I assume a spoiler warning is not necessary for an eighty-year-old film.) The protagonist, John Sullivan, is a director of lowbrow comedies who aspires to instead make serious art about the suffering of the poor. He tries to do experiential research about their suffering, and winds up being falsely imprisoned at hard labour. The prisoners’ one reprieve is to watch a Disney Goofy cartoon, at which Sullivan finds himself laughing uproariously. His lesson, from actually experiencing the suffering of the poor, is to go back to making silly comedies. The film closes with his lines: “There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh. Did you know that’s all some people have? It isn’t much, but it’s better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan.”
The story of Sullivan’s Travels serves as an eloquent defence of lowbrow or shallow art, of kitsch and even smarm. And I think it helps us see what is wrong with the philosophical critique of kitsch.
Critics of kitsch, like Milan Kundera, see it as “the aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being”: kitsch falsely depicts the world as entirely good, in accordance with the claims in the Book of Genesis that “the world was created properly, that human existence is good, and that we are therefore entitled to multiply.” I agree with Kundera’s existentialist metaphysical critique of the Hebrew Bible: there is no God, and no value underlying the physical world.
What I strongly disagree with is the aesthetic view that is claimed to follow from this metaphysical critique. Existentialists are known (and sometimes caricatured) for making gloomy, miserable artworks that depict the gaping void of the cosmos in all of its awfulness – like Lovecraft without the fantastical. In that, they are like John Sullivan at the beginning of his travels. But his journey within the film reminds us that often when one is personally – one might even say existentially – confronted with the suffering of the universe, the last thing one needs is art that dwells on that suffering! Rather, one needs the escape: one needs a depiction of a happier, prettier world, the more comfortable world that kitsch and comedy provide. The existentialist demand for grim art turns out to be an expression of privilege – a privilege that insulates one from existential contact with the universe’s darkness.
In the work of Marxist critics like Theodor Adorno and Clement Greenberg, kitsch is depicted as a so-called opium of the people or opiate of the masses: numbing people in a way that harmfully detracts from the true task of revolution. But Marx himself, in the original quote (about “religion”) from which the “opium of the people” (Opium des Volkes) phrasing is drawn, is smarter than this: he prefaces the “opium” quote with “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the spirit of a spiritless situation.” That, to me, is exactly what kitsch is. It gives us joy amid a world that all too often takes joy away from us. It gives us the light in the darkness so central to the festival of Christmas – the most kitschful time of the year.
For Marx, the need for such an opium – prescribed in Marx’s day as a painkiller – will wither away with the arrival of a better society that ends oppression and alienation. It is that part of Marx’s thought that I think naïve: not that I think a better society is impossible, just that it would still leave us with far too many sorrows and woes. It may well get rid of the painful hardship that John Sullivan came to experience, and that would be a great thing. But there will remain the sickness, old age and death that shocked Aśvaghoṣa’s Buddha. There will remain people being mean and petty to each other, getting angry over perceived slights. There will remain the ultimate inevitability of human extinction (in millions of years if not hundreds). In short, in such a society there will be no shortage of potential sources of suffering, and so there is no reason to think that either religion or kitsch will wither away there.
20th-century Marxists and existentialists draw significant parts of their thought from Hegel and Heidegger respectively. I think this is influence extends particularly to aesthetics, in a way that I find detrimental. For I suspect Hegel’s and Heidegger’s aesthetics are among the weakest parts of their thought: as far as I can tell, it comes down to a strikingly single-minded aesthetics, in which the point of art is to reveal truth, and nothing more. Thus Hegel can find art to be fully superseded, first by religion and then by philosophy. There is no significant role in either of their aesthetics for joy or pleasure; indeed, as I understand him, Heidegger disliked the very word “aesthetics” because it put the emphasis in the study of art on subjective experiences like joy rather than on the revealing of truth. This strikes me as a bleak and depressing conception of art, one that reduces humans to nothing more than seekers of truth. (Adorno, to his credit, speaks of the “autonomy” of art in a way that resists reducing it to truth-revealing – though he too leaves no room for the joy produced by kitsch).
The lesson of Sturges’s story is, I think, a very wise one. The world can indeed be a cold and a dark void, and that is all the more reason for us to create pleasing works of light – however fake and fantastical they may be.
There is much I could comment about in this post; to keep it brief, one thought I would add is that making kitsch, whether dark like Lovecraft stories (and Lovecraft is definitely kitsch in my view) or light like Christmas movies, can pay the bills. The producers of the opium need it as much as the consumers of it, but for different reasons! And we shouldn’t overlook how the producers’ needs may shape the product.
I like your review, and it reminds me that one reason I read a murder mystery with a book club at the Somerville Public Library every month is that we just don’t have to take the books seriously. If we learn anything from them, it’s a pleasure (at least for me) but an incidental pleasure.
“The world was created properly, that human existence is good, and that we are therefore entitled to multiply.” Whew, that “therefore” does a lot of work in that sentence! I don’t know how Kundera makes a connection there.
Very much agreed. There are many Opinions in science fiction about futures that develop “beyond” religion (e.g. Star Trek), and I am in camp That Is Nonsense.
I suspect that the “people will move beyond religion” perspective is heavily informed by rejection of Christian biblical literalism – and, so often occurs, the assumption that this reaction-to-[specific-form-of]-Christianity is a universal reaction-to-religion.
Big purposes and narratives are useful. As long as people remain psychologically like modern humans, we will continue to find/create/love those big narratives. (This is me agreeing with your aesthetic point.)
Bit of a tangent, but perhaps an interesting one: later Jewish thought levels the same Kunderaesque anti-Kitsch critique at the Book of Genesis. The kabbalistic answer (developed in pieces across 100-1500 AD, and massively abbreviated here) is that God’s perfect creation is unfinished, and humankind’s purpose is to complete/repair it.
This is why I read Agatha Christie!
I think your comparison of kitsch to opium is complicated by at least one point: You focus on opium as a tool to dissociate from pain, but I think kitsch differs from opium in that it does, usually, say something. They may not say anything consistently, but they still add to the conversation. Cartoon characters like Goofy or Daffy are 2-dimensional, but they’re also characters. Therefore, participants of kitsch shouldn’t be looked at as solely refusing to deal with the reality of the world (though, as you point out, that’s still a factor). Rather, I think we should look at them as participating in the world, but simply another way.
Some kitsch has a message, but the message of slapstick comedy is often minimal, and what I hear Amod emphasizing with the opium analogy is an affirmation of the value of the effects that “lowbrow or shallow art” provides even when it doesn’t have a deep message. The opium analogy is apt since social laughter involves endogenous opioids (e.g., Sandra Manninen et al., “Social laughter triggers endogenous opioid release in humans”, Journal of Neuroscience, 37(25), 2017, 6125–6131) that provide innate pain relief.
Even if one extends the meaning of kitsch unconventionally to include the aesthetically dark as well as the light (or the cold as well as the warm), as I did in my comment above, the point would be to emphasize some desired changes of mood such as the “thrills and chills” induced by Lovecraftian horror stories.
It’s true that such kitsch is not “refusing to deal with the reality of the world” insofar as it is manipulating an important part of the reality of the world: namely, one’s own body-and-mind.
Opium is an apt analogue for such manipulation of (part of) reality insofar as opium similarly changes one’s own body-and-mind. But a closer analogue might be the placebo response to an object or action that indirectly (via cognitive processes) stimulates release of endogenous opioids or other endogenous chemicals in one’s body. The placebo response would be a closer analogue because opium reliably causes changes independently of cognitive processes, whereas the desired effect of Disney cartoons or Lovecraft stories depends on how one thinks about the material.
This may be another way of analyzing the idea that “kitsch differs from opium in that it does, usually, say something”: kitsch depends on cognitive processes, which implies cognitive content. But the function of kitsch, as it is defined here, is nevertheless still analogous to opium as just described.
I said “the function of kitsch” in my last sentence, but it would have been better to say “the functions of kitsch” in the plural, since kitsch has multiple functions (purposes), as does opium. In my first comment, I alluded to the kitsch and opium economies. The Christmas kitsch economy is in high gear right now.