Love (Gaspar Noé, 2015)
Then she turns to me and says "I'm sitting in a café, in a park, there's a parent nearby with their kid. The kid's about two years old, tops. And the parent's stooping, low in their seat, eye-to-eye with the child, and telling them that they'd put a great deal of thought and care into the day, and into the child having a nice time, but the kid isn't giving them anything back."
This might sound like a reasonable thing to say to someone who's older than two (at the most), someone whose critical and verbal faculties are more fired up. But kids don't care. Not because they're evil, but because their minds are still developing, and the concept of sharing and giving and being considerate to other people, what we might call 'strategic social behaviour,' just takes a while to develop. There are those who even say that it's not until the age of seven that children have a strong grasp of the difference between right and wrong at all. And hey, let's not get into the specifics of this, let's all just agree that adults and children think differently. Their minds work in different ways.
That's why adults can't really play in the same way that children do. Generally what adults like is reading newspapers and driving cars. And then meeting up and talking about what they read in those newspapers, and the routes they took when they drove those cars. And what's wrong with that? Nothing whatsoever. However, some might suggest that they themselves are locked into a world of specific concrete detail, and have lost the ability to make a stick into a living character with a name, and to have that character go on adventures, and meet other characters along the way, and talk to them, and get in and out of various sticky situations. It could happen.
They might go on to argue that time, and the distance that comes with passing time, are kind of like this. Stuff in the here and now is dizzying and confusing and difficult to get a grip on. But give it a while. Sometimes a very long while. And finally some form of clarity is resolved. For an example, let's look at Edgar Degas. We could look at absolutely any of the Impressionists, but we're going with Degas principally because one of his most famous subjects was children, and we started this chat by talking about kids, and isn't everyone just a sucker for following a line of thought like this? Sure.
We look at Degas pictures now and we (by which they mean 'most people') love them. They're elegant, well drawn, and give us a gorgeous insight into what life was like at the end of the 19th century/beginning of the 20th century. But it wasn't always like this. At the time that Degas was working, a great many people thought his pictures were awful. They thought all of the Impressionists were awful. You simply didn't make pictures like that. You didn't make pictures of what was going on outside. The subjects should be grand, historical, important, etc, and taking part in grand, historical, or important activities. But Degas and his gang were painting drunks, kids, workers, street walkers, and so on.
"But this is pretty general to all of the Impressionists. Why have we chosen Degas again?"
Okay, okay, first of all, for that kids connection, but secondly for his interest in photography. As soon as he could, Degas started taking pictures of everything: his friends, horse races, ballerinas, whatever caught his eye. And from doing this so often and so quickly he developed a strong interest in 'the snapshot.' And from that he started giving his paintings and drawings this improvisatory, fractured feeling. These days this kind of thing is dime a dozen, so pay attention: photography back then followed the same rules as painting. Clean composition of the frame was everything. But Degas developed a lack of interest in this classical structure, and consequently fell in love with a haphazard, broken frame that was a problem for people back then. Nowadays we all like it. We're used to seeing trees, buildings, even faces cut off by the edge of a frame. We've even grown a preference for it sometimes, it's become part of how we compose images. But back then people simply didn't like it.
Cut forward a few decades, and you have the descendants of some of these people hearing The Beatles for the first time and complaining that that isn't music.
Cut forward a few decades and you have the descendants of some of these people listening to Skrillex for the first time and complaining that that isn't music.
This kind of thing happens so often that you'd be forgiven for thinking that it might end at some point. But it won't.
Principally because we're always in the now, and perspective and depth are not things that we bring to the now. Once something is complete it's easy to look back and unravel the various strands with crystal understanding of what they all were, and how it all fitted together.
For an example of how people act in the now, two men called John Darley and Bibb Latané did an experiment back in 1968 about crowds. They got varying numbered groups of people into these rooms and then pumped smoke under the doors. The idea was to look at how long it took for someone to take action. The result? Well it depends. As it turns out, the larger a crowd the more people are interested in seeing how other people react before taking a suitable course of action. Billowing smoke and impending death are less important, it seems, than what other people in the room think. In fact, it's far more likely that people will actually do something when there are very few people in the room. Or alone. Weird, I know, but true.
One of these days you and I should go see Degas. He lives somewhere around here. I know you might think he's dead, but, like Elvis, he's not. The problem is that he's always moving, so he's tough to find, but we can be sure that he always lives in the same city. On the day we'll end up being given a blank piece of paper, and have to work out the route for ourselves. It's challenging, for sure, and the map ends up becoming difficult to explain, with annotations written in a language we both only speak on that day, but once our marks on the paper are complete we end up enamoured with it, folding it up, and keeping it somewhere secret, to look at from time to time, always taking the time to make sure no one is looking over our shoulder when we do so.