Three cheers for ambiguity. For untidy endings. For uncertainty.
If you're wondering where I'm going with this, let's start with two words: "The Sopranos." By now, most people have stopped arguing about the fade-to-black ending of David Chase's masterly series on HBO. I had so many spirited discussions with friends about what really happened when the screen went dark, or might have happened or could yet happen, that you would think we had been parsing Shakespeare, to which this saga of familial love, loss, betrayal and revenge has been compared.
At about the same time "The Sopranos" was singing its final aria, I was finishing Ian McEwan's latest novel, "On Chesil Beach," in which a disastrous, unconsummated wedding night haunts the virginal couple long after they have uncoupled.
As with any good post-modern novel, McEwan's book raises more questions than it answers. It invites us to ponder the contingent nature of human experience - in this case, how different the outcome of a marriage might have been if only the emotionally constipated partners had been able to give voice to their real feelings at a crucial moment and then had the patience to stick with each other through an awkward stretch.
"This is how the entire course of a life can be changed - by doing nothing," McEwan writes at the end of his chilling tale.
On a broader canvas, in his 2004 novel "The Plot Against America," Philip Roth conjures a different sort of might-have-been: What if Charles Lindbergh, the daring aviator who was also an isolationist and Nazi sympathizer, had run for president in 1940 and defeated FDR? And what if a Lindbergh victory had allowed Hitler to conquer Europe and had ushered in a wave of fascism and anti-Semitism in America?
In the post-9/11 era, laced as it is with fear and loathing and threats to civil liberties, Roth makes this dark scenario both believable and heart-wrenching, especially as chaos envelops a Jewish family named Roth - his own - in Newark, N.J. What is not believable is the ending: It is simply too tidy. Roth pulls us back from the brink after preparing us for the moral ambiguities and awful compromises that his fictional clash of civilizations would force us to live with.
Youthful perspective
In the books I treasured in childhood, from the likes of Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Grahame to Charles Dickens and the Brothers Grimm, there was plenty of darkness. But hope, too, and almost always a happy ending. As kids, we expected our storytellers to make sense of the world, to sort out good from evil, to punish the wicked and reward the penitent.
Indeed, as child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim observed in "The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales," stories like "Little Red Riding Hood" and "Cinderella" teach children to deal with hardship and loss, family strife and primal fears.
But Bettelheim cautioned: "It destroys the value of a fairy tale for the child if someone details its meaning for him." That is something we have to discover for ourselves.
Now that I am an adult (or trying to be one), I think Bettelheim's observations are just as true about art in general. If its meaning is too obvious, it isn't very interesting. If the ending is too neat, it is probably inauthentic. Life, after all, is messy. People are rarely all good or all evil - think of Tony Soprano -and sadness and joy are intermingled, sometimes in the same moment. Why should we expect (or want) our artists to make things simple for us? Art may delight, unsettle, anger, comfort, but it can't solve the mysteries of life, or make us whole.
Consider Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the Washington Mall. To many, that black granite gash in the Earth, with its more than 50,000 names, evokes the waste and anguish of a futile war. To others, it represents nobility and sacrifice. To some, all of the above. In any case, it's impossible to come away unmoved.
The memorial's impact derives from Lin's embrace of an abstract, minimalist form, in contrast to the more conventional statues of soldiers that were later installed nearby. Lin's V-shaped composition, sunk into the ground, is both somber and restorative, inviting visitors to trace the names of loved ones and to see themselves reflected in the granite surface - a gesture of reconciliation between past and present. We complete the composition the artist began.
So, too, with the work of Richard Serra, perhaps our greatest living sculptor. I haven't yet seen the retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, but it was thrilling to behold a Serra installation several years ago at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.
Walking through those torqued canyons of Cor-ten steel, I had an attack of claustrophobia so intense that my heart began racing, yet I was also exhilarated.
As light beckoned near the end of a tilting, rust-streaked spiral, as terrifying, hard-edged forms suddenly turned warm and velvety, I remember thinking: This is how art can transform us, playing with perception, embracing contradictions, redefining space, volume and material.
In a creepier vein, an untitled 1997 piece by American sculptor Robert Gober is one of the most compelling works at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Placed in the middle of the floor of a lake level gallery, it looks like nothing more than a battered suitcase, left open and seemingly empty.
But peer inside: A man dangles the legs of a small child in a subterranean pond, its surface shimmering with light.
What is the meaning of this? Is it just a harmless exercise? Or is the man about to drown the baby? Is the baby already dead?
In its juxtaposition of innocence and menace, this work toys with some of our deepest fears: the exploitation and torture of children, the thin line between playfulness and cruelty, the dangers lurking inside everyday objects. The work has a haunting power because Gober provides only the barest outlines of a narrative - it's up to us to fill in the blanks.
At the movies
And now for a silly example: When I was about 13, my parents took my sister and me to see a movie called "Kiss Them for Me," starring Cary Grant and Jayne Mansfield. Something about a bunch of Navy guys on shore leave.
The only reason for the Goulds to watch this otherwise forgettable 1957 release was that a family member was in it: cousin Dorothy Gould, who had gone to Hollywood in hopes of becoming a movie star (and had, for some inexplicable reason, changed her first name to Barbara). Sad to report, she was consigned to bit parts and this was one of them. She played a WAC and had exactly one line.
But just as she was delivering that line, my father sneezed. Dorothy / Barbara's big moment was lost to us forever.
(My parents weren't about to sit through the execrable film a second time, and this was long before the days of VCRs and DVDs; we didn't even have a television.)
I suppose I could rent the movie now and find out what my cousin actually said. But it is much more fun to remember the way my sister and I for weeks thereafter acted out imaginary lines for Dorothy in The Movie Where Daddy Sneezed.
[From jsonline.com] |
