(My friend Alex Abramovich asked me and several others for our thoughts on the 2013 film The East for a blog post he was writing for the London Review of Books. This is a slightly longer version of the remarks that appeared in his post.)
My instinct when watching Hollywood films -- and I think any movie produced by Ridley and Tony Scott can safely be placed in that category -- is to assume that form is inevitably going to be subservient to content, and that the incoherence of the content is going to increase in proportion to the formal earnestness with which it is presented. Which is a way of saying that the earnestness of this film puts it at so great a distance from both art and reason that my evaluative apparatus goes TILT. I thought it was well done, (i.e., “/”) but I had to wonder what political point it could possibly have been hoping to make, given its blissful embrace of rounded Hollywood form -- e.g., a depiction of growth and change that makes Sarah’s conventionalized points of departure (generic Christianity, sterile apartment, neutered boyfriend, bland materialism, and a host of unexamined assumptions) seem crassly obvious once she has arrived at her new self-identity, and particularly in the movie’s closing endorsement of a “third way” of continued liberal activism (the substance of that new self-identity), depicted in the closing montage using filmic techniques jarringly reminiscent of the very corporate advertising the movie parodies.
I’m not suggesting that a “third way,” some combination of environmental and consumer advocacy, isn’t possibly the most effective next step an apathetic citizenry can take from a politically sedentary position. But as the film’s formal solution to the moral ambiguity it conjures, it doesn’t begin to approach the more essential issues the film raises concerning the concentration of wealth and power in this country.
And that conformation to form does suggest the artistic limitations of well-doneness: maybe that’s the fundamental dictum of corporate art -- confine axiomatic truth within an inoffensively familiar form to flatter the audience. Among other helpful remarks in his “Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art,” Alain Badiou says that “Non-imperial art must be as rigorous as a mathematical demonstration, as surprising as an ambush in the night, and as elevated as a star.” The East is none of those things.
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My instinct when watching Hollywood films -- and I think any movie produced by Ridley and Tony Scott can safely be placed in that category -- is to assume that form is inevitably going to be subservient to content, and that the incoherence of the content is going to increase in proportion to the formal earnestness with which it is presented. Which is a way of saying that the earnestness of this film puts it at so great a distance from both art and reason that my evaluative apparatus goes TILT. I thought it was well done, (i.e., “/”) but I had to wonder what political point it could possibly have been hoping to make, given its blissful embrace of rounded Hollywood form -- e.g., a depiction of growth and change that makes Sarah’s conventionalized points of departure (generic Christianity, sterile apartment, neutered boyfriend, bland materialism, and a host of unexamined assumptions) seem crassly obvious once she has arrived at her new self-identity, and particularly in the movie’s closing endorsement of a “third way” of continued liberal activism (the substance of that new self-identity), depicted in the closing montage using filmic techniques jarringly reminiscent of the very corporate advertising the movie parodies.
I’m not suggesting that a “third way,” some combination of environmental and consumer advocacy, isn’t possibly the most effective next step an apathetic citizenry can take from a politically sedentary position. But as the film’s formal solution to the moral ambiguity it conjures, it doesn’t begin to approach the more essential issues the film raises concerning the concentration of wealth and power in this country.
And that conformation to form does suggest the artistic limitations of well-doneness: maybe that’s the fundamental dictum of corporate art -- confine axiomatic truth within an inoffensively familiar form to flatter the audience. Among other helpful remarks in his “Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art,” Alain Badiou says that “Non-imperial art must be as rigorous as a mathematical demonstration, as surprising as an ambush in the night, and as elevated as a star.” The East is none of those things.
Return to The Bottom Drawer
