the tropification of everything

I am irrationally excited for Inside Llewyn Davis, which appears to be just my kind of Coen Brothers movie. (Generally, I'm yes to Raising Arizona and A Serious Man Coens and no to No Country For Old Men and Fargo Coens. Which is inscrutable, I know.)

Alyssa Rosenberg reflects on the relationship between Oscar Isaac's Davis and Carey Mulligan's Jean. She's as astute as always, but it made me think about the odd way in which the language of art and media criticism has started to eat into how we describe the real world:

This clip reminded me of something Emily Nussbaum wrote earlier this year about “a time when the legendary wildness of male New York intellectuals and artists was made possible by middle-class girlfriends who paid the rent and absorbed hipness from the kitchen. As Joyce Johnson, Jack Kerouac’s onetime girlfriend, observed in her scathing memoir Minor Characters, an account of kohl-eyed Barnard coeds fleeing to Greenwich Village, ‘Even a very young woman can achieve old-ladyhood, become the mainstay of someone else’s self-destructive genius.’”... It’s irritating to constantly put women in the position of having to be the in-text reminders to the audience that what male characters think is badass is not necessarily so.

Now the phenomenon that Alyssa is talking about is very real. There is indeed a long history of artistic young men who have had their economic, practical, and emotional lives subsidized by young women who have had to act as an amalgamation of managers, surrogate mothers, and concubines. It's certainly a state of affairs worth complaining about, considering how suffused with sexism the conditions that create that sort of dynamic are. And we can lament that even while acknowledging that some of these women chose that setup freely; human beings are irrational, especially in their desires, and that's been true of men and women forever and will go on being true. Also, I think Alyssa is spot on to recognize that there's something shitty about the fact that filmmakers keep having to drop reminders about why the behavior of some male characters is genuinely bad. Our culture is so suffused with (white) men in movies acting like assholes and getting praise for it that those gestures are probably necessary, which is depressing.

But my more skeptical take on this is to say... the phenomenon that Alyssa is talking about is very real. Real, as in not fictive. By that I mean that however self-aggrandizing for the dude artist and however terrible for the long-suffering woman, and however bullshit the celebration of this behavior is in our media, the behavior is real, and is reality reflected in art— not art reflected in reality. Johnson's book was, after all, a memoir. I think the last line I excerpted above is key: that is annoying in art, but in reality it's just how it is. Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner's relationship was what it was, Kerouac and Johnson's was what it was, Johnny Cash's with Vivian Liberto was what it was.... None of them was attempting to embody the tortured artist trope. They were living their lives as natural beings, and the trope emerged from people doing so. This is not an argument about that behavior, which as I've said is obnoxious. It's an argument about the tendency to slip into a framework of analyzing fiction when talking about history.

It's kind of a subtle point and one that I'm not, obviously, ascribing only to Alyssa. It's fine to be bored with the expression of certain aspects of reality in art. But more and more often, I find that people talk about real life as though it is a narrative, the product of some artifice or affect. And that just isn't true. There are no tropes in real life.

The temptation springs from just how sophisticated the average consumer of media has become in deconstructing and describing what they consume. There is so much critical commentary about every piece of media out there, with posts and essays devoted not merely to movies or episodes but to individual scenes, that people are remarkably savvy in how the pieces work together. Which is great, I think. The downside is that it becomes irresistible to apply those techniques and categories to what exists to real life. That can provoke a profound misunderstanding of the directionless, unauthored quality of reality. What's more, precisely because the lines blur when we talk about art, because it's hard to tell where someone's discussion of media becomes a discussion of real life, this kind of thing can be hard to avoid. It's why Alyssa's post is so understandable.

The propaganda campaign in favor of living a permanently and totally mediated life is overpowering. Every tech blog, sci-fi magazine, economics article, "the Way We Live Now" piece... they all contribute to a relentless argument that life will be and must be lived through a series of filters and at a permanent remove. The books and articles that push back are met with furious backlash. If I am sensitive to the slippage between the virtual and the real, it is only because I am asked everyday by my culture to abandon the commitment to being fully human. I think that recognizing that life is not art and contains no tropes is merely part of the effort to demand the right to live in the physical world.