I’ve loved horror movies since I was a little boy, but I never imagined a world in which I’d have the rough equivalent of a Mom-and-Pop video store at my disposal every night. Nor could I have hoped for an air-tight system of recommendations curated for my own peculiar tastes. Long gone are the days of those gloriously misleading VHS covers that promised so much more than they could deliver!
I was watching one such perfectly curated film on the night in question. Predictably, it had all the qualities I cherish. Even so, I found it mind-numbingly dull. This is not a critical condemnation. I don’t believe the fault lies with the film. Once again, on paper, the title ticked all of my boxes. Ticking all my boxes, it turns out, was the problem. Call it the unbearable lightness of always getting what you want.
Today’s odd dilemma of being disappointed by something that perfectly matches your preferences is hardly limited to our viewing choices. For those of us who remember the days when physical media was a necessity, and not just a philosophical stance, picking up a new record often involved a certain amount of risk. True, movies, radio singles, and good old-fashioned word of mouth might clue you in to the sounds of a particular artist. Beyond these scattered breadcrumbs, though, you were obliged to follow the rather cryptic clues offered by the band’s name, the album artwork, and the lyrics.
The shock of something outside our own narrow range of experience is a much-needed spiritual tonic for all of us today.
Sometimes the risk paid off. I have a good friend who would’ve missed out on baroque pop geniuses XTC were it not for the fact that he was charmed by their name. Sometimes you pressed “Play” only to realize you’d just sunk your hard-earned cash into something irredeemably lame. And sometimes, something kind of magical happened: You heard music that challenged your narrow tastes and expanded them—something that changed your understanding of what music could be.
In seventh grade, I gladly forked over my allowance for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Boatman’s Call, fully expecting something as perverse and chaotic as From Her to Eternity or Your Funeral… My Trial. What I got was a record of subdued ballads! When did Cave trade in his punk credentials to become a poor man’s Burt Bacharach? But I’d spent the money and so I continued to listen and gradually, the rich interplay between the searching poetry of Cave’s lyrics and the subtle music began to melt the ice around my heart. Cave was maturing as an artist and, partly because of the limitations imposed on me by a pre-streaming world, my own sonic palette was refined in the process.
Back to horror films… Horror shatters lazy visions of reality, which is part of what I love about the genre. At its best, horror confronts us with the uncomfortable fact that the world is larger, stranger, and more ferocious than we could ever imagine, whether this involves recovered footage of an uncanny experience in the woods or a gnarled old sailer perishing in the jaws of a giant shark. But this paradigm-destroying quality fails decisively when it’s neatly packaged as a made-to-order thrillride courtesy of the almighty algorithm. A work of art can only shatter my paradigms if it exceeds my sensibilities. Put less charitably, we’re all much more boring than we’d like to believe and it’s only a matter of time before something that perfectly matches our taste ceases to please and instead, becomes lifeless and hollow. Inwardly speaking, I’m a desert, not an oasis.
Today, we scoff at any divide between “high” and “low” art. Thanks to this sensibility, a repulsive exploitation flick like I Spit on Your Grave can now command as much serious attention as Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Consequently, a reference to Bicycle Thieves or Au hasard Balthazar is more likely to provoke eye-rolls these days than coos of approval. Despite its rich insights into the contemporary imagination, the net effect of all this democratization is to reward consumers and elbow out connoisseurs. In short, the commercial engine behind our current entertainment habits has an inbuilt resistance to anything that fails to constantly amuse.
One of the great benefits of serious art is that it can liberate you from yourself. Toward the end of the roving conversation that constitutes the bulk of Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre, the two main characters begin to discuss the narcotizing impact of habit in our lives. We master our societal roles, embrace the modern world’s creature comforts (an electric blanket comes under heavy scrutiny in the film), and before we know it, we’re sleepwalking through our lives, impervious to true experiences and largely blind to the people we love.
What can rouse us from our modern slumber? The titular character of My Dinner with Andre recommends, among other things, participating in shamanistic dances, eating sand in the desert, and being buried alive. I have a less drastic proposal. Willingly expose yourself to works of art that can help you escape your comfort zone. Though we could easily overcomplicate such a pursuit by arguing that everything around us militates against it—that all of our devices are calibrated to keep us firmly imprisoned in our comfort zones—most of us know what we need to do. To borrow the venerable phrase coined by Robert M. Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, we need to join “the great conversation.” Hutchins and Adler are referring to the relationships between the most celebrated works in Western literature, but we can expand their metaphor to include any works of art that have withstood the test of time.
A popular adage of our moment has it that we’re all critics. A more accurate statement would be that we’re all outspoken consumers reviewing what we take to be products. The role of a critic, however, is concerned not only with criticism, but with appraisal. A good critic will point not necessarily to what pleases, but instead, to what’s worthy of our attention. Since serious art often makes serious demands, instant gratification is largely off the table. This is as true of George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady as it is of Yasujirō Ozu’s Tokyo Story and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker.
One of the deep consolations of art is that it helps us to feel less lonely. It does so by bringing us into contact with other minds, other times, and other worlds. It’s this otherness that’s so crucial. The shock of something outside our own narrow range of experience is a much-needed spiritual tonic for all of us today. It’s this otherness that reminds us that there’s life beyond our own “skull-shaped kingdom,” to borrow a phrase from David Foster Wallace. One’s comfort zone is locked from the inside. To escape, all we need to do is move away from what merely pleases toward what is worthy of our attention.
