A maximalist, Mr. Luhrmann doesn’t simply want to rouse your laughter and tears: he wants to rouse you out of a sensory-overloaded stupor with jolts of passion and fabulous visions. That may make him sound a wee bit Brechtian, but he’s really just an old-fashioned movie man, the kind who never lets good taste get in the way of rip-roaring entertainment. The usual line about kitsch is that it’s an affront, a cheapening of the culture, a danger. “Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession,” Milan Kundera wrote. “The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.”
True, but it doesn’t make the second tear any less wet. — Manohla Dargis , The New York Times
Over at the Confabulum , I’ve written in passing about kitsch before: specifically, about moral kitsch, which was the subject of a great essay in The Hedgehog Review that I still can’t find. In that essay, the same Kundera that Dargis quotes above is used to capture the move from mere kitsch to moral kitsch; and, here, Dargis seizes on it unwittingly to provide a rebuttal. So Luhrmann’s movie is an exercise in moral kitsch — it, like the reaction it calls forth from us, is sincere .
Now some, notably Arthur Melzer [pdf], have traced a "cult of sincerity" back to Rousseau, the godfather-critic of bourgeois hypocrisy. There is much hay to be made there, but here I’m interested in seeing how it could be that sincerity has become the apology of bourgeois hypocrites, the holy water in which bourgeois hypocrisy is bathed and absolved. One answer could have something to do with an attitude that Freud captured when he sighed privately over the way everything in life turned to "dreck," his hypocritically polite scatological term of preference. On the one hand, the turning is a journey downward ; the heights of his theoretical put Freud in practice down in the depths of "smut," with psychology becoming " dreckology ." Talk about disenchantment! On the other hand, the turning to dreck is a journey forward , through time, a historical phenomenon. Forward, indeed, is downward. This kind of ‘progress’ parodies itself. Rieff, in a similar key, makes cutting reference to the pop slogan "Same shit, different day." If "the more things change, the more they stay the same," the same in question is the profoundly disenchanting recognition of decay, of the progressive stripping-away of passable illusions that anything isn’t, eventually and really, dreck. This despairing nihilism could well sit at the heart of a kind of bourgeois hypocrisy rather different from that which Rousseau pilloried. We can, perhaps, see something of the move from one kind to the other in the movement from Rousseau to Stendhal to Zola, whose attacks on hypocrisy focus obsessively on the physical filthiness of bourgeois moral and sexual life. Fine! the bourgeois nihilist finally screams. It’s all dreck, you and me included! At least let me have the consolation of . . . !
Of what? In another Hedgehog Review essay, Svetlana Boym updates Freud to consider "Nostalgia and its Discontents:"
My hypothesis is that the spread of nostalgia had to do not only with dislocation in space but also with the changing conception of time. [ . . . ]
Nostalgia as a historical emotion came of age during the time of Romanticism and is coeval with the birth of mass culture. In the mid-nineteenth century, nostalgia became institutionalized in national and provincial museums, heritage foundations, and urban memorials. The past was no longer unknown or unknowable. The past became ‘heritage.’ The rapid pace of industrialization and modernization increased the intensity of people’s longing for the slower rhythms of the past, for social cohesion and tradition. Yet this obsession with the past revealed an abyss of forgetting and took place in reverse proportion to its actual preservation. [ . . . ] It is as if the ritual of commemoration could help to patch up the irreversibility of time.
Boym frames her discussion in terms of the "homesickness" that spread with uncanny regularity across the cultural landscapes of so many supposedly uniquely nationalist romantic movements in Europe. On my reading, nostalgia expresses a sickness at the dreck of man’s mortal — and so never truly meliorable — estate, at the homelessness that that estate entails; the home for which the nostalgic bourgeois nihilist longs is, knowingly, utopian, a fantasy which can cash out only in our fleeting encounters with a certain kind of life force of nature. The flourishing innocent — the healthy, unknowing child — takes on tremendous power as the locus of romantic experience. But the tension between locating that experience innocently with the pre-pubescent child and not innocently with the post-pubescent child (whom we then must ascribe another name besides ‘child’, like ‘adolescent’ or ‘teen’) rapidly complicates and threatens the purity of the romantic experience. The momentary repose to be taken in the spectacle of childhood innocence in motion is always under an attack of nostalgic nihilism, and the viewer himself (this is an especially male problem, as Nabokov knew) finds, like Freud, that he is pulled inexorably down into the dreck, even at a physically appropriate distance.
There is no solace, in other words, to be found in the immanent individual experience of the natural, romantic spectacle of innocence in full flower. The bourgeois nihilist cannot watch the children running in the grass with unsuspect and untarnished pleasure. How quickly it turns, how quickly we all turn, to dreck! And with the authenticity of that estate-relieving experience foreclosed, the site of dreck therapy must shift from the individual to the mass — to all bourgois nihilists in guilty solidarity. We who cannot watch innocently can at least watch united in the solidarity experience of our shared estate! If none of us can really celebrate the children running through the grass, surely we all can celebrate the enjoyment value of the children running through the grass. In place of a real relief from our estate, a sense of relief appears.
Yet our yearning for that relief, our longing for a home to inhabit in innocence, is no mere sense of itself. No matter how many critical distances we erect between it and ourselves (in an effort to obscure, perhaps, that there is no other true solidarity among us but it?), it remains real, ‘a given’, non-negotiable. We can repress it only and always failiingly. So in our strategic, therapeutic complexes of solidarity in romantic hypocrisy — in, that is, moral kitsch, we reveal that true longing as we conceal it — as ‘sincerity.’ No matter if that second tear is suspect — the authenticity of that first tear has been denied us, now; that the second tear is sincere is, because it must be, enough! This sincerity transpires as a knowing collusion among bourgeois nihilists, conveying as it does the sense of forgiveness for our multifarious inability and unwillingness to be simply frank or honest .
No wonder, then, that the movies — which, at their best, forgive themselves for (as Plato claimed) giving us a sense of the real instead of the real itself — give us such a fine opportunity to revel in moral kitsch. And no wonder that they, in addition to the more realistic weavings of our own fictions in everyday life, take on a more appealing character than the stricture of immovable facts or faith. We seek to dominate our real yearning — in the knowledge that we can never destory or banish it — with a new one: to believe, if only for long enough stretches at a ime, that the sincere lie is really better than the unbearably disenchanted truth.
Postscript: It is very difficult to grasp the full power of this whole story if its religious telling is deliberately repressed or excluded — as I have almost done here for dramatic effect.
