Politics & Culture
A Challenge to Hollywood:
Back to the Real World
By Claes G. Ryn
Christianity and the classical heritage taught men and
women to strive for a better life but to have modest hopes. The reason
why we cannot look forward to a vastly improved worldly existence is
that human beings—we ourselves in particular—are flawed creatures. We
have to learn to deal with the consequences. We must not forget that
this, not some imaginary utopian alternative, is the life we have to
live. We should accept it and make the most of it.
But for over two centuries Western culture has generated
the sentiment that the life in which we find ourselves is nothing
compared to what might be. A longing for human existence to turn into
something quite different and glorious has produced a tendency to
disparage the possibilities of ordinary life. Instead of giving our
actual lives our best effort, we moan because dreamt-of possibilities
are out of reach. Novels, paintings, compositions, movies, and popular
songs have depicted the depredation and pain of a narrow-minded,
cramped, routinized, boring, oppressive society, and the thrill of a
hoped-for liberation. The desire for sexual excitement and freedom has
been pervasive.
The imagination has tended to wander from tasks and
opportunities actually at hand to visions of the human condition
transformed. Political ideologues have catered to and encouraged the
daydreamer in Western man, offering a magnificent future in which
present limitations have been overcome and human beings can realize
their fondest hopes. A wonderful fulfillment would be possible, if only
. . . . The culture of escape has left many grown-ups with the mind-set
of children, addicted to fantastic stories with but a tenuous
connection to real life.
The Hollywood dream machine has been perhaps the most
powerful purveyor of the culture of escape. Romantic love stories
involving beautiful men and women in spectacular, exotic surroundings
have been merely the tip of the iceberg. That existing society is worth
little and in need of drastic change has been the explicit or implicit
message of countless movies. This has been as true of films with a
dark, depressive flavor, including dystopias. These, too, have usually
emanated from the mentality of daydreaming, expressing the
disappointment and resentment of the chronic utopian dreamer who finds
himself defeated by actual life and stuck in the same crummy old world.
A manic-depressive imagination has strongly affected Western culture.
This type of sensibility has been an integral part of
the outlook of the Western art establishment, including movie
connoisseurs and reviewers. It is somewhat puzzling, therefore, that so
much favorable attention should have been given to “An Education,” a
movie that, despite superficial appearances, would appear to challenge
the dream of liberation from ordinary life. The film was even nominated
for three Oscars, including the award for best movie of the year. Is
the explanation the sheer artistry and charm of the movie? Or have the
reviewers and connoisseurs simply missed a part of what the film has to
say? Or have the prejudices and tastes of the arbiters of our culture
started to yield to something different? Is there a stirring of
dissatisfaction with cheap emotion and false liberation?
Lone Scherfig directed “An Education” on the basis of a
script by Nick Hornby. Scherfig, a Dane, directed and wrote the
original script for the delightful “Italian for Beginners.” Like that
earlier movie, “An Education” does not depict epic events or present
some grandiose perspective. In comparison with the typical Hollywood
film it might be described as low-key. It is the opposite of
pretentious. It shows a slice of life not far outside of common human
experience. Its characters, circumstances and events are—the movie
leaves no doubt—from real life. And yet the viewer senses within
moments that the story matters. The movie brings out the importance and
mystery of seemingly simple, straightforward, unexceptional events. It
holds the viewer’s complete attention. Lone Scherfig brings everything
in this film—the script, the acting, the editing, the photography, the
music, the costumes—together in a remarkable manner. This is a big
“little” movie.
To what genre does the film belong? It has a smiling,
humorous dimension. Is it predominantly a comedy or a drama? Like real
life, it is both—a drama with a comedic aspect. The movie’s light
touches are indistinguishable from its basic seriousness. The time is
the early 1960s, and the setting is the solidly middle class London
suburb of Twickenham. The movie captures perfectly the look and flavor
of the period. It may speak with special poignancy to people of the
same generation as the movie’s central character, Jenny. She is a
pretty, vivacious, and very bright teenager—only sixteen when we first
make her acquaintance—who will soon graduate from preparatory school.
She is an only child. She is expected—not least by her father, who is
struggling to bear the cost for her education—to qualify for Oxford.
Suddenly there comes into her life an older man, a
really smooth charmer. Already filling with the dreams of a gifted,
imaginative teenager, Jenny is introduced to a life of new
possibilities, excitement, and great fun—nothing like her previous
existence. Her life takes a sharp turn. She is introduced to
“liberation,” though not of the political kind attempted a decade later
by the Counter Culture and New Left. The moviegoer might think that the
film will follow a familiar pattern: girl extricates herself from
closed-minded, puritan, repressive “bourgeois” society. But no—nothing
so pat and simple here.
The movie tells a tale whose surface “classical” simplicity hides the complexity of real life. The film has many facets
and layers. No character or event is univocal. All but the most
unimaginative viewers will perceive that, like all stories of any
consequence and like life itself, this story is also metaphor and
parable.
“An Education” is not a movie with a “message.” Unlike
so many Hollywood movies, it pushes no ideological agenda. Yet, in a
non-didactic manner, it offers a lesson that our time badly needs to
learn: that all is not gold that glimmers and that meaning and deep
satisfaction do not have to await a radical transformation of human
existence. The film draws the attention of a confused and superficial
era to a truly humane dimension of existence that this era has managed
to neglect. Ordinary life carries a kind of promise that is within
reach of those with the patience and energy to realize it. The movie
discloses the potential hollowness and danger of the thrill of escape.
To the sickly, if enticing, imagination of daydreaming “An Education”
opposes artistic imagination rooted in real life. It points to the less
fleeting, more deeply rewarding quality of being that belongs to a more
mature apprehension of what makes life worth living.
Did Scherfig, Hornby and the rest of the team set out to
make a movie challenging the culture of escape and liberation? It does
not much matter, for the artistic imagination seized control of the
material and created a compelling glimpse of what is what in real life.
In art, the creator is only partly conscious of what she/he is
expressing.
The depiction of the persons, the milieu and the
attitudes of the time achieves great authenticity. The movie views its
characters with a sharp eye but also with gentle empathy. These are
real people, hence a mixture of many things, good and bad. Seldom has a
movie been so richly blessed with superior acting. Scherfig has clearly
worked some directorial magic. Young Kate Mulligan as Jenny has amazing
subtlety and versatility. She must be destined for a celebrated career.
But one hesitates to single out one or two actors for praise. There
really are no weak links. Rosamund Pike as the beautiful and stylish
young upper class do-do convincingly shows the emptiness and dullness
of her breed but also that she deserves our pity. Peter Saarsgard, an
American, makes David, the accomplished seducer, very believable.
The movie lets us see through Jenny’s eyes the thrill of
new, enchanting possibilities and makes what happens seem entirely
plausible. It shows how, in a society long influenced and tempted by
the imagination of escape, ultimately false and untenable dreams can
exert a powerful pull, especially on the young and unformed. Jenny
experiences the same great excitement as many others before her who
have let their imaginations carry them off. Under the spell of David
and what he represents, she says to him, “You have no idea how boring
everything was before I met you.” These words of an enraptured teenager
are also those of an entire age ripe for seduction.
The movie captures well the shortcomings of the society
of the time. It suffered from the moral, intellectual and cultural
anomie of a civilization whose deeper roots had barely been watered for
the last two hundred years. Its old tastes, standards and expectations
had atrophied into stale formulas and routines. This society did not
have enough to offer a girl of Jenny’s gifts and smarts. People like
her were bound to become susceptible to seduction in one form or
another.
It might be said that because there is no great disaster, only a
threatening catastrophe, Jenny’s story is trivial. So it is, in a way.
But ordinary, “trivial” life contains drama, threat and meaning hidden
only from the superficial observer. That Jenny is greatly endangered
and then saved—that she saves herself—is no insignificant matter. The
reason why she does not succumb in some more disastrous way is that she
is an unusually decent girl, very mature, perceptive and sensible for
her years. It is because of Jenny’s essentially admirable character
that she is not finally lost to the new seemingly liberating existence
placed before her.
Though Jenny is swept off her feet, she does in the end
not stray very far. She soon senses that all is not as it should be and
begins to resist. Talking to the three companions who have taken her
into their charming but dubious little social set, she says, “It’s a
funny world you people live in.” She almost walks away. Then, after the
crash, she manages, with the help of others, to put herself straight.
Unlike so many others depicted in the movies of today, she does not
sink into the kind of depression that results from continuing to
indulge the impossible dream.
The film makes you realize that had it not been for
Jenny’s strengths, which are attributable in no small part to the
fading strengths of her family, school and society, she might have been
irreparably damaged. The society that produced her was deeply flawed,
but not hopeless. Even the smug, prim and narrow-minded headmistress,
who might seem to be singled out by the movie for contempt, turns out
not to be such a bad person and to have offered sound advice, however
awkwardly and unimaginatively. And how much could have been expected of
Jenny’s parents? Given the limitations of the society that had shaped
them, had they not done rather well? It was certainly no mean
achievement to have brought up a girl like Jenny.
After her flirtation with disaster Jenny seeks the
advice of the teacher whose advice and life she had scorned when under
the spell of David. Coming for the first time to the teacher’s simple
but respectable and cozy apartment, she looks around, with new eyes,
and says: “This is lovely!” In the movie those words are also a comment
about the life that she almost abandoned and whose promise is greater
than she knew.
Would not this story have been more plausible, if David,
who seduces not just Jenny but her parents, had turned out to be less
villainous? But here the movie sees more deeply than may be obvious to
most viewers. Intentionally or not, it says something very important
about what has tempted the Western world into unreality: that there is
a close connection between the modern imagination of escape and
criminality. Yes, criminality.
Who are the master criminals, the monsters, of the
modern world? They are the same as those who advocated grandiose
benevolent-looking schemes for liberating mankind from an oppressive
society. They are Lenin, Stalin, Mao and many others. Who are these
mass murderers? Why, great “idealists” offering humanity a wonderful
vision of the future. They are the supreme seducers. What needs to be
understood is that their killing was not an example of a good,
beautiful end being ruined by bad means. It was an example of a
pernicious, ultimately diabolical “idealism” showing its real, ugly
face in concrete action. Partly because so divorced from attainable
reality, the dreams were themselves evil. That self-deception may have
played a central role in the designs of these seducers did not make
their “idealism” any less vile.
David is not Stalin or even Trotsky, but his using the
allure of escape and liberation in a partly self-deceptive scheme
connects him to what has been a profoundly destructive and often
unimaginably cruel force in Western society. However far-fetched it may
appear, the escapist, liberationist imagination is, at the extreme,
closely akin to and expressive of unfettered criminality. In suggesting
that David’s seductive conduct is linked with his coldly manipulative,
wicked personality, the movie is admirably perceptive.
At the very end, the movie seems to look back on Jenny’s
adventure and brush with disaster with something resembling nostalgia.
Is it giving a kind of wistful approval to Jenny’s youthful experiment?
If so, is the movie sounding a false note? To repeat, nothing in this
movie is simple and straightforward. A work of art is as ambiguous as
life itself and never wholly transparent. But the ending seems to
indicate chiefly that, much as we may strive to avoid it, we are all
bound to go badly astray. When we do and we experience and cause sharp
disappointment and suffering, we should not rail against life but learn
from our mistake.
Nothing can be less fruitful than settling into that
permanent whine that life is not what it should be that has been a
hallmark of modern Western culture. If we stop moping and try picking
ourselves up, we may be able to salvage something even from disaster.
“What does not kill me makes me stronger,” Nietzsche said. We mature.
In time we may, if we are lucky, look back on our failings not from the
vantage of sour, chronic disappointment, but from the point of view of
a stronger, richer, deeper, more fulfilling life. From the latter point
of view, our old mistakes can be seen as part of the material out of
which a better existence was forged and elicit from us a smile of
almost benign tolerance.
“An Education” enthused audiences. It spread from the
discriminating, “artsy” movie-theatres to theatres showing more popular
movies. One has to wonder whether the film connoisseurs and reviewers
saw quite the same movie as the one described in this article. Will
they eventually discern more of its facets and start to resent its
violation of prescribed beliefs and taboos? There has already been some
grumbling.
Or is the perversity of the movie-crowd changing or
being challenged? Even in Hollywood a change of heart seems to be
underway, though possibly induced by little more than a desire to cash
in on pent-up popular demand. It is not uncommon today for movies to be
at least partially subversive of sexual liberation and other
politically correct sentiments. One of several recently popular movies
of that kind is “Up in the Air,” whose protest against self-indulgent
hedonism and callousness runs parallel to that of “An Education.” The
movie leaves no choice but to disdain and pity the putatively
“self-sufficient” character played by George Clooney. Speaking of
violations of political correctness, who could see “Blind Side” or
“Precious,” for example, without thinking that the standard view of how
to explain or deal with the destruction of the black family is
hopelessly superficial and that traditional Christian decency and
charity have much to recommend them?
Moviegoers not in tune with the sensibilities and values
predominant among moviemakers have learnt to be grateful for small
favors. They are used to crossing their fingers, shaking their heads at
the moviemakers’ rather twisted view of the world, but finding some
satisfaction in the artistry of the best films and in nuggets of gold
culled from them. Take as one particularly frustrating example “No
Country for Old Men.” In its obsession and fascination with pitiless,
brutal actions it presents a warped, perverse perspective on life. Its
way of dwelling on blood and violence is largely pornographic. We
should not be seeing this. But the film is not without its dark
artistry, and some of those leaving the theatre may at least have
awoken to the reality of evil. They might also conclude that a society
that produces so many such villains would be well-advised to take a
second look at the beliefs and practices of the society that it is
replacing.
The dimension of modern Western society with which “An
Education” deals both subtly and incisively shows perhaps better than
any other the precarious state of Western civilization. Escapism of one
sort or another is behind virtually all of its travails, including
those depicted in the other just-mentioned movies. Because “An
Education” deals more comprehensively, penetratingly and artistically
with its subject, it ranks considerably above them.
Claes G. Ryn, professor of politics at
the Catholic University of America, is chairman of the National
Humanities Institute and editor of Humanitas. He also is
president of the Academy of Philosophy and Letters. Another version of
this article appears in Humanitas 22:1-2.
