Centrepiece
Art and morality
Colin Welch
An Old Bailey judge recently interrupted the Guardian film, critic as he was praising the camera work in an obscene video horror film. Judge Christopher Beau- mont asked, 'How is this relevant? You might say the German tank invasion of Poland was well executed. Does excellence and camera work help the jury to come to a conclusion in this case?'
This mordant rebuke reminded me of an extraordinary conversation I had with a distinguished film critic, not on the Guar- dian, a cultivated man of nice aesthetic taste. He maintained that it was his duty, as that of all critics of the arts, to exclude all moral consideration from his work, to reach and express no moral judgments whatsoever. His business, as he saw it, was solely with artistic merit (or, just con- ceivably, with intellectual merit), with moral merit or demerit not at all.
The Guardian critic, Mr Derek Malcolm, to be fair, did not take such an austere view. The prosecution claimed that the film was likely to deprave and corrupt, that it 'glorified and encouraged violence', featuring a four-minute sequence of the 10-year-old boy discovering his father in sexual bondage with a girl and decapitating her with an axe which he then buries in his father's skull.
Mr Malcolm's comments for the defence showed him to be a tolerant laid-back' man of the world: 'Dracula drinking the blood of young virgins 60 years ago was shocking at the time'; the film under con- sideration was 'not a masterpiece... but, seeing many horror films, this would be among the better rather than worse ones technically'. Yet he did consent to muse a bit about morality: 'You don't find a lot of profundity in this sort of film, but there's usually a moral of some sort. The moral in this case is that children are likely to be perverted by the excesses of the adult world.' The prosecutor suggested that the film was itself one of 'the excesses of the modern world'. Mr Malcolm coolly replied, 'That may be a view. It is not my view.'
Not having seen the film, I must at once concede that Mr Malcolm may have been perfectly justified, though the jury didn't think so. Judges, prosecutors, juries and prudes can make the most awful mistakes. Overhasty or insensitive, they can confuse coarse language (sometimes necessary) with coarse thought or feeling, truthful depic- tion of evil (sometimes necessary) with endorsement of it. The indispensable Mrs Whitehouse is said sometimes to have damned shows she has not seen, relying on descriptions supplied by people little known to her, some of whom may be off their heads.
Stanley Kaufman's novel The Philan- derer was about adultery. It was in no way. pornographic. It did not dwell on the physical aspects more than was needed to make its strictly moral point. This was, if it be legitimate thus to boil down a rich and complex novel, that casual sex destroys all true feeling and happiness, that the wages of sin are death, or in this case spiritual death. At the close we see with sadness and foreboding the philanderer, by now a mere empty shell, lust alone left to him, embark- ing on yet another hopeless and joyless adventure. He is already dead. And this book, a generation or so ago, was found by a court obscene!
I met the author, an American, shortly after. I shall never forget the bewildered sorrow in the eyes of that gentle and talented man. For all I know, despite the jury, the makers of our film, Nightmares in a Damaged Brain, may have been in part moved by like lofty purposes.
It is certainly my intention to attack not Mr Malcolm personally, but rather the to me extraordinary notion that critics should not be concerned about morality at all. The critic is our representative at the theatre, cinema or whatever else it may be. We ex- pect or hope that he or she will be more discerning, fastidious, experienced and knowledgeable than we are, but not in other respects utterly alien, like a Martian. May we not expect him to be a whole man, representing us not only as aesthetic but also as moral beings? He need not be any more virtuous than we are: but he ought to know what morals are. Most of us at the theatre don't hand in our moral judgment to the cloakroom along with our hats and coats; why then should he? Seeing a play, few of us judge it solely by whether it amus- ed or moved us, by whether it was well writ- ten or constructed or acted. Inescapably we wonder (assuming it was not so imbecile as to render such speculation superfluous) whether it was right or wrong, good or evil, true or false. We wonder what influence it might have on us and others, whether it is likely to inspire, to spread wisdom under- standing and true feeling, or to enrage, deprave and corrupt.
The narrowest sort of critic has under- gone a sort of lobotomy, removing all those parts of the mind in which moral sentiments normally reside. This self-mutilation is not capricious, but designed to serve the in- terests, as he sees them, of the art he criticises. He sees art and morality as perpetually at war, his duty thus to fight for
The Spectator 10 March 1984 art. They certainly seem at war today' though you could hardly name morality as the aggressor or probable winner. Art has perhaps normally been at war with the has; formal pseudo-morality of scribes and pharisees. With true morality it has no quarrel at all. Morality is not only an ail itself, subtle, disciplined, complex an humane, with beauties of its own. Morality is also an essential ingredient in most other works of art, providing the structural ten- sion, balance and inner conflicts without which they would collapse. Art without morality is tennis without the net or tnasic without tonality. Unless set in conflict with morality, tremendous passions are mean- ingless. Unbridled lusts will not make " tragedy; a bridle is needed. Why, even P°1' nography collapses without morality im- plied. What thrill in decapitating a woman if it were the norm? Being greater than morality, art must be for our critic above its laws, obedient °I' to the anarchic promptings of its nature. He intends a great comPlimenti:o art. He has in fact mortally insulted it. 'al place anything above or outside the Mc't, law is in effect to say that it doesn't matter that it can produce no consequences act trivial ones, peripheral, irrelevant to the human condition. Could any idea be in°r false or dangerous? In the great works of art of an epoch the find the unacknowledged legislators of nt world shaping the future. In their works ate foreshadowed, if often in distorted or fan tastic forms, splendours and miseries; triumphs and disasters which have Yet..,, come and would otherwise be unimagi', able. Our children's destiny — absit Oen' — exists already in the art of our own claYci If that art is anarchic, disordered an without morality, so will their world be, poor souls. Art matters all right. Criticism has many functions, n°1; all disciplinary, but one function is surelYar_ act as a cultural police force, stopping' ching and arresting not only art which ",,h competent or fraudulent but also art Which is wicked. This police role has been n.logo abandoned. I suspect that demoralisat,4 set in with the 'mistakes' made by nsile;s about Wagner, by Clement Scott anofficers about Ibsen, and so forth. These o's got the wrong man, so to speak, made °To of themselves and discredited the forcei;ove avoid like errors, the critical police • rip gone over to the criminals. Their role is„od longer to repress vandalism, disorderh'ar. `gubus'*, but to explain, justify and r bet- sodise about them, to act as panders so ween the anarchic Alsatia of nwderri,c'cle. and the fascinated bourgeois world 4311—self The moral dangers to the critic turnho, are not small. Do we not know critics r't'to while raucously denying the power °f corrupt, yet testify involuntarily to th: trary by their teachings and exan2211A *C. C. O'Brien's acronym concocted of unbelievable, bizarre, unprecedented hoiswnaegcrhsaraacs ,gro characterisation ue, eventsM r H a uugnhdeeyr ' s tescl
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