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Notes -
It’s interesting, because I can see a lot of myself in both of these guys.
Although I’m retired from performing, at various points I have been a musician, an actor, and dabbled in playwriting. And having gone to school with other artists, I’ve been a part of numerous conversations about art - what is art, is art inherently transgressive, what is the nature of the tension between art and entertainment, is it an artist’s responsibility to expand consumer’s horizons, etc. - and I’ve always found myself somewhere in between the two extremes. The dispute between Alexander and Eisenman mirrors the tension within myself. (“Inside you there are two wolves. One is Christopher Alexander, the other is Peter Eisenman…”)
I love pop music. Even the most cloyingly generic, harmonically predictable, lyrically lowbrow, etc. However, I also listen to metal, although far less often than I used to in high school and college. Now, even within the framework of “heavy metal” (which is actually a pretty wide umbrella term encompassing a large variety of sub-genres) I generally prefer music that is slickly-produced, with tightly-controlled and non-dissonant vocals, whether clean or unclean. Listening to metal is a good outlet for feelings of frustration and disharmony, but it is best when it provides catharsis and resolution of those feelings, rather than exacerbating them.
I’ve had arguments with friends who are into far more intentionally-bizarre-and-alienating music than I am, and I find myself taking the Christopher Alexander position: Why is bad for music to make people feel good? Why would you listen to something that’s designed to be grating? What is the point of Merzbow and Melt Banana? Theres some mental block within me, as there is in Christopher Alexander, that renders it impossible for me to even comprehend or model the mental state of someone who enjoys that stuff. Yet conversely, when I talk to someone who hates metal music, I find myself in more of the Eisenman stance, explaining why some level of dissonance can actually act as a sort of beauty in itself, by providing contrast to more harmonious and pleasant feelings. A more nuanced and varied palate is good for everyone, right? The world can’t all be sunshine and rainbows all the time. Where’s your outlet for negativity?
When it comes to movies, I’m far far closer to the Eisenman stance. I just get almost nothing out of the predictable Dashing Virtuous Hero Defeats Evil Villain and Saves the Princess story, unless it is executed absolutely masterfully. I have said multiple times (with only a bit of exaggeration) that I never want to watch another movie with a happy ending. Not that I don’t think such movies should be made! I believe that the common people need and crave that style of entertainment, and I don’t want such things taken from them. But I’m very happy that some filmmakers still throw a bone to people like me who like our films challenging, ambivalent, stimulating, and nihilistic.
This sometimes gets me into fights with smart people of a more conservative bent, who lament the very existence of non-didactic art. They seem to believe that all art exists (or should exist) to promulgate pro-social narratives about virtue. But where does that leave people like me, who are more comfortable inhabiting mental states full of tension and anxiety and alienation? They can’t understand what anyone would get out of watching Seinfeld (a show about nothing!) or the films of Woody Allen. They can’t comprehend why someone would want to watch Requiem For A Dream. Well, they can stick to watching the ninety-fifth installment of The Fast And The Furious, but I’m happy that they haven’t yet succeeded in stamping out all art that doesn’t comport with their preferences.
So then we get to the question of: is architecture an art in the same way? Does it contain philosophical and discursive content, such that an architect who merely gives the unwashed masses what they claim to want is the equivalent of a musician who writes nothing but (as John Lennon accused Paul McCartney of doing) “writing silly love songs.” Clearly there’s nothing wrong with a musician who writes abrasive or unhappy or disharmonious music, so long as he doesn’t force everyone to listen to it. A building is different, though, because everyone who passes by it is forced to look at it. And when it’s a building that people are forced to look at every day, because it’s in a busy area, or it’s a government building that people have to interact with against their will, there is absolutely an element of forceful psychic harm being done to people. Like strapping them to a chair and blasting Dying Fetus at them all day.
But then, what does that mean for a man like Peter Eisenman? His chosen art form is architecture, and that’s what matters to him. Should he be forced to live in a city where there are no buildings that suit his tastes? Where all buildings are harmonious (and all music is David Guetta, and every film is a Disney movie) and he is treated like a villain for wishing to introduce some element of his own tastes into it?
In the debate, Eisenman says he’s very happy to be able to live in New York City, where there are eight million people who feel the same way as he does. This is interesting to me because I nearly moved to NYC, I had an overall great experience when I spent a week there in 2016, but it had never occurred to me that the thing people actually like about the city is all of the disorder and disharmony. Those seemed like things everyone agreed were unfortunate downsides that one must suffer through in order to access all the better things about the city. I never thought there was any serious number of people who embraced the chaos and disorder - the graffiti, the cacophony of car horns and unintelligible conversations, the mishmash of architectural eras, the homeless zombies and the occasional smell of human urine and shit - as a positive good! And it occurred to me, hearing Eisenman say that, that there are probably people who have the power to make NYC less disharmonious, but choose not to because they want the city to be a refuge for those like them who have disordered internal lives and who want their external world to mirror that disorder.
I think that people like Eisenman - and people like me, when I’m in one of my more disagreeable moods - need and deserve to have the opportunity to indulge their own tastes and to see them reflected in at least some small corner of the world. The problem is giving them immense power to force their tastes onto the great mass of people who will be harmed by them against their will. If people want to seek out novelty and disharmony, it should be there for them to find. It shouldn’t be the first thing people see every day when they exit their front doors. It shouldn’t be shoved down their throats every day. And if Eisenman feels that he is having treacly vapid harmony shoved down his throat every day, then he needs to suck it up and come to grips with the responsibility that a minority has to the majority around it.
To force this off on a tangent, please let me have some examples of this:
If you had a few more mainstream and a few less mainstream examples, that would be great. (I have some ideas — e.g. Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, Paris Texas — but love to hear of this is on the right track or you have completely different ideas.)
For what it’s worth, I’m not sure I associate this with the “inflict psychic pain” category. I’m more in the camp of “this describes a difficult but likely universal experience”.
Uncut Gems is my ur example of a painful movie done well. European or Japanese torture porn, even the very basic example of Trainspotting, is emotional masturbation for nihilists. Technical competence for actors can be displayed in the grey experiential spaces between saturday morning cartoons and A Serbian Film, but a great performance can be teased out in relatively benign normie works like Marriage Story or even Jojo Rabbit. Depressing films don't automatically translate to quality scripts, unless we assign said value to it on our own preference matrix.
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