We are in the new year! I hope this year finds you well and that things go good for you. I am writing this on the day that the US has kidnapped the president of Venezuela, sparking at this time unknown levels of conflict that could easily escalate into another Iraq. Obviously this is a tragedy, separate from whatever any of us think of Maduro, because it is point-blank a war crime, many people have died and will die from this, and our president didn’t even tell Congress he was doing it until after it was done. Just your usual rising dictator stuff. So, just a reminder: Stop calling all of these things he does “distractions.” It is purposefully chaotic, and it’s all tragedy and crisis. It’s a distraction in as much as someone lighting your house on fire might catch your eye even after that same person has shot you in the stomach.
Right now, though, I want to talk about advice for your resolutions for the New Year. I saw a video by Jason Pargin about how to meet goals. He starts by boosting Arnold Schwarzenegger’s advice that motivation runs out and you have to build routine to be successful. Jason then adds that in his experience, routines are built through shame and guilt and anxiety, which runs counter to our cultural move towards a life free from negative emotions. Honestly, I largely agree with all of this. Building routine is very important, and a lot of people stumble on the assumption that they have to maintain motivation all the time. That becomes a distracting pursuit in itself. Routines require that you follow them no matter how you feel and no matter what’s happening, and that will complete a task or project. Arnold says to be forgiving of yourself in building and maintaining that discipline, which is great advice, as well. And certainly Jason is correct to say that the backbone of a routine is negative reinforcement. The initial happiness and joy don’t last, and then you find guilt and shame in their place. That is how you experience it. I’m not claiming to be a great success, just someone who has made a few short comics. It takes a long time to make a comic, a lot of work, you won’t be prepared or capable of everything being asked of you, and it won’t be “fun” most of the time. I have maintained discipline and routine in working on these projects and completed them. My experience of that process does mirror what Jason and Arnold are saying.
My issue with his advice is that, even if Jason didn’t intend it, I can easily see people hearing it and concluding that it’s for the best to be as harsh and demanding of yourself as possible, that beating yourself up is good. In fact, as I left a comment, I saw other comments in that vein. And I don’t think that’s the takeaway from building and maintaining discipline. I also had a time where I was being way too hard on myself to push my goals forward, and it just burned me out. Simply taking the advice, “Be your own taskmaster if you want to succeed,” at face value isn’t a healthy way to pursue your dreams, in my opinion, even if you do have to do that and it will feel that way a lot of the time.
The real key to all of this is to have the proper perspective. After all, you’re setting your routine to meet goals. Things you want to do, that will make you happy. You’ll feel good about it at first, too. But over time, you stop feeling good about it. Then you start to worry and feel bad when you can’t meet that routine, or when you fall short of expectations. Those feelings can grow over time if you can’t maintain sufficient progress. The reason for this is that you want to accomplish the goal. You want to maintain that routine. The routine no longer feels “good,” but it is still the good thing you want. The special thing is no longer a bump above your normal, it is the normal plateau. You have somewhere to fall from, and you know where “below” is. Emotions are a part of you and serve a purpose; it is silly to live your life avoiding negative emotions, because it means you’re evading yourself. However, being consumed completely by a single emotion is often to your detriment. Being consumed by shame and guilt for not accomplishing anything is called burnout. That’s why I don’t think it’s practical to focus on the shame and guilt as the key to success. Those emotions will be present, and it’ll take willpower to muscle through, but I find it’s overall much healthier to focus on the desire and happiness of the project or goal than the guilt and shame for not meeting it.
So take a step back and remind yourself: You want this. You like this and you enjoy this. You’ll reach the end in time. If you ever take that step back and realize that isn’t true, you can always reexamine and make a new decision. Has your desire gone away? Have you been working towards that desire in the first place? Is there another way forward? What have you learned? Obviously there’s nothing wrong with backing out of a goal if you truly have lost that desire. If you still want to do it, though, you need to figure out what isn’t working and make a new plan. Hitting a roadblock, even an insurmountable one, isn’t proof that you should stop if you still want to move forward. You might simply be on the wrong road, and your experience is a roadmap.
I also want to discuss how we talk about art. More so that I can organize my own thoughts, really. I’m routinely annoyed and feel at odds with those who decry all corporate-owned art, despite the fact that I’m not really disagreeing with the perspective. It is really bad that massive companies can own art, and generally have a huge say in what art we have easy access to and find out about. There is also a greater push in recent years from the business side to have creative say in the art itself. There are always patterns and trends in art, and the art produced under corporate auspices is trending away from diversity of style. We need to change things to make a better future, and we need ways to bring outsider and small artists to people’s attention. Audiences are also declining in quality.
My big issue with all of this, I’m starting to think, is in a couple places. First, I think it’s far too common to conflate the artist, the art, and the corporation in a way that’s not productive or accurate. Second, I am opposed to making every problem in the world a moral failing of the individual, especially when this problem is systemic.
I’ll use the MCU as my example, because I know it well. Like I have said before, there’s a lot to criticize with them, like with any movie. Most of the crap these movies get is earned. But, unlike their fiercest critics, I actually watch them. It turns out, they aren’t “all the same.” Some are better, some are worse. There is artistic diversity in the catalog, lacking though it is. I saw someone who watches a lot of movies and has a good eye for film say that James Gunn’s Superman looks the same as every other superhero movie. That’s just straight-up incorrect, on basically every front. It’s the kind of thing you’d say if you 1) haven’t been watching superhero movies, and 2) don’t like superheroes and so aren’t discerning about them.
I’m also not going to defend all the values in these movies. Like the comics have been for decades, the MCU is locked into a “crime-fighting” paradigm that ultimately aligns them with the status quo and, often, the state and police. I, too, would like a superhero story that centers on other societal problems, and for them to not shy away from the revolutionary implications of their stories. The corporations are putting their thumbs on the scales way more than before, too. All that said, I don’t think it’s fair to say that the MCU, or any corporate-owned franchise, can only have the values of the corporation. The artists are still actual, human artists, with intentions and creative spirit. They’re not all hacks or class traitors because they work for a big company. And the movies themselves are works of art, on their own terms. They do deserve the crap they get, but because of their own merits. I get being mad at Disney and the rest, but it’s simply inaccurate to attack the movies and the people who make them as a singular cabal to destroy all of culture. Separate your targets. Like, how successful and profitable does a work of art or artist have to be before they become a sellout? Why is it that only rich reactionaries can co-opt or subvert things? Maybe being owned by WB meant that Superman couldn’t be as staunchly anti-occupation in Palestine as the filmmakers wanted, but being owned by WB doesn’t mean that value isn’t present in the film at all or that James Gunn and others don’t have opinions. Like, what’s the line?
And like I said, this is all systemic. Of course Disney and Marvel aren’t hiring the revolutionary and avant-garde artists, who in turn don’t want to work for Marvel and Disney. Why would that connection happen? The artists being hired to make these movies are people who want to make the kinds of movies Disney and Marvel want to produce. It’s selection bias. These are also action-blockbuster movies, remember? Why are you expecting them to bring the heat? Not that they can’t or shouldn’t, of course, it’s just not their usual goal; it would be surprising and unusual. No one attacked San Andreas for ignoring inequality or whatever. Marvel Studios only release two or three a year; taking other franchises into consideration, they’re vastly outnumbered by non-franchise films. They seem omnipresent because of a flood of advertising meant to guarantee return on their definitely oversized investment, and social media boosting the lowest common denominator. The things you’re mad about, and rightly so, are systemic issues in the business side of things, which has downwind effects all over. Besides feeling like we only get these movies, this kind of art, we are also being hidden from independent artists doing very different things. They’re competition, and I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention to capitalism, but big companies are terrified of small competitors. It’s unfortunate, especially when it comes to the arts, but it’s easy to see how it happens with the current infrastructure. The companies want you only paying attention to their stuff, the venues need to work with the company stuff to stay afloat, social media needs the widespread engagement you get from millions of people talking about a single topic. On and on and on. Everything that happens on a society-level is systemic. Your anger is correct, and it’s disappointing to see it be directed at peers instead of the powers that be.
I’m also generally very tired, and have been greatly hurt by, the individualism of our culture. An artist I admire said that anyone who has ever enjoyed a Marvel film is a moral failure who can’t handle nuance. His favorite movie of last year was Bugonia. I’ve liked the MCU and Bugonia, so I guess that means Bugonia is artless hackery with no nuance, right? Like, maybe these movies being popular actually means a large enough percentage of people have had a merely satisfactory experience, and that creates a commonality that makes for water cooler talk? Like, maybe, art with strong personality and taste won’t be popular because it’s specific and nuanced and niche, and it’s not an individual moral failing on anyone’s part that that sort of art isn’t popular, and the actual revolutionary position is to stop caring about popularity? Like, maybe we live in an anti-intellectual society that has been denigrating the arts for years and years, including by defunding and eliminating art education, and has been deliberately teaching people to read wrong, and so if audiences aren’t discerning or growing in their media diet, it’s because we failed them and can fix it? Like, maybe we’re all poor and don’t have time to go to the movies constantly and, much like how everything else in capitalism is brand-focused, people go see the big franchise things out of an assumption that they’ll get the level of enjoyment they’re seeking from a movie-going experience, because they view it entirely as a product to make them feel good because of that aforementioned thing about education?
Oh, and also the part where not everyone is into movies! Or is a music person, or cares about TV, or whatever else. We put forward certain forms of art as “normal” and expect that everyone likes them all and has a moral responsibility to develop taste in them to be full-fledged human beings. Kind of like how we have the “normal” sports, and laugh at people who care about obscure and unpopular sports as if they’re wasting their time. No one would be so harsh as movie snobs are if you didn’t have specific opinions about puppetry, which most people don’t. Some people dip their toes into “normal” arts as they desire and need to, but have a ceiling and don’t care or know how to reach higher. Maybe they would if they were to encounter some other, more obscure art form they like better, or if they were educated on how to approach art. However, no one has a moral obligation to have well-defined taste in movies specifically. If the most someone ever sees is Marvel movies and spends their time doing other stuff, they haven’t failed; they just aren’t much into movies. You can’t berate someone into having good taste. Trying to strictly enforce these cultural expectations against others doesn’t make you smart or helpful: It makes you a freaking snob. It makes you like those body-shaming jerks who make fun of fat people at the gym for doing the thing the jerks would like fat people to do. If you aren’t up for peer education for potential allies and compatriots, then maybe just let them be and direct your rage at the business ghouls making our lives worse, because it doesn’t help anyone to be a snob.
I’m saying all this because I struggled to make anything for years because I was bearing that cross too dearly. I wanted to be an artist, so I had to make something “”””IMPORTANT.”””” But all my ideas, and all my creative spark, comes from wanting to make something fun. Fun, for me, can be a lot of things, but it still has to be present. It fully crushed my spirit to think that the superheroes and kaiju and action-fighting stuff that inspired me to make art were invalid options, because they all said those stories can’t have the kinds of values that Real Art has. And I got really, really angry at those same snobs when they talked about how they liked the same or similar things while they pushed this puritanical narrative that art has to be incredibly serious and political and socially revolutionary if it is to have any value. I realize part of this journey is me internalizing things too easily and taking others’ words too close to heart, but that’s my whole point. You see comics creators and comedians and other “totally not real artists” downplaying the importance and value of their work all the time, beyond the usual humbleness or desire to avoid sincerity. This snobbery is just reinforcing a classist hierarchy in art that hurts other artists and the viewing public. I realize, “Let people enjoy things,” is used to say, “don’t criticize stuff,” but it’s still good advice if you take it to mean, “Don’t be mean to people for liking the ‘wrong’ things or thinking the things they like matter.”
Have you read Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud? He made an entire comic book about how to read comics because he spent his life making independent comics and didn’t much care for superheroes, and he wanted to spread the word to people who avoided comics because of superheroes. I’m obviously not expecting everyone to write books, I’m just saying that’s the attitude to take into the world. He loves comics and has issues with the industry, and his response was to spread love and knowledge. Since most people aren’t going to film school and aren’t going to intuitively pick up filmmaking knowledge, maybe lend a hand. That, or talk about the things you love and would like more people to see. Or shut up, you snobs.
Life in the Gutters 