Should every work of art offer a shocking insight into the current cultural zeitgeist, or is perhaps an exploration of the inner life more important? To begin this deep and probing search, I shall examine a very odd film by the much loved director of
Back to the Future, Bob Gale.
Interstate 60: Episodes of the Road manages extraordinarily to be even stranger than Gale's earlier time travelling extravaganzas, and perhaps sometimes gets lost in its own oddness. The tone is uneven and it uncomfortably vacillates between bildungroman and social satire, only really excelling when focusing on the latter. James Marsden's performance as our hero Neil Oliver often falls a little flat, and his quest to meet the ethereal girl he obsessively draws is unrealistic to say the least. But some little gems emerge nevertheless as Oliver journeys down the eponymous road (that doesn't exist). We are presented with the predicament of a town where the crime rate has been kept down by legalizing highly addictive drugs which kill the sex drive and essentially makes addicts slaves to the Government. Metaphor for late capitalist consumerism anyone? The scenario has been stolen from the barely readable
Naked Lunch if I remember correctly, but it's still impactful.
Aldous Huxley has infinite amounts of fun toying with drugs in
Brave New World, with the World Controllers using some bizarre form of hypnotism whilst people sleep to encourage them to taken
Soma, a hallucinogenic without all the unpleasant side effects. The idea is that when our sulky hero, Bernard Marx, has all his depressing ideas, he should take the drug to achieve short term happiness. After all, "everyone is happy now". Of course everyone only thinks they're happy and Bernard Marx chooses to grumble rather than take
Soma.
It's not hard to make the leap to a society where buying the latest consumer goods and satisfying all kinds of desires at every turn prevents any serious thought or questioning of the ruling powers. And as David Mitchell astutely predicted in
Cloud Atlas, the human hunger for more will remain insatiable, possibly leading to our destruction, but conveniently encouraging free people to give their consent to be enslaved by society.
These are both interesting works, fantastical yet cerebral, and hopefully encouraging us not to be so lethargic about living and question things more often. But is this all that makes a great work?
The Waves by Virginia Woolf is a very good book, for some the culmination of a run of experimental novels which began with the famous
Mrs Dalloway. But aside from a few cheeky pot shots at empire (imperial hero Percival dies by falling off a horse, all of the characters take this very seriously but it's easy to see the irony), there's not a lot in the way of social criticism. Even if there was, would what was radical in its time still be radical more or less 100 years later. In the case of
Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Howard's End and
The Great Gatsby yes, but in most cases probably not.
If so, what makes
The Waves great? Many would say its experimental style. It's written in prose that feels more like poetry, consisting almost entirely of "dramatic soliloquies", no dialogue, interspersed with the occasional descriptions of the waves breaking across the length of a day, which of course is a metaphor for life itself. Furthermore, whilst the other novels and books mentioned have focused on making us question social structures,
The Waves makes us question selfhood. This is most powerfully envisaged through Bernard, who takes on the character of Byron during his youth to hide behind, only feels himself when recounting empty phrases to others, and at the novel's climax his sense of self abandons him and he tops himself
In fact all of the characters lead a thoroughly miserable existence; even Jinny, who only seems to care about fashion and seduction has the occasional wobble. Rhoda lives in a fantasy world, is terrified of human contact and lacks any sense of self; Louis is commercially successful, but locked in a constant mission for perfection; Susan retreats to a pastoral idyll with a Victorian housewife's mentality, occasionally glimpsing something more which she had failed to reach; Neville is horribly intense and only flourished in intimate one on one situations. Bernard comments over dinner (in his head mercifully) that they have all failed to be human beings, and you can't help but agree with him. But in the end, don't we all fail?
It's good for us to be made to question things on all sorts of levels. We shouldn't ignore oppressive regimes and outrageous poverty to sit in candlelight pondering the meaning of life, but equally if we're overly political we may lose track of deeper philosophical questions. Therefore both Huxley and Woolf are worth a read, and despite its occasionally terrible moments,
Interstate 60 is also worth a shot.
