TOP・UPDATES・FOUR PILLARS・CINEMA/TV・GAMES・MANGA/ANIME・MUSIC・WRITINGS・FAQ・LINKS
TOP・UPDATES・FOUR PILLARS・CINEMA/TV・GAMES・MANGA/ANIME・MUSIC・WRITINGS・FAQ・LINKS
Academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion. Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates.
Werner Herzog [1]
Today the phrase "media literacy" gets thrown around everywhere. In theory, media literacy is the ability to understand how to interpret the way media sources like movies, games, etc. convey meaning, either formally or contextually (in terms of historical, social, political, and cultural context). In practice, it is a phrase that gets wielded out by extremely annoying humanities majors to enforce dominance over the interpretation of artworks. This most commonly happens in all of those 100 hour essays about shit like the Marxist undertones of King of the Hill that will stay in your feed for eternity on YouTube. And it usually smuggles in some incredibly pernicious and evil ideas about how art, culture, and creativity should operate.
"Media literacy" should ideally be something that is freeing: being able to identify the formal and contextual features of artworks makes our understanding of them, and thus our potential interpretation of them, richer and more open to interpretation. In practice, 99% of the time it is used to "analyze" an artwork in a way that pretends to be impartial but is really a method of censorship via social coercion: "don't you think this representation of a Native American is heckin PROBLEMATIC?" "look at how much their uniforms resemble Nazi troopers... isn't that a heckin ROMANTICIZATION OF FASCISM?" This constant policing and paranoia about every bit of visual language is cancer and ruins anyone's ability to be creative.
"But isn't that an anti-intellectualism? Shouldn't we encourage an honest reading of media no matter what?" The idea goes that a simple normie watches a movie or game or whatever and just enjoys the pretty colors and explosions, but someone with LE EPIC MEDIA LITERACY is enlightened and is able to see what's really going on and thus "understand" it on a deeper level. Thus, they would argue that my argument against "media literacy" is anti-intellectual. It is anything but. I would keep the metaphor of enlightenment, because it is indeed what learning to appreciate art is like. But enlightenment is not what you think it is. We should turn to a very famous statement by Dougen:
Before one studies Zen, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after a first glimpse into the truth of Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are no longer waters; after enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and waters once again waters.
Dougen [2]
Learning to appreciate art is much the same. All true appreciation of it has to, at the end of the day, return to what is most real and simple before us. Otherwise it is not truly art we appreciate, but something else. The illusion is that we first learn to like art just because it is "cool" and then become "mature" enough to enjoy them for their ability to convey "messages." In reality, conveying a "message" is one of the least interesting things a work of art can do. Conveying a "message" is the kind of thing a Sunday school cartoon or a North Korean propaganda poster does. I am not arguing that a work's "message" cannot be a part of how we learn to appreciate it. There are many artworks I love in large part due to their "messages." But to center all appreciation of artworks on their "messages" is to do violence to the essence of art. It is to subordinate the value of art and to exploit them as tools to spread ideology, just as industries like Hollywood exploits them as tools to make money. And centering our "media literacy" on learning to search for the "messages" and "meanings" of any and every bit of iconography or representational choice is a way of subordinating art to ideology.
And I believe, furthermore, that this tendency exists in the western world for a specific reason: the Abrahamic demiurge continuing to haunt the western mind. In the puritanical view of the past, the creation of art could only be "justified" if it served and glorified Jehovah. Therefore the idea of a piece of art existing and justifying itself by being beautiful, by expressing the creator's vision, or whatever else, was seen as an indulgent and vain thing, if not a complete blasphemy. Remember that this is the same god who forbade the creation of any graven images in order to prevent competition with his glory. The tyranny of Jehovah has created a subconscious fear of pleasure in the hearts of western peoples.
And it has persisted into the present day. Namely, it persists in Marxism, which lies at the root of most modern progressive ideology. It was Marxists like Lenin, Mao, and Stalin who first began to spread the idea that all art is inherently political. Now instead of the glory of god, artworks are meant to glorify the revolution, the proletariat, or, to modern American progressives, the cause of social justice and critique of the white supremacist patriarchal settler colonialist capitalist neoliberal military industrial complex (don't forget to mark your "white American college student" bingo cards!). In effect though, it's just the same as the old puritanical Abrahamic religion: instead of painting fig leaves over Adam's wang in the Sistine Chapel, now they complain on Twitter every time an anime character's tits are too big. And it is all born from the same base assumption: that artistic pleasure in and of itself is a vain and shameful thing and must serve some higher cause to be worthy.
Is all art inherently political? Yes, in the sense that all art has to come into being in a particular nexus of cultural, social, and political circumstances insofar as it is created by humans. But this definition of "political" is so broad as to be basically meaningless. There is a subtle equivocation which doesn't get communicated well: All art is "political." But this does not mean that all art must convey a primarily political "message" and certainly should not be judged primarily by that "message." The reduction of art to "messages" misses its primary essence and forces artists to market their works towards simpletons. And the reduction of its messages to political praxis is an idea invented by Marxists who have replaced Jehovah with politics as the monotheistic tyrant who controls all meaning.
Therefore, I venture to argue that what is called "media literacy" takes us AWAY from the work of art by conceptualizing it and reducing it to a prop for ideological purposes. It takes far more courage to sit WITH an artwork and remain unsettled in its uncertain meaning. I say indeed that your average cosplayer who dresses as an anime character just because they "look cute" has understood and appreciated the artwork that is the anime MORE than the dweeb who makes a 10 hour YouTube essay about its politics of gender and representation. The greatest understanding always makes an artwork MORE difficult to grasp, not easier. We should all enjoy being illiterate about media, because there is only mystery, depth, and resonance when there is something left that we don't understand.