Break the Mirrors
A mirror is a shallow metaphor for art
I recently watched the 2022 documentary series Blumhouse’s Compendium of Horror. This is no surprise. I am, of course, an afficianado of horror and I love retrospectives of the genre. (The epic trilogy In Search of Darkness is another treat and I devoured it in its near 15-hour totality). Compendium of Horror was a terrific watch as well and included a lot of great interviews with many key figures in the genre, including John Carpenter, my favorite artist.
I noted one thing about it very quickly however, and it began to bother me. The series repeatedly, and almost exclusively, used the metaphor of "the mirror" to justify the genre as important. It's not enough to be entertained or thrilled, one should take the genre seriously because it is always a "reflection" of its time, whatever time that happens to be.
The series quickly introduced this a primary rhetorical technique and doubled and tripled down on it throughout its five-episode run. And let me say again, I really enjoyed the program and admire the people who put it together.
But about this whole mirror fixation.
On one hand I understand its function and I certainly understand why people revert to using it so often. It is, in fact a primary metaphor for academics when they are exploring popular culture. And the use is understandable. People who take popular culture seriously often have to defend themselves against people who do not. I have often found myself in this position.
My sole MLA Convention experience is a good example. I was hobnobbing with scholars specializing in Modernist poetics, Toni Morrison, and the de-colonization of Rhetoric and Composition pedagogies. While being there to present a paper about An American Werewolf in London. So yes, a pop culture person can suggest that their work is important because it "reflects" contemporary attitudes about ... whatever ... in a way that yet another book about Dickens does not. And I get the impulse to make that claim. (Even though I don't think many of our problems are rooted in people reading TOO MUCH DICKENS).
But the idea that simple reflection makes a thing important is silly. Nothing reflects reality more than a newspaper. Surely art has another function besides the reflection of reality. And to be honest I'm not sure that's what art or movies do anyway.
For one thing, if we are going to go with the reflecting mirror metaphor, it at least has to be a kind of funhouse mirror that we're talking about. I could maybe buy that art relects a VERSION of reality, one distorted by the lens of the reflector. But even with this concession and qualification, I don't think that the mirror metaphor works very well.
For me, I still prefer; the metaphor of a tree.
Think about any art's relationship with 'reality' for a moment. It absolutely emerges from its time and place. Even if an artist stubbornly creates works that are purposefully archaic, say a filmmaker making silent movies on super 8 film today, that is an act of its time. A purposeful act of resistance to its time, but still a work emerging from the zeitgeist surrounding its creation.
An artwork is therefore like a tree. It grows in a particular soil in a particular environment. The politics and culture is part of that environment. The artist's family history and personal psychology is part of that environment. The other artworks in the field this new one emerges is part of that place and that dirt.
A tree doesn't "reflect" its reality, it emerges from it. And once it grows it becomes part of the landscape itself.
Such is a work of art. Take the subject of Blumhouse's Compendium for an example. Scream bristles with certain anxieties about violence and desensitized youth, no doubt. But it "reflects" nothing so much as it does horror movies themselves, Halloween in particular. Those movies that Blumhouse wants to reduce to simply having "reflected" their times were actually far more than educational mirrors; they emerged from society through a certain matrix of environmental influences, then they BECAME PART of the environment themselves.
Scream isn't reflecting anything; it is absorbing something, nourished by social anxieties, commercial tastes, and the great horror films of the past. Then, fed by the many nutrients of its landscape, Scream grows into a great tree itself, casting a long shadow over the culture. I loved Blumhouse's Compendium of Horror, but I am very bored with the metaphor of simple reflection. Art is not only about the representation of life; it is an essential part of life itself.
What’s your favorite metaphor for art?
I don't think I object as strongly as you do to the metaphor of the mirror; however, you are right to point out its inadequacies, and to insist that art must be part of the cultural environment in which it exists. Your tree metaphor is very good, and I can't improve on it.
The artistic practice has been compared to therapy or speech acts or self-expression, and a number of other things as well; but I like to tell people that what artists are doing, more than anything else, is emulating their Creator. We are created in the image of God; part of that image is to be creative.
I enjoy recalling the observation our conductor made that 'Visual Art (painting, sculpture) decorates space, while Musical Art decorates time' - and for those of us in the Orchestra world, that's usually an *abstract* decoration of time. After encountering this article, I can think of film as definitely decorating both space and time...