2022: Huzzah For Cynicism!
One of the most vital attitudes one can maintain towards anyone wielding power – be it politician, preacher, or pop star – is cynicism.
By this I don't mean relentless negativity, but instead a continually-applied skepticism about motives, means, and justifications. When these folks make their grand proclamations, they may indeed be right about what they say, and they may indeed be honest, and they may indeed be speaking in good faith…but then again, they may not.
Because here's the thing about power: it tends to fatally distort one's vision.
The powerful are surrounded by people who idolize them, and by people whose own expectations for advancement are reliant on reinforcing the sterling self-image of the powerful. It's as if they've surrounded themselves with mirrors that clamor their own amazingness back at them. And because of this, the powerful end up deeply invested the myth of their infallibility.
One sees this in the freedom they feel to declare themselves arbiters of virtually any subject that floats across their transom. It's an obvious fact frequently forgotten that when actors opine about politics, or tech magnates opine about philosophy, or Supreme Court justices opine about morality, they are opining about something outside the realm of their expertise. These folks may (or may not) be intelligent, but I am for one am not convinced that your average Supreme Court justice knows more about race relations than your average plumber, or that your average billionaire knows more about ethics than your average homeless person.
Beyond this, even when they do confine themselves to their area of expertise, one must listen with care. Nearly every powerful person has had something in their minds twisted by that power. They earnestly conflate their own good with the good of everyone; they earnestly believe that they have risen for no imaginable reason other than their own excellence; they are earnestly committed to the notion that their success has granted them some kind of rare insight.
Are they, the powerful, evil? Of course not. No more than you and I. But they are subject to different pressures than are you and I – in much the same way that someone who has served in combat, or spent their life in a penitentiary, or lived a long time alone in the wilderness is subject to a host of specific mental pressures – and should be treated accordingly. We should also remember that any of us, if put in a position of power, would be sorely tempted to act in the exact same way.
At its best, Hollywood has a knack for articulating and examining the social structures of power. And it often approaches these structures, and the people who inhabit them, through cynicism. It trades in stories that remind us that nobility is rare and hard-won, to be fought for tooth and nail, while venality tends to be the norm, meaning that the greatest among us are usually no different than the worst among us, and often less capable.
In the best of these films, this is generally not a political analysis, for art is not good at political analysis. It is instead a human analysis, an articulation of the things that make life difficult and beautiful, and a reminder that what afflicts us and what salvation is to be had for us both come from the same source: the human itself.
The examples of the ways this plays out in movies are myriad, but on my mind today – as it should perhaps be on the mind of any person, I might humbly suggest, facing the year 2022 – are movies that pull apart the reasons that our society faces the difficulties it does.
So, for example, there is Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole (1951), which features an ambitious reporter (played by Kirk Douglas) who stumbles across the story of a man stuck in a collapsed cave. Driven by his need to turn the story into a vehicle for his own success, the reporter creates a carnival atmosphere out of the rescue attempt, until people flood the area to watch and the wire services are clamoring for his copy. Things go badly, as they must in a tale like this. Hampered by the reporter's meddling, the rescue attempt fails and the man in the cave dies; the reporter is stabbed by the wife of the victim, with whom he's started an affair, and dies on the floor of a small-town newspaper office.
The point of the film is not that the reporter is evil, or that the media is infested with people who cannot be trusted; the point (or one point, for films are not reducible to messages) is that ambition and accomplishment and greatness can be like devils astride our backs, whipping us forward into a destruction cleverly disguised as success. The film is cynical, that is, but it tempers this with a clarity of vision – as all great cynical art must – about the human condition. Douglas's reporter is both a perpetrator of malignity and a victim of a system that has rewarded him for being exactly who he is. It is a cynicism that does not point fingers but offers mirrors, of precisely the kind that one wishes the powerful were surrounded by at all times; it is a cynicism about the effects on us of the system we ourselves have created.
Other films are more explicit in their diagnosis; some of the best examples of this are in movies about war. One thinks of things like Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (1964) or Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979). In both cases, the cynicism rests on an elemental equation, which is that war is madness. (This is itself a kind of cynical stance, refusing out of hand all claims of glory and the protection of the people.)
Kubrick's film is openly satirical, and takes place in a world in which nearly everyone is both comically (or terrifyingly) insane and entirely at the mercy of a madcap system that proceeds forward to death regardless of the wishes of anyone involved.
And while it may seem that these characters – Peter Sellers' President of the U.S., frantically on the hotline to the Soviet Premiere in an attempt to stop the outbreak of a nuclear war, or his Dr. Strangelove, who cannot prevent his own hand from flying upwards in a Nazi salute when he gets aroused, or Slim Pickens' Major Kong, who leaps atop the first atomic bomb to be dropped on the Soviet Union and rides it toward the ground whooping like a cowboy atop a bucking bronco – while it may seem that these characters are not "us" in any sense, this isn’t quite right. These people are, instead, the embodiments of a system based on a lie; they are, like the reporter in Ace in the Hole at the mercy of the exact system that up until now has rewarded them; and who of us would act differently if we were not careful?
We have been told (according to the film) that the nuclear arsenal is for our own protection, and that the men entrusted with operating that arsenal are rational and careful; but the truth (according to the film) is that they are just as silly and prone to idiocy as the rest of us, if not more so because they occupy positions of power. The cynicism of the film, then, is not about some claim that the men at the top are somehow uniquely "bad," but that they are enmeshed in a system that is itself insane. Which is, by extension, a peril that threatens any human system.
In Apocalypse Now this cynicism is given a more specific target: the American adventure itself. With its shattering use of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness as its template, the film makes an explicit comparison between the American war against the Vietnamese and the 19th Century rapine and extermination of whole populations in the Congo in the name of Belgian colonial profits.
The two primary characters in the film – an army Captain (played by Martin Sheen) and a special forces Colonel (played by Marlon Brando, and named after a character in Conrad's book) – both started out, we are told, as good, wholesome American men. But the ends to which their country's war aims have put them have destroyed them both. The Colonel has broken free from the "rules of engagement" (a term that itself begs for cynical flaying) and is committing nakedly to the violence that his nation would like to shroud in euphemism and justification; the Captain, who has already been made into an assassin by that same nation, must be sent to kill the Colonel to put a stop to this madness.
One sees, immediately, the cynicism of the film toward war in general; but the sharpest stake therein is saved for the America that up until the moment of the Vietnam War had managed, among its ruling classes at least, to maintain a rather misty-eyed vision of the means it had used to come by its power on the world stage.
There is no way, Apocalypse Now seems to want to cry out to us, to force another people to submit to your people's designs – be they political, imperial, or economic – without destroying both them and you yourself in the bargain. The film opens with Jim Morrison crooning "This is the end…" over shots of the Vietnamese forest being incinerated by napalm; it ends with the American Colonel, who has been killed by his American assassin, crooning "The horror…the horror." What has begun as an attack on them has redounded to the destruction of us.
As a final example, note the cynicism of something like Drew Goddard's Cabin in the Woods (2011), which, while not nearly the most cynical horror film out there, has the virtue of being more cynical than nearly all its contemporary counterparts. The film opens with the hackneyed story of a group of teenagers going to a cabin in the woods to party, where it's clear that they will be assaulted by one monstrosity or another; the twist is that the cabin they are lured to is run by an international group of scientists who must perform this ritual massacre every year in order to appease a set of terrifying gods who live below the surface of the earth.
The film is cheeky in its referential nature but cynical in its underlying metaphor, which revolves around the idea that the "horror" in horror films serves some larger placatory purpose. But what purpose?
Well, the film seems to intimate that what is being placated is some strange human need for violence – which expresses itself in our histories, and on the screen, and in our imaginations – and further, that this need also tends to become an excuse for profit-making titillation. Whether one buys the line that horror films are a way of burning off our love for violence so that it does not erupt in real life, or the line that they are a continual mapping of the ways our culture has gone wrong (or neither line, or both), one cannot escape the film's suggestion that horrific stories are intimately connected to a innate darkness that is an element of our human condition.
Our titillation, in other words, is merely the surface expression of something at which we would rather not look directly. That this is a dangerous and appalling and unavoidable fact about us is explicitly suggested at the end of the film, when two of the teenage protagonists decide that it's probably better if the human race ceased to exist, and so let the vengeful subterranean gods destroy the world.
The exploration of the modern media age which Ace in the Hole engages in, and the exploration of war and American conquest that Dr. Strangelove and Apocalypse Now engage in, is here turned onto the machinery of entertainment itself. It is the audience of Cabin in the Woods, rather than the characters, which is caught up in a system cynically revealed to have its roots in destruction; we, viewing the film, are explicitly made aware of our own enmeshment in that system.
Perhaps you're with me about all this (or perhaps not), but perhaps you're also asking why now? Why cry "Huzzah for cynicism!" at the dawn of 2022?
Because cynicism is under threat, as periodically happens, by the forces of self-righteousness. One can look at recent horror films if one wants examples – which tend, disastrously, to not be terrifying in any real way if one holds the same political viewpoint as the filmmaker – or one can look at something like Adam McKay's Don't Look Up (2021). In nearly every filmmaking element but its acting, McKay's film misfires badly; more interestingly for my purposes here, though, is the utter lack of cynicism it displays.
With its allegorical tale of a pair of scientists (Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio) who discover a planet-destroying comet hurtling towards earth, only to realize that no one in charge either believes them or cares, it applies to the human calamity of climate change the tidy labels of good guys and bad guys. Its lack of cynicism is rooted in the unidirectional aim of its satire: the "us" are the good guys who have been hollering at the top of our lungs about climate change, and the "them" are the obfuscationists who have, gleefully at times, ignored the threat and gone about their business, resulting in all of our imminent destruction.
As political analysis, this very well may be true. (Or it may not be true; many is the time I've been assured by liberal folks just back from a vacation to somewhere like Turks and Caicos that the real problem is the wealthy Republicans who have prevented the hoi polloi from understanding how deeply they have to change their lifestyles). But as a route to wisdom through art – and remember that the first Cynics were philosophers – it is somewhat lacking.
True cynicism, like true irony, is not a defensive posture, or an armor that prevents one from being criticized while one criticizes everyone else. It is not a judgment but a suspicion, a vigilance about motives, a belief that it is best to be wary of people hollering virtue in your face.
A film that takes the tragedy of climate change, which has its roots in very human things – the desire to have more, and specifically to have more than your neighbor, the love of ease, an economic system that both feeds on and promotes these things, the ingrained resistance to change, the biological drive to favor the short-term over the long-term, the obdurate refusal to face the idea that your actions and beliefs might be radically destructive, the fact that day-to-day existence in the contemporary world is so overwhelming that most people have little left over for larger fights, etc. etc. – a film that takes a tragedy with its roots in these things and turns it into a tale about how "we" were right, and should feel good about ourselves, and "they" were wrong and have doomed us all: this is a film that is very far from cynical.
One cannot live in cynicism permanently, as both Dostoevsky and Nietzsche tried tirelessly to explain. One would not want to live, in other words, in a world where Wilder's Ace in the Hole existed but his Some Like it Hot or The Apartment did not, or a world in which Kubrick made Dr. Strangelove but decided against 2001. But there is a bracingness in cynicism, a perspective it gives to human calamity. There is a sense of perseverance in it, and a wisdom, for if peered into properly, the mirrors it offers bring us closer to other people, rather than driving us further from them.
All of which seems like it might hold us in good stead as we approach this new year.
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