Contemp[orali]t[y]

I especially enjoyed the contrast in the film between the quotes espoused by the producer, Palance/Prokosch, and the director, Fritz/Lang. They seemed to go straight to the heart of this debate between high and low culture. On the one hand, the producer, concerned with commercial success above all else, read pithy aphorisms from that tiny stupid notebook he carried in his pocket: "I have the knowledge right here", he says at one point after reading something about learning from mistakes. His refusal to generally speak any language other than English, even when he understood the French around him, and his reliance on his secretary/translator Francesca underscore his manipulative, demanding character, which it seems people put up with only for the money (ah, meta-narrative...). On the other hand, the director, Fritz/Lang, quotes Dante and other poets from memory -- and knows multiple versions of their work to boot. He speaks at least three languages - German, English, and French - and he has, moreover, a REASON for shooting the Odyssey as a stylized, symbolist piece.

While these two characters can seem polemical set against one another, perhaps even heavy-handedly taking up the positions of high vs low art, culture vs kitsch, the married couple of Camille and Paul perhaps showcase the confused, sometimes hypocritical, sometimes hypercritical position of the petty bourgeoisie in this moment of the end of Modernism. Their marriage is strained by the demands of commerce as much as of Art. If Paul "sells out", Camille has already "bought in", quitting her job as a typist to be supported by his pseudo-literary endeavors of scripting for the highest bidder. No wonder she's exasperated with his complaints about that compromise, and just as equally, no wonder he can't win back her love by posing as the frustrated artist once more.

There is another moment where the film-as-about-film comes full circle. In discussing the shots of the statues of heroes and gods, during the initial screening of what Lang has directed so far, the producer says that he "know[s] just how they [the gods] feel. Exactly." To this, the director replies, "Don't forget. The gods did not create man -- man created the gods." Likewise, the producer with the god-complex tries throughout Le Mepris to position Camille as a screen-goddess, as which she already appears to Paul (Shades of Pygmalion and Galatea, a story engendered by Aphrodite.) The great culture industry, in which this film as much as any other is bound up, contains the seeds of its critique.

But even (and especially) if we explode the duality between high and low art, we can only do so from within the institutional frameworks and mindsets by which these distinctions were constructed. Artists who position their work in opposition to the culture industry's dominant styles, categories, and modes of production do not do so from OUTSIDE that industry. There may well be no outside to this discourse, no utopia of egalitarian plurality. Nevertheless (thank synthesis for Hegel), these oppositions and the revelation of their contradictions necessarily lead to new forms and subjects within that framework. In other words, just because we can't escape the culture industry doesn't mean we can't resist its dominant effects. Every work that challenges our sensibilities performs just such a resistance, and every repetition and permutation of the debate over what art is, does, looks like, and means also carries the potential for that performance.