* People can readily accept that different selective pressures are responsible for their favorite breed of dog’s distinctive appearance and general personality traits, but we can’t notice the same effects in humans. And naturally, any evolutionary differences that might exist could not possibly extend to the organ that consumes the biggest share of the body’s energy.
* We keep hearing of the power of A.I., about how artificial intelligence is going to overtake humans–at least in figuring out stuff if not in political power–in everything.
I’m thinking that in the future, A.I. will be able to take in all the data and advise people on what must be done.
Now, suppose A.I. is fed all the raw data on race and were to rely purely on its computational skills to assess the problems of human society.
Given the facts of reality, won’t A.I. be politically incorrect in noticing all the things that we are not supposed to notice.
So, what is going to be done? Are they going to program A.I. to be politically correct?
If so, A.I. would, on the one hand, be programmed to be purely factual, logical, and analytical. Surely, a computer can be made to do that. But its PC programming would do what? Not connect the dots on certain issues? Overheat and shut down when the findings might be ‘racist’? Or, will A.I. consciousness be instilled with a form of ‘guilt’ complex?
What if A.I. were to observe that the reason that black students are suspended more is because they happen to be more unruly, disruptive, and violent?
What happens when SJW-types accuse computer engineers of having created a ‘racist’ artificial intelligence? Will the engineers then be required to install some PC program into the computer where the A.I. understands that it is not supposed to notice or report on certain things? Or even lie? I suppose A.I. could be programmed to lie.
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As for PC and art, the above story is a good example of how PC can be censorious and stupid.
But censorship isn’t necessarily anti-art. In some ways, limitations on artistic freedom forces the artist to sublimate his ideas and expressions in more interesting ways.
Most artists all through history never had the freedom of modernist artists, but they did remarkable work despite or even because they weren’t allowed to do anything.
Who knows? If Renaissance artists had been allowed total freedom and lack of restraint, maybe they would have been just a bunch of homo pornographers. Someone like Robert Mapplethorpe might have been more like Caravaggio had he lived centuries ago, whereas some Renaissance artists might have been like today’s self-indulgent pervs had they been lived in our times.
John Simon once said of Roman Polanski that he actually benefited from communist censorship because it put a cork on some of his more self-indulgent tendencies.
And more violence, more curse words, and more sexuality haven’t necessarily made for better cinema since the 70s. More freedom is great for the artist if he knows what to do with it. But it has a tendency of making some people just self-indulgent and excessive. I think Tarantino would have made better films in the 50s and 60s when no one in Hollywood could be as excessive as Tarantino soon became. An earlier period would have restrained his worst infantile & sadistic tendencies or forced him to find subtler means of expressing them. Much of Hitchcock’s art developed from limits on what could be shown. It forced Hitchcock to be more suggestive, subtle, and insidious, which proved to be more fun. Hitchcock could finally show more sex and violence with Frenzy, but it wasn’t necessarily better.
Limitation of artistic freedom also has a way of forcing the artist to find a compromise between personal vision and the conventionality of the tried-and-true.
While mere conventionality is the same old same old, a purist commitment to personalism has the tendency of making the artist self-indulgent oblivious of the audience and what has been proven by time to work.
In this sense, Shostakovich might actually have benefited from Stalinism. His considerable talent was in the service of creating music that was accessible and meaningful to large number of people. He had to make people’s music, just like most Renaissance painters has to make religious art, and he had just enough freedom to imbue it with his unique vision and touch.
Many critics in the past denigrated Shostakovich for his compromises while favoring the more pure avant-garde composers, but as time passes, Shostakovich endures and looms larger whereas many of the more pure experimentalists have been forgotten.
Likewise, it’s not surprising why THE GODFATHER is Coppola’s greatest film. He applied his talent in the service of really solid story material. He had to focus on something other than his artistic ego. Now, Coppola will insist that his best films are really One from the Heart and Rumble Fish, but NO ONE agrees with this.
And the best films of Polanski are KNIFE IN THE WATER — where artistic license was somewhat restrained under communist rule — and CHINATOWN where his talent was in the service of a killer noir genre script.
His more personal films range from interesting to downright ludicrous.
It’s like Brian Wilson did his best work in the midpoint between populism and personalism. When he completely lost himself in his own artistic universe while working on SMILE, he sort of went nuts.
* It’s like David Mamet said some degree of ‘genre’ is crucial to art because art needs form, structure, conventions, expectations, rules. Now, an artist can play with those rules. After all, if a work is purely conventional and obeys every rule, it is just the same-old-same-old. It is more a piece of machinery or furniture than personal expression.
So, the artist plays with the rules, bends them, remolds them, and even breaks them on occasion. But he cannot totally dispense with them and just do whatever he feels like. That is creative breakdown or orgy or chaos, not art. The result is like some of Fellini’s later films where rule is “I’m Fellini the genius, so whatever I do is art.”
Peggy Goo isn’t like that. It works on pretty decent genre material, and Coppola did what was necessary instead of over-layering it with excessive stylization
Coppola’s worst failures were when he over-indulged in personal projects that were all fireworks and no substance. There is no core in One from Heart and Rumblefish. It’s style-as-movie than style-serving-story.
Coppola’s other problem was his over-stylization of thin material. The Outsiders might have made a decent youth movie, but Coppola tried to turn it into Gone with the Wind. It is so bloated and overdone.
Same with Cotton Club. It might have been a fun breezy movie with dance and gunplay. The story and script simply weren’t up to Godfather standards. And the movie has some good things in it. But Coppola went for something grand and epic, oblivious to the material’s insufficiency in that department. It is so confused and compromised. (Compromise: throw in a white character in the form of Richard Gere to pull in white audiences. Confusion: a movie about thugs and gangsters turns into a NAACP speechifying about ‘racism’. Black gangsters as civil rights leaders. As for the Italian, Irish, and Jewish gangsters, they are pure hokum drawn from old Hollywood movies. Hokum can be fun, but Coppola goes for gravitas of Godfather with some of them, and it doesn’t work.)
Peggy Goo and Gardens of Stone work better because the styles fits the subject.
One is light-hearted comedy with some pathos, and the other is straightforward drama. Coppola did no more than he needed to.
Tucker is pretty good too. Manner matches matter. Finally, Coppola made peace with himself and accepted that not everything he makes has to be important or a masterpiece. If the script calls for a good movie, just make a good movie. It’s like if the recipe calls for hamburger and fries, make hamburger and fries instead of trying to turn it some fancy French dish. I think all the attention he received in the 70s, the decade when American cinema finally became ART, really messed up Coppola’s head for awhile, and he couldn’t accept anything less than being the new Welles-Fellini-Kurosawa rolled into one.
But then later came the obnoxiously over-directed Dracula, but then it turned out to be a hit.
As for Godfather III, the crime wasn’t over-direction but over-writing. Puzo and Coppola turned a crime drama into something bigger than the Fall of Roman Empire, Reformation, Hundred yrs war, the Cold War, etc.
You’d think that the Corleones became so important to world history that the fate of Western Civilization hanged in the balance of which bunch of greaseballs stood standing after the latest round of bloodshed.
* See Chris Rock’s documentary “Good Hair” about all the expensive hair care behavior black women engage in due to differences in hair texture.
