When Filmmaker Charlie Kaufman Received the 2023 Writers Guild of America West Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement in March, the creative genius behind Being John Malkovich (1999) And Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind (2004) used the ceremony to express their dissatisfaction with the current state of the film industry.
“They made us believe that we can’t do it without them,” he said. “The truth is, they can’t do anything of value without us.” Kaufman has made similar statements before. He thinks that aside from its obsession with profit, Hollywood has made a habit of making formulaic films that wrap the nihilistic cruelty of existence in fallacious platitudes.
In Kaufman’s latest film, I’m thinking of ending things, the main character lists some of these platitudes during a nervous breakdown. They include: “It’s going to get better”; “It’s never too late;” “God has a plan for you;” “Age is just a number;” “It’s always darkest before dawn;” “Every cloud has a silver line;” and “There’s someone for everyone.”
For a filmmaker trying to convince you that existence is pointless, even evil, Kaufman is surprisingly popular. So popular, in fact, that its influence can be seen in many indie hits, including Ari Aster’s new horror flick Handsome is scaredWho film critic Jason Adams described as anxiety-provoking to the point that it will make you “up your meds as soon as you leave the theater”.
Reading this made me think of Plato. Republic. While the philosopher’s ideal state is more dystopian than utopian, there are arguments that I find sensible, including that art should play a practical role in society. Just as Plato believed that soldiers shouldn’t read poems about forgiveness before a battle, I wonder if people should entertain art that makes them feel like they need antidepressants, to paraphrase the film critic aforementioned.
Depressing art can still have a positive impact on the world. Ilya Repin’s 1885 painting “Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan” comes to mind, as do Wilhelm Brasse’s photographs of German concentration camps. Both artists show where the darkest human impulses can lead us and inspire us to be better.
Another example is the Japanese film drive my car (2021) which, like the Anton Chekhov play it adapts, implores its viewers to bear the inevitable pain and suffering that life will throw at them, rather than submit to it.
Not all depressing arts possess these redeeming qualities. While Kaufman’s 2008 debut film Synecdoche, New York, about a hypochondriac theater director determined to share his crippling fear of death with those around him, blew me away with his production quality, it also made me stay up late worrying about medical issues that I didn’t have. One evening, after one beer too many, I even quoted the movie saying to my best friend that “everyone is disappointing, the more you know someone”.
There is a great article on infinite time explore why sadness is more prominent in art than happiness. It is prefaced by Henry Wallis’ “Chatterton” (c. 1856), a painting depicting the titular Romantic poet after committing suicide at age 17 by drinking arsenic. Although there is evidence that Chatterton never committed suicide, the romanticization of his death led many angsty young Englishmen to emulate him.
The same thing happened to the epistolary novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe The Sorrows of Young Werther, in which the young hero shoots himself to escape a love triangle. The 1774 novel inspired so many copycat suicides that the phenomenon is called the “Werther Effect,” a term that emerged after the suicides of Kurt Cobain, David Foster Wallace, Kate Spade, and Anthony Bourdain.
The Werther effect is closely linked to the myth of the tortured artist, which suggests a positive correlation between intelligence, creativity and mental illness. A popular belief about the most famous tortured artist, Vincent van Gogh, is that his madness was the very source of his talent.
Van Gogh’s own writings paint a different picture: that he was a talented artist not because he was mentally ill, but despite it. Confined to an asylum after cutting off his ear, painting helped him maintain his ever-eroding sanity. “Oh, if I could have worked without this accursed disease,” he wrote in a letter, “what things I could have done.”
Today the majority of clinical professionals believe that there is indeed a link between mental health and creativity. However, it is not the one presented by the myth of the tortured artist. Although depression doesn’t seem to help you make or enjoy art, making art does seem to help improve symptoms of depression. It is for this reason that art is a basic human need.
