Reader Contribution: Where Is The Art Rage?

The last line of defence is failing

This week’s reader contribution to Bearly Politics comes from Mark Chadbourn, a journalist, novelist with his works including The Age of Misrule, The Dark Age, The Kingdom of The Serpent and screen writer for Doctors. He asks whether, in a period of political upheaval, the arts are still capable of playing the disruptive role they once did - and whether something structural has changed in how cultural resistance reaches the public.

You can find more from Mark on his excellent Substack below:

Are you happy? Do you have love? What will you do when you get older? Will you try to change the world like I did? We failed, but maybe you will not. Maybe you will be the one who puts the world right. ~ Perfidia Beverly Hills

We’ve been here before. In the 1930s, when the world seemed to be spinning into the darkness in the same way that it is now. But also in the 1960s and the 1980s when the forces of oppression emerged from the shadows to try to bend society to its will.

This time one thing is different.

That became clear during Paul Thomas Anderson’s masterful One Battle After Another, a film filled with righteous rage and flawed humans trying to overthrow a repressive government. Anderson had been working on adapting Thomas Pynchon’s 80s-set revolutionary novel Vineland since the noughties, constantly rewriting and tweaking to try to find something that would speak to Now.

And that’s what he achieved. One Battle After Another is a film for the ICE Age, completed months before the current outrage, a counterculture excoriation of Trump and his Far Right thugs delivered with just the right level of scorn and mockery.

Deserving of all its Oscar nominations, the film also offers a lot of truths about the nature of the people fighting the good fight and why they often fail. Most importantly, it is a story for our time.

Every revolution begins fighting demons. Motherfuckers just end up fighting themselves. ~ Perfidia Beverly Hills

One Battle After Another strikes home because in these days it stands alone as a furious indictment of the dark forces of authoritarianism that are closing in on us.

Historically when political opposition falters, artists have always taken up the fight — the filmmakers, musicians, novelists, comic book writers. Their voices became a rallying call to the public.

In December 1940, long before America entered the Second World War, newsstands across that country carried a powerful message: the first issue of the Captain America comic with the cover showing the patriotic hero punching Hitler in the jaw. Designed by two Jewish creators, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, it hit home in more ways than one.

That same year comedian Charlie Chaplin also took on Hitler and fascism with his satirical film The Great Dictator. In Germany itself artists performing in the cabarets became the voice of opposition to the regime. Werner Finck was sent to a concentration camp for his act.

Jazz became a focal point for opposition after the Nazis called it music for degenerates and there was an entire wave of anti-fascist protest songs like Round and Round Hitler’s Grave by The Almanac Singers, written by Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and Millard Lampell.

The white heat of the counterculture in the 1960s seethed through society. The Vietnam War, feminism, the Civil Rights movement and its offshoot the Black Power movement were propelled into people’s homes.

From Bob Dylan’s Masters of War about the military industrial complex through Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Fortunate Son with its attack on class inequality and the unfairness of the Vietnam War draft to James Brown’s Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud, the music of the era punched hard at the forces of oppression.

In cinemas there was Dr. Strangelove, Easy Rider and The Battle of Algiers. In the bookshops we had Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.

Directed by Stanley Kubrick, distributed by Columbia Pictures -Public Domain

In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher’s societal cruelty and Ronald Reagan’s turbo-capitalism and military posturing were taken on by musical creators as diverse as The Specials, Elvis Costello and Crass, Springsteen, Prince and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. On TV there was Boys From The Blackstuff, The New Statesman and Edge of Darkness. In comics there was a new wave of writers like Alan Moore and Grant Morrison.

The message is clear. Free borders, free bodies, free choice and free from fucking fear. ~ Perfidia Beverly Hills

This is more than entertainment. The arts have the power to change the world, often more effectively than politics.

That’s because stories and music bypass the conscious mind and slip directly into the unconscious where all our heavy lifting is really done. They take root, change one thought, then another, their message spreads in conversations with others, memetically, changing more minds in the process.

The art virus that authoritarians can’t combat or control.

It’s the last line of defence against those oppressive forces. If politics can’t change the system, art will change the people.

In recent days Bruce Springsteen has stepped up with his furious anti-ICE protest song Streets of Minneapolis. We knew it was effective because it instantly got under Trump’s thin skin and sent him into a wild rage. But Springsteen is a veteran of these fights. Where are the young voices?

We’re now in arguably the worst times since the Second World War and we desperately need those songs and films and books to rally our spirits and drive spikes into the heads of the Far Right. But the Art Rage is muted.

It’s not that the fury isn’t out there. It’s more that the channels of delivery have been captured.

Commerce has no truck with revolution. It wants to soothe and cocoon and keep the buyer happy. The music industry could always be persuaded if they saw cash in it — the groundswell that thrust the Sex Pistols and punk centre-stage convinced even the most stuffed shirt that there was profit to be had in tearing down the establishment.

But that groundswell can’t happen any more. The venues are closing, the clubs silent, the high street record shops shuttered. Radical artists are releasing on YouTube and Spotify but they never cut through to the mainstream and instead settle into their micro-tribes preaching to the converted.

Nor will we see the kind of films that caught fire in the sixties and seventies. No one is really making those mid-level movies with something to say. It’s either uber-budgeted blockbusters or cheaply produced indie films which only reach a certain demographic and get caught in the slipstream of cultural conversation. Taxi Driver would now be confined to the dim corners of a Netflix data centre, only picked up by the algorithm.

Somehow, in some way, we have to bring the Art Rage back. We need it more than ever. Those subversive performances, songs and stories have to find a way into people’s homes and lives to counter the sly, lying voices of the authoritarians.

Where is the new generation of creative revolutionaries?

Let’s hear from you.

I want you to create a show, Pat. Okay? This is going to announce the motherfucking revolution. Make it good. Make it bright. Impress me. ~ Perfidia Beverly Hills