FREE EXPRESSION: AT WHAT PRICE?

THE MASK OF FICTION

FEINTS, JABS, LOW BLOWS, ROUNDHOUSES AND THE GENTLE ART OF THE COUNTERPUNCH

Art's power comes with responsibility

By Lennard J. Davis, professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago in English, disability and human development and medical education

March 6, 2005

This has been a busy time for protests against films and novels.

In recent weeks, Academy Award-nominated films "Million Dollar Baby" and "The Sea Inside" have fallen afoul of critics. Disability activists and scholars, along with right-wing commentators such as Rush Limbaugh and Michael Medved have protested that the movies advocate the euthanizing of quadriplegics.

The 2004 National Book Award winner "The News From Paraguay," a novel by Lily Tuck, is provoking protests from Paraguayan citizens who see her book as racist and demeaning to their history.

Meanwhile "Downfall," the new biopic of Hitler's last days has been criticized by many Germans, most notably Wim Wenders in Der Zeit, for creating a "benevolent understanding" of the Fuhrer.

This flurry of protest only underscores a process that happens all the time. A work of art--film, painting, novel or play--comes out. Some group or groups judge the content of the work odious. Outrage ensues as some people attack the work for racism, sexism, homophobia, immorality or some other offense.

In response to such protests, pundits and artists tend to come back with defenses that focus on freedom to create, artistic license and the notion that the work is, after all, just fiction not a political diatribe. Maureen Dowd, for example, exonerated Clint Eastwood's "Million Dollar Baby" by saying "the purpose of art is not always to send messages. More often, it's just to tell a story, move people and provoke ideas."

Dowd echoes Hollywood mogul Sam Goldwyn's famous response concerning the political function of art: "If you want to send a message, call Western Union ." Frank Rich of The New York Times added in a private correspondence with me, "`Million Dollar Baby' ... is not based on a real story or real characters and does not purport to be a docudrama; it's wholly fiction. ... So I would argue that it has to be allowed the same poetic license as any other fiction."

These arguments tend to line up with the following points.

First, a work of fiction is just that. A good yarn has its own logic and its own demands of character and plot apart from any received truths or opinions about how society should be or not be.

Second, an author, director or artist can do anything he or she wants. If artists want to make outrageous, offensive comments, plot points or images, we should allow them to do so because art is something we value highly, and we don't want to restrict the creative process, which we also value highly.

Both defenses have the same goal: Leave the work alone! Don't make it into a political hockey puck to be slammed around the value-laden courts of public opinion.

But people who protest films, novels, plays or artwork consider Eastwood and his like as unforgivable. First, they may claim that the work is offensive. It hurts various subgroups in the audience by violating moral, religious or ideological norms. Second, they may claim that the work is factually wrong, and in portraying the facts incorrectly, the artist has distorted the social and moral questions in the work.

So, what if groups of people feel demeaned by a work or feel that the work misrepresents the facts about them? Is the simple statement that creative works are "just fictions" enough?

The problem is that the dual appeal to the fictional status of a work and to artistic freedom contains a serious contradiction. You can't have it both ways. When we give artistic license, we do so because we believe that art is one of the most sacred and valuable things that humans produce--not just make-believe. If this is the case, then the argument that such works are "just fiction" or only "creative" is misleading and contradictory. In fact, most people believe that art embodies the values, vision, morality and ideology of our culture and even, for great works, the cultures of the human race.

When critics and pundits argue that we shouldn't criticize a work of art because of freedom of expression or the work's fictional status, they paradoxically weaken the very artistic freedom claimed. If only artists are free and the audience or critics are counseled to hold their tongues in the name of artistic freedom, there is a serious contradiction.

In reality there is no opposition between those who cry that a work of art is biased and those who assert the right of artists to do what they want. The truth is that the work of art and audiences are in a reciprocal free-speech relationship with each other.

Artists should have the freedom to create, and audiences should have the freedom to judge.

Artistic works are more than just fictions. We rely on films or novels to poke their heads into the dark corners of our moral and social world and help us make sense of things. When two forces conflict, like the value of life and the wish to die, films and novels will explore those complexities.

That's why in dealing with life-and-death matters in the culture, directors or writers have an ethical, although not a legal, obligation to get their information right.

When novelist Lily Tuck decided to write about Paraguayan history without going to Paraguay , she did herself and her readers a disservice.

Now in that country, Tuck says, "I'm glad I didn't come before I wrote the book, because I would have been overwhelmed by all the factions and their point of view." But then is Tuck's work misleading because she took a simple point of view? Shouldn't she have to answer to her critics who claim she misrepresents the culture and its history?

A work of art is part of a process that includes a long-term dialogue with its audience. If a work speaks to its time--and that means addressing what the majority of readers think and feel without either getting its depiction of some of the audience wrong, so wrong that the readers cry "ouch,"--it gets preserved for posterity. If it gets things very wrong, it will be consigned to the dustbin of artistic history.

Our laws should protect the right to produce anything, and also the rights of people to say anything in response.

Copyright© 2005, Chicago Tribune