Art vs. Entertainment or; how to be a film guy

Look, I wasn't going to write a newsletter today. I was going to be a few days late, which, given my intention is to be a week ahead, is already very late. But then my friend Marie's newsletter came out and it made have thoughts. Or, rather, it made thoughts I already had coalesce into an opinion, which is even worse.

Thoughts, you can keep to yourself, opinions pick at the inside of your brain until you put them in the world.

So.

I'll give you my thesis statement right up front: great art never intends to be great art. And art that intends to be great art is often pretty boring.

I'm not responding to the main point of Marie's newsletter, everything she says is very correct. But when she talks about trying to get into film masterpieces the thought I had was she should watch Kurosawa.

I mean, she might have done already, I did not ask her before I wrote this.

Something I've been thinking about a lot lately is how Shakespeare didn't expect his work to outlive him.

We know this because of two things. The first is that, in Shakespeare's time, theatre was not art. It was low culture, it was entertainment for the masses, it was disreputable.

If you wanted to write art, you wrote poetry. And Shakespeare could have made a career out of that. When the theatres were closed because of the plague, Shakespeare wrote long form narrative poems. He wrote them to shill for a patron, but he also arranged for them to be published, and they sold extremely well.

But when the theatres reopened, he went back to writing plays. He didn't have to do that.

The second thing is that he never bothered to have his plays published. That's not unusual – most plays weren't published, and the ones that were weren't published well. Shakespeare made absolutely no effort to ensure that good quality printed editions of his plays existed at all.

I talked about this in detail on a recent History is Sexy but the point is that most of his plays wouldn't have made it to the modern era at all if a couple of his friends and colleagues hadn't made sure they were published after he died. It would have been a lot easier for him to do it himself, but he didn't. He didn't care.

He could have chosen to work in a respected field, he could have chosen to have his work preserved for the long term. But he chose to write for the rabble, he chose a form that, at that time, was basically disposable.

He could have written art but he chose to write entertainment.

The attitude we have to him now is something that grew over time as his work continued to be performed and enjoyed. I think if that's what he'd been aiming for, the plays would probably not be that good.

Most of the classic literature we now consider high art started life as populist entertainment. We all know this right? Serialised novels, bawdy plays.

It's always been a frustration to me, when we talk about engaging with art. The attitude we have to Shakespeare, to Dickens, to whoever – it's alienating and elitist. It puts people off, which is a real shame because these stories are bangers.

Recently though, it's the intended ephemerality that's struck me.

We consider things now as art simply because they've lasted, when they were never meant to last at all.

And I think film is the last art form this was or could be true of.

When people talk about the great filmmakers there are a lot of names that come up again and again. Stanley Kubrick. Martin Scorsese. Paul Thomas Anderson. Etc. All of them have made movies I think are great. All of them have made movies I think are deeply tedious. That's fine. Art is subjective, that's the point.

But I've found watching the great filmmakers a little further back in time more rewarding. There's a higher hit rate for me with Akira Kurosawa, with Preston Sturges, with George Cukor.

Men who were working in an era when films played at the cinema and only at the cinema. Where new films came out every week, pushing the previous ones out of rotation. None of them could have known that I would be able to watch their work in blistering high definition in my own living room. I suspect none of them even thought about potential revival screenings five years down the line.

They were making films to entertain people in that moment in time.

There's a self-consciousness that comes when you start thinking about what people will say about your work in the future. How people will talk about you after you're gone. I think it's detrimental to the process. I think it encourages all our most pretentious impulses.

It makes us prize drama and dismiss comedy. It makes us look for thematic depth and ignore good story. It makes us value interiority and forget agency. It makes us snobs.

To each his own, but in my opinion the best works of Kubrick, Scorsese, and Anderson are their funnier, weirder films. Dr Strangelove, King of Comedy, Punch Drunk Love. And I don't think we should have to accept that all their films are great in order to be film people.

There is, naturally, no set required watching for being a film person but I will tell you what I think you need. Watch a lot of different stuff. Different genres, different eras, different countries. When you find something you like follow that thread further. Have a good time.

And what the hell, here are my recommendations:

• The General (1926)
• Duck Soup (1933)
• It Happened One Night (1934)
• Libelled Lady (1936)
• Easy Living (1937)
• It's Love I'm After (1937)
• Holiday (1938)
• The Lady Eve (1941)
• Sullivan's Travels (1941)
• Casablanca (1942)
• Double Indemnity (1944)
• Seven Samurai (1954)
• Rear Window (1954)
• The Apartment (1960)
• Lolita (1962)
• High and Low (1963)
• Charade (1963)
• Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
• Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)
• Le Samouraï (1967)
• Night of the Living Dead (1968)
• The Long Goodbye (1973)
• Paper Moon (1973)
• The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
• Sorcerer (1977)
• Tootsie (1982)
• Ran (1985)
• A Room with a View (1986)
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)
• Do the Right Thing (1989)
• When Harry Met Sally… (1989)
• Wild at Heart (1990)
• Point Break (1991)
• Much Ado About Nothing (1993)
• Jurassic Park (1993)
• The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994)
• Muppet Treasure Island (1996)
• Fargo (1996)
• The Castle (1997)
• Perfect Blue (1997)
• In the Mood for Love (2000)
• Punch-Drunk Love (2002)
• Away We Go (2009)
• The Raid (2011)
• Attack the Block (2011)
• A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)
• Chi-Raq (2015)
• The Handmaiden (2016)
• Night Is Short, Walk On Girl (2017)
• You Were Never Really Here (2017)
• One Cut of the Dead (2017)
• Parasite (2019)
• She Dies Tomorrow (2020)
• When Evil Lurks (2023)
• Anora (2024)