The better angels

Almost exactly twenty years ago, on April 12, 1995, Tony Kushner, author of Angels in America, was honored at an event at Northwestern University. While taking questions from the audience, he was asked whether he thought there was such a thing as nonpolitical theater. His response:

Well, I don’t think there’s anything that’s not political. As they say, the absence of an ideology is an ideology. It’s a conservative ideology. And a politics that seeks to efface its presence is part of the great mythmaking project of bourgeois, capital society…

I feel uncomfortable talking about theater artists. I will say that, for instance, Steven Spielberg is apparently a Democrat. He just gave a big party for Bill Clinton. I guess that means he’s probably idiotic. I feel I can trash people in the film industry and, of course, they read about these terrible things that I say about them and then I’m having a smaller and smaller market in Hollywood as a result. [Laughter.] Forrest Gump is bad reactionary art and Jurassic Park is sublimely good, hideously reactionary art. E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind are the flagship aesthetic statements of Reaganism. They’re fascinating for that reason, because Spielberg is somebody who has just an astonishing ear for the rumblings of reaction, and he just goes right for it and he knows exactly what to do with it.

This wasn’t the first time that Kushner had expressed this opinion: the previous year, in an interview with the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, he described Spielberg as a “front-runner for the Reagan counterrevolution.” What’s astonishing, of course, is that many years later, Kushner went on to become one of Spielberg’s most productive collaborators, writing the screenplays for Munich and Lincoln, with another historical drama in the works as we speak. As far as I know, Kushner—who is more likely to describe Spielberg these days as “one of the great filmmakers of all time”—has never directly addressed the sea change in his feelings, which leaves us free to speculate. It’s possible that Kushner simply mellowed a little with age; or that he was moved, like so many other moviegoers, by the transition in Spielberg’s career after Schindler’s List; or that he realized that working with the most successful director in history would allow him to write scripts that had a decent change of being made, which is something that even a Pulitzer winner can’t take for granted. Really, though, it’s likely that it was some combination of all the above, as well as a recognition that political art is much more effective when executed with peerless technical proficiency. Spielberg is simply the best there is; Kushner, when given the chance to work with him, seemed more than happy to acknowledge this.

Which gets at a tricky point about political art in general. Writers are often warned against trying to inject particular ideological or social concerns into their stories; we’re told that our themes should arise organically from an extended engagement with plot and character, rather than being imposed from above, and that audiences are haunted the most by works of art in which the conclusions seem to emerge almost against the author’s will. What deserves to be emphasized, though, is that political content in itself isn’t a kind of poison pill that makes for bad art; it simply allows bad art, the kind that ought to be revised into something better, to be tolerated and widely seen in what amounts to draft form. A mediocre play of no particular merit might lie in a drawer forever, but if it embraces a viewpoint that happens to resonate with how its audience already feels about a certain subject, it’s more likely to get a sympathetic reception. When the audience, to use David Mamet’s image, leaves the theater humming its own sense of virtue, it’s likely to forgive a lot of other things. Which means that it’s easier for political art to get away with things like flat characters, muddled storytelling, and stretches of outright boredom—which are the source of its bad reputation.

This doesn’t mean that artists have to avoid politics, but it does mean that they need to try just as hard to live up to their own standards of good storytelling as they would if they were writing a straight comedy or drama. (Even the most talented writers suffer from a streak of laziness, and political art’s one great liability is that it allows us to indulge in it. Politics is a little like pornography; it can be shoddy on every level but still find an audience.) And I suspect that’s why Kushner was ultimately drawn to Spielberg. He understood the difference between art that we politely applaud and the kind that grabs us and doesn’t let go, and he evidently came to see that Spielberg’s relentless focus on craft, which once struck him as reactionary, was a weapon in its own right. What makes a film like Munich so extraordinary—and I think it’s one of the great movies of the last decade—is that it uses all the conventions of the thriller, and every trick Spielberg has acquired in a lifetime of popular moviemaking, to tell a story that implicates all of us in frightening, complicated ways. And Kushner’s unstated acceptance of this is more revealing than any number of his more explicit pronouncements on the subject. There’s a place for politics in art, just as there’s a place for everything else, but only if it refuses to settle for anything less than a Spielberg.