No, all this is not presented to us “tongue in cheek.” There is an old French theater that specializes in presenting that sort of stuff “tongue-in-cheek.” It is called “Grand Guignol.” But today the spirit of Grand Guignol has been elevated into a metaphysical system and demands to be taken seriously. What, then, is not to be taken seriously? Any representation of human virtue.
One would think that that maudlin preoccupation with chambers of horror, that waxworks-museum view of life, was bad enough. But there is something still worse and, morally, more eviclass="underline" the recent attempts to concoct so-called “tongue-in-cheek” thrillers.
The trouble with the sewer school of art is that fear, guilt and pity are self-defeating dead ends: after the first few “daring revelations of human depravity,” people cease to be shocked by anything; after experiencing pity for a few dozen of the depraved, the deformed, the demented, people cease to feel anything. And just as the “non-commercial” economics of modern “idealists” tells them to take over commercial establishments, so the “non-commercial” esthetics of modern “artists” prompts them to attempt the takeover of commercial (i.e., popular) art forms.
“Thrillers” are detective, spy or adventure stories. Their basic characteristic is conflict, which means: a clash of goals, which means: purposeful action in pursuit of values. Thrillers are the product, the popular offshoot, of the Romantic school of art that sees man, not as a helpless pawn of fate, but as a being who possesses volition, whose life is directed by his own value-choices. Romanticism is a value-oriented, morality-centered movement: its material is not journalistic minutiae, but the abstract, the essential, the universal principles of man’s nature—and its basic literary commandment is to portray man “as he might be and ought to be.”
Thrillers are a simplified, elementary version of Romantic literature. They are not concerned with a delineation of values, but, taking certain fundamental values for granted, they are concerned with only one aspect of a moral being’s existence: the battle of good against evil in terms of purposeful action—a dramatized abstraction of the basic pattern of: choice, goal, conflict, danger, struggle, victory.
Thrillers are the kindergarten arithmetic, of which the higher mathematics is the greatest novels of world literature. Thrillers deal only with the skeleton—the plot structure—to which serious Romantic literature adds the flesh, the blood, the mind. The plots in the novels of Victor Hugo or Dostoevsky are pure thriller-plots, un-equaled and unsurpassed by the writers of thrillers.
In today’s culture, Romantic art is virtually nonexistent (but for some very rare exceptions): it requires a view of man incompatible with modern philosophy. The last remnants of Romanticism are flickering only in the field of popular art, like bright sparks in a stagnant gray fog. Thrillers are the last refuge of the qualities that have vanished from modern literature: life, color, imagination; they are like a mirror still holding a distant reflection of man.
Bear that in mind when you consider the meaning of the attempt to present thrillers “tongue-in-cheek.”
Humor is not an unconditional virtue; its moral character depends on its object. To laugh at the contemptible, is a virtue; to laugh at the good, is a hideous vice. Too often, humor is used as the camouflage of moral cowardice.
There are two types of cowards in this connection. One type is the man who dares not reveal his profound hatred of existence and seeks to undercut all values under cover of a chuckle, who gets away with offensive, malicious utterances and, if caught, runs for cover by declaring: “I was only kidding.”
The other type is the man who dares not reveal or uphold his values and seeks to smuggle them into existence under cover of a chuckle, who tries to get away with some concept of virtue or beauty and, at the first sign of opposition, drops it and runs, declaring: “I was only kidding.”
In the first case, humor serves as an apology for evil; in the second—as an apology for the good. Which, morally, is the more contemptible policy?
The motives of both types can be united and served by a phenomenon such as “tongue-in-cheek” thrillers.
What are such thrillers laughing at? At values, at man’s struggle for values, at man’s capacity to achieve his values, at man; at man the hero.
Regardless of their creators’ conscious or subconscious motives, such thrillers, in fact, carry a message or intention of their own, implicit in their nature: to arouse people’s interest in some daring venture, to hold them in suspense by the intricacy of a battle for great stakes, to inspire them by the spectacle of human efficacy, to evoke their admiration for the hero’s courage, ingenuity, endurance and unswerving integrity of purpose, to make them cheer his triumph—and then to spit in their faces, declaring: “Don’t take me seriously—I was only kidding—who are we, you and I, to aspire to be anything but absurd and swinish?”
To whom are such thrillers apologizing? To the sewer school of art. In today’s culture, the gutter-worshiper needs and makes no apology. But the hero-worshiper chooses to crawl on his belly, crying: “I didn’t mean it, boys! It’s all in fun! I’m not so corrupt as to believe in virtue, I’m not so cowardly as to fight for values, I’m not so evil as to long for an ideal—I’m one of you!”
The social status of thrillers reveals the profound gulf splitting today’s culture—the gulf between the people and its alleged intellectual leaders. The people’s need for a ray of Romanticism’s light is enormous and tragically eager. Observe the extraordinary popularity of Mickey Spillane and Ian Fleming. There are hundreds of thriller writers who, sharing the modern sense of life, write sordid concoctions that amount to a battle of evil against evil or, at best, gray against black. None of them have the ardent, devoted, almost addicted following earned by Spillane and Fleming. This is not to say that the novels of Spillane and Fleming project a faultlessly rational sense of life; both are touched by the cynicism and despair of today’s “malevolent universe”; but, in strikingly different ways, both offer the cardinal element of Romantic fiction: Mike Hammer and James Bond are heroes.
This universal need is precisely what today’s intellectuals cannot grasp or fill. A seedy, emasculated, unventilated “elite”—a basement “elite” transported, by default, into vacant drawing rooms and barricaded behind dusty curtains against light, air, grammar and reality—today’s intellectuals cling to the stagnant illusion of their altruist-collectivist upbringing: the vision of a cloddish, humble, inarticulate people whose “voice” (and masters) they were to be.
Observe their anxious, part-patronizing, part-obsequious pursuit of “folk” art, of the primitive, the anonymous, the undeveloped, the unintellectual—or their “lusty,” “earthy” movies that portray man as an obscene subanimal. Politically, the reality of a non-cloddish people would destroy them: the collectivist jig would be up. Morally, the existence, possibility or image of a hero would be intolerable to their overwhelming sense of guilt; it would wipe out the slogan that permits them to go on wallowing in sewers: “I couldn’t help it!” A heroes-seeking people is what they cannot admit into their view of the universe.
A sample of that cultural gulf—a small sample of a vast modern tragedy—may be seen in an interesting little article in TV Guide (May 9, 1964), under the title “Violence Can Be Fun” and with the eloquent subtitle: “In Britain, everybody laughs at ‘The Avengers’—except the audience.”