Contempt for the Audience
On Balancing Art and Exposition (in Adam McKay Movies and at Election Rallies)
At the end of Adam McKay’s Dick Cheney biopic Vice, there is a mid-credits clip in which a focus group breaks the fourth wall to answer questions about McKay’s movie. A Fox News-coded man in the circle says he felt it had a “liberal bias,” to which a glasses-wearing, NPR-coded man retorts that the film was likely fact-checked by lawyers to avoid a defamation suit, and so, therefore, not really biased. Quickly, the disagreement between them snowballs and explodes into a slapstick brawl.
The exchange is a caricature of polarized political discourse, but it isn’t drawn in a particularly funny or insightful way. It’s more like holding up a mirror to the audience and saying, “This is you! This is what you sound like!” The last line of the clip is the kicker though. As the men tussle on the floor, the camera cuts to a medium shot of one woman in the focus group remarking to another: “I can’t wait to see the new Fast and the Furious movie. That looks lit.” End scene.
What annoys me about this clip is how dismissive it is of its own audience. There is something dishonest about the pose it’s striking relative to the messaging of the movie as a whole. It portrays politically engaged folks as stubborn bores and the politically disengaged as unserious sheeple as it seeks to entertain them with its own obtuse brand of condescension and cynicism.1
Even as I find myself in agreement with McKay’s underlying assessments of the Cheney administration and the tiredness of partisan political discourse, this representation of American politics is hard to stomach. I would levy the same criticism at his more recent movie Don’t Look Up. It isn’t that the politics of either film are eminently disagreeable. (It’s quite sensible to skewer climate deniers and war-mongers, in my book.) More so, it’s that the satire is so didactic and one dimensional that they are hard to endorse as aesthetic objects worthy of one’s attention.2
It’s not unusual that qualities like these show up in cinema that wears its politics on its sleeve. As someone who has written about the absence of politics from a lot of high-profile Hollywood cinema, I am aware of the irony implicit in criticizing films that demonstrably challenge the industry’s preference for uncontroversial universalist dramas, cut off from meaningful sociological context. But I think it’s important to draw distinctions between compelling political representations and exercises in pandering or proselytizing from the soap box at the front of the theater.
Artistic merit has less to do with having the right political views than it does with placing the viewer in a state of abstract reflection – an experience that is distinct from ordinary life. This can be achieved with or without the expressed political views of the filmmaker making their way on screen, but it cannot be achieved with the expression of the views alone. That’s more like propaganda.
I am reminded of the famous Oscar Wilde quote, “All art is quite useless.” That is, art is not a tool to be employed for the completion of a specific task. Its value is not instrumental; it’s more abstract than that. Personally, the works of art that have had the greatest impact on me have not resembled the intellectual satisfaction of a well-argued essay so much as the experience of hiking through the Grand Canyon, coming around a bend and halting one’s steps to look with awe upon the the epochs of time cast in shadows and sunlight across the variegated canyon walls.
While it’s satisfying to try articulating that experience after the fact, words are ultimately incapable of capturing the sublime. You cannot assert its beauty if it is lost on your hiking companion. At best you might help them appreciate it by describing your own appreciation for it. But the richness of the experience does not exist in language. It transcends it by reaching into the deep recesses of the spectator’s mind, the perceptual nodes that look at something of great scale and beauty then translate it into a dopamine rush for reasons unknown.
I think one requirement of great art is that it has to transcend ordinary experience on some scale, no matter how small relative to the sublime. At the very least this is a requirement I hold of the visual arts and music.
The less an art form deploys exposition, the more it retains the potential to activate that power of abstract natural beauty. Likewise, the more an art form enters the realm of exposition, the more it activates one’s verbal intellect and the more its pleasure gets coded with the interaction between abstract beauty and one’s explicit interpretation of it. Its pleasures become a mix of the contemplative and the aesthetic.
Thus, in deploying language, many art forms – poetry, fiction, song lyrics, plays, narrative film, and prestige TV – make themselves vulnerable to the world of discourse by making assertions (wittingly or not) that have political and social ramifications others might find disagreeable. These sorts of assertions are usually checked by the formal aspects of the medium: the way the language is contextualized through character, verse, plot, metaphor, metonymy, camera angle, performance, and so on. These formal aspects layer in the open-ended abstractions that leave the viewer with a task of interpretation similar to, though characteristically different from, analyzing a painting, sculpture, or symphony.
We trek further into the realm of discourse with documentaries, non-fiction, podcasts, and so on, to the point that our expectations as audience members begin to shift and become more susceptible to direct language, argument, didacticism, and so on. That is because the rules of exposition are different from the rules of art. An openness to exposition, to being told exactly what a filmmaker thinks about a political subject, does not fit as nicely into the realm of art as it does the realm of journalism and opinion. This is where I’d locate my dissatisfaction with Adam McKay’s recent movies: they favor exposition at the expense of both cinematic pleasure and persuasive political messaging.
In the case of Don’t Look Up, all the overt institutional critiques of Washington and the media industrial complex are coded in the form Adam McKay is most practiced in: improv comedy. The extent to which you enjoyed the film likely had something to do with the extent to which you found this melding of McKay’s comedic talents with his overt political messaging to be successful. As someone who shares McKay’s outrage over the political gamesmanship that has hindered international cooperation on reducing carbon emissions and transitioning to a green economy,3 I felt the film offered little insight into its subject matter and fewer laughs than I’d come to expect of the famed comedy director. Per the review aggregation sites (a 55% on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 49 on Metacritic), it seems many critics felt similarly. I think that’s because the movie’s narrative and comedic elements are just set dressing for an exposé we’ve been hit over the head with many times in the world of exposition.
Alice Gribbin articulates this problem well in her essay “Why Good Politics Makes for Bad Art”:
“Rarely are the politics of an artwork, even when it addresses political matters directly, any more penetrating than the statement of a problem. Rarely does art treat political subjects with the complexity found even in quality journalism. Expecting artists to contend with social scientific data, to carry out the work of think tanks or propose legislation, would be silly.”
The best challenge McKay poses to this assertion is in The Big Short (2016), which, while not being as articulate as quality journalism or social scientific data, does do some work in the direction of educating the masses about the financial overclass that disproportionately controls its material reality. Like the Michael Lewis book it’s based on, the adaptation teeters on the edge of narrative and instruction. It exists mostly as a comedy but occasionally spills over into the register of a Vox explainer video, keeping one foot in the realm of art and one foot in the realm of discourse, as it works to inform the viewer about the systemic factors that caused the financial crisis in 2008.
Several scenes in the movie completely drop their narrative pretense and break the fourth wall to explain specific financial mechanisms. Margot Robbie explains subprime mortgages in a bathtub, Anthony Bourdain explains collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) with three-day old halibut, and Selena Gomez and Richard Thaler explain synthetic CDOs at a Vegas blackjack table.
These explanations work because the tone is calibrated to respect both the audience’s tolerance for learning new financial terminology and its desire to be entertained. Not to mention, the pop culture icons reciting droll Investopedia information are themselves a jest at the valence of boredom Wall Street firms rely on to hide efforts to redistribute wealth from regular folks back up to themselves (via sketchy management fees, tax breaks, government bailouts, playing with public pensions, and so on). In other words, the entertainment value here is subversive.4
The symbiosis of these expository and narrative elements produces a movie that is successful at drawing attention to the mechanisms underlying the financial crisis and the social disparities those mechanisms created before it all blew up at the expense of the American taxpayer. And, unlike Vice and Don’t Look Up, it’s much clearer that the movie is on the side of ordinary people. It does not portray them as irrational mobs or philistines or uneducated voters. More so, it aligns them with its outraged protagonists and the people Baum and his team meet in Florida when they see the markers of the CDO bubble in the real world.5
How The Big Short balances itself on the edge of explaining the financial crisis whilst appealing to an Anchorman movie audience is admirable. But it is a tough balance to strike. The more one leans on exposition in the form of mass entertainment, the more one risks alienating the audience by outright insulting its intelligence with the “statement of a problem” they’re likely already well acquainted with.
To bring the logic full circle, I think the exact opposite rule holds true for politicians. In this realm, entertainment is not an adequate substitute for exposition. From politicians, we expect clear answers to hard questions and detailed explanations of their plans – not just the hollow “vibes” that launched the Harris-Walz ticket, for example. That is to say, politics is the realm of exposition, not abstraction.
We saw the significance of exposition in politics when the “Project 2025” agenda was published earlier this year: once the architects of the Trump administration wrote down its policy plans, there was suddenly a concrete account to reference. For many, it clarified what they suspected of the administration already, but for others (those lost in the “vibes” of the election year) it was alarming: evidence of the authoritarian aims of the Trump-Vance ticket.
When the document entered the mainstream, Trump quickly sought to distance itself from it (even though his VP candidate wrote the foreword to it) using his trademark abstract language, “This was a group of people that got together, they came up with some ideas, I guess some good, some bad, but it makes no difference.” This makes sense because the Trump campaign’s populism, far more so than the Harris-Walz campaign, has always been more about “vibes” than policy. It’s one reason why so many Americans were immediately repulsed by it, and another reason why so many have been energized by it despite not really understanding what it is beyond the vague “Make America Great Again” premise. It sounds kind of good if you leave it at that. Maybe “again” refers to that time when the Clinton administration ran a budget surplus! Or when Tina Fey played Sarah Palin on SNL! Or when you felt better saying “Merry Christmas” without considering whether the recipient of your holiday greeting was a Christian or not! Like most banal platitudes, it means whatever you want it to mean (and possibly all the bad stuff too).
This is why a politician’s words matter. By detailing policy agendas they keep the conversation specific and elevated relative to the PR battles that surround it. You might say it is a way of enacting a different kind of respect for the audience than the kind we expect of artists. In the realm of art, a lack of exposition respects the audience’s skills of interpretation. It makes the act of reception its own autonomous sphere, a space to be in conversation with art even when the artist is not present. In the realm of politics, however, a lack of exposition disrespects the audience by not offering a sufficient explanation for what an administration plans to do with the power the people grant it. Politicians owe their supporters more than pleasantries and banal campaign slogans. Not only do these – in their appeals to abstraction – not make for good art, they make for incomprehensible politics and further undermine trust in the democratic system.
To its credit, after its initial good “vibes” roll out, the Harris-Walz campaign began posting policy details online, but what remained frustrating about Harris’s messaging in public appearances was her refusal to explain her position on issues she believed would lose her voters. Essentially the strategy the campaign settled on amounted to an insincere and radical centrism: pro-fracking yet pro-green energy investment, union pandering whilst flaunting the support of billionaires and cultural elites, defensive of Israel yet horrified by its actions in Gaza. In the process, the campaign managed to alienate all the voters that cared to know what Harris actually stood for beyond, “Not going back.”
In the meantime, they bet on the power of endorsements from massive pop stars, the commodification of Tim Walz’s Midwestern kindness, and frequent reminders of her opponent’s shortcomings, which eventually culminated in calling him a fascist once again. As a cultural force, it certainly felt undeniable. As Christian Lorentzen said in his coverage of the DNC for the London Review of Books:
“I will be surprised if Trump and Vance defeat Harris and Walz in November. The Democratic Party is the most powerful force in American society. It has won the popular vote in seven out of the last eight presidential elections, and the nation’s organised money and institutions are behind it.”
Unfortunately it was not powerful enough to beat the party of Kid Rock, Hulk Hogan, and the January 6th insurrection. Hard to imagine a more unappealing aesthetic argument than that. And yet, here we are.
Art ought to represent politics in all its strangeness and complexity, just as it is wont to do with every other subject. The boring account of this election cycle is one that reduces everything back into the binaries that came before it. The reality is much more interesting than that and the people who manage to create art out of this moment in history will do so by penetrating through these narratives in ways that don’t fit into the familiar matrix of our political discourse. But in order to get to that point, one needs to start with a little less contempt and a little more respect for the audience one creates art for. After all, people go to the theater to watch a movie, not a message disguised as one. For those who prefer spectacles disguised as political messaging on the other hand, there will always be campaign rallies.
Keep-in-mind, this latter dismissal of the Fast and the Furious audience is coming from the guy who previously directed such films as Anchorman, Step Brothers, and Talladega Nights. Are the irreverent one-liners of a Will Ferrell comedy not analogous to the car explosions of a Fast and Furious movie, as far as frivolous mass audiences are concerned?
In fact, I’d argue that its central metaphor of a comet headed for Earth misses a couple fundamental aspects of climate catastrophe: the delay between fossil fuel emitting actions and their consequences, the disproportionate distribution of said consequences across the globe, and the decentralized nature of orchestrating a response to curbing emissions.
And as someone who can quote Anchorman ad nauseum.
Additionally, the movie is structured around characters far more defined than the outright villains and dopes of the Bush administration, or the sweaty, panicked scientists of Don’t Look Up. Michael Burry, Ben Rickert, and Mark Baum are rendered with distinct personality traits that account for the brazen, anti-establishment dispositions that led them to bet against the CDO market in the first place.
I’d still hesitate to praise The Big Short versus, say, a documentary on the subject (see: Inside Job (2010)) but it is clearer to me that Adam McKay’s aims were more fully realized here than in the movies that followed it.