A few months back, in May to be precise, I wrote a review of Green Porno, an "instructive" video about insect procreation from Isabella Rossellini (I did not like it). I had nothing to say about the "provocative" title — that is, if "porno" is actually provocative; in its context it is meant to be alluring and ironic. True irony is either unavailable to us these days — what could possibly be ironic in a country, forget the larger world, where a vacant but testy and truly untested Alaskan would be the latter half of a Presidential ticket whose former half is not exactly in his prime, to be gentle to the nearly prehistoric Senator from Arizona? But I digress.
Ms. Rossellini obviously meant the title to be ironic in the supposedly light and silly way she meant her work to be: gently amusing and educational.
I received an unusual number of responses to my review on Blogcritics; all of them were critical of me for disdaining the work, and the criticism lay in the noble intentions of Ms. Rossellini in creating Green Porno. I actually did not express disdain for the work; I simply dismissed it as trivial, loony, and pointless.
Regrettably, I did conclude the review with this sentence, for which I've punished myself on more than one occasion: "Great credit to her for her intentions and her effort, but really?" Even though earlier in the piece I had "hoped" to avoid condescension, I didn't succeed. It's the but really that did me in. I did not want to dismiss the motivation for the piece even though the result was painful and pitiful. Many of us require, so it seems, only one ingredient for artistic merit, for a pleasing or laudatory outcome: that it be well meaning. How do you link the two — decent, well-conceived motivations for something (work, act, creative act, etc.) with the outcome — if the outcome is disastrous or if it is not? This is not a weighty philosophical question. Most of the "stuff" we produce is well-intentioned, and only a fraction of it is any good. Elitist? Probably. True? Definitely. Some of it is propagandistic and mean-spirited, and as hard as it is to admit, the result of that might have artistic merit and be worthy of praise. We can kill the messenger without disregarding — even if we ultimately renounce — the message. Misanthropic and poisonous intentions do not automatically eliminate artistry or aesthetic value from the result [N.B. Leni Riefenstahl: Triumph of the Will, 1934].
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Article comments
1 - Marcia Neil
Well-intentioned representations seldom deviate from altruistic motivation -- but if audiences don't like what they see or hear, happy-hassler attitudes will have their say and maybe their own way, too.