Fiction Is Always About Us

Aristotle claimed art had two sources: Our instinct to imitate and our instinct for rhythm and harmony. The aesthetic rendering of reality enables fiction to provide us with emotionally satisfying insights. Greek tragedy originated a tradition wherein fiction conjured catharsis to enable understanding.

For Aristotle, tragedy achieved this end by representing the action of a superior kind, evading pity and fear in the audience. These emotions then affect a kind of purification; for example, Charles Dickens deliberately wrote melodramatic stories to convince his readers to consider social inequality, not just intellectually but through visceral emotion.

I'll consider how a particular genre of films, films about the making of films, enable insight into the function of fiction. These films raise these questions by exploring the distance between the artist and the work of fiction. If fiction is indeed a kind of imitation of life, that is to say, if fiction is about us, then if Aristotle is right, it can tell us something about the human condition.

Source: Courtesy of Rami Gabriel

Films about films, let's call them auto-fictions, can be traced from Soviet director Dziga Vertov (1896-1954), George Méliès (1861-1938), and Buster Keaton (1895-1966) to Jean-Luc Godard (1930-2022), John Cassavetes (1929-1989), Bernardo Bertolucci (1941-2018), Vincente Minelli (1903-1986), François Truffaut (1932-1984), Jonas Mekas (1922-2019), Bob Fosse (1927-1987), Ross McElwee (b. 1947), and Olivier Assayas (b. 1955). These auteurs have each, in their idiosyncratic manner, demonstrated how the form, as well as the process of fiction, exposes the fragility of control.

In these films, the director is constantly fighting to achieve a vision and create harmonic fiction under a hail of resistance from the crew, the talent, and the producers—not to mention their wives and lovers. The scenario of the artist as Sisyphus grinding through the stressful work tells us something about the extent to which any of us can exert control of the dynamic world we live in.

For the director, paranoia and curiosity about the fate of the film mirror the loss of control over their narrative that they experience by presenting a work to the public. Modern art often explores the juxtaposition of the construction and the reception of work as a space to consider ambiguity and expectation. As Richard Wagner knew, if one enlarges the canvas of the artwork to include everything around the celluloid, one is creating a total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk) in which fiction becomes more like life than life itself. From the movie set to the relationships between the actors to the drama of financing, the tedium of editing, and the pain of critical reception, the sensory experience of auto-fiction in moving pictures can relay life itself. Like the naturalist tradition of self-portraiture in painting, this genre is somehow about all of us in our efforts to live coherent lives.

The strategy of allowing the audience to view the totality of the artwork amid its very production was used by French painter Gustave Courbet in The Painter's Studio of 1855. In this work, the studio was treated like a theatrical stage, with every character playing a role that transcended the painting itself to point to the greater world within which the painter's studio existed. Painters like Courbet, Edgar Degas, and Edouard Manet often treated the subjects of their paintings from a studied distance.

Philosophers of art Michael Fried and Robert Pippin use the label theatricality to describe this characteristic of 19th-century French painting. Specifically, it is the dramatic portrayal of the distance between the artist and the work. In painting, theatricality is explored through perspective, treatment, and subject matter. In cinema (and especially in auto-fiction), theatricality is accomplished through methods that put the process and the medium of the creation of fiction itself on stage.

For example, shooting what is happening behind the scenes or breaking the fourth wall, as in Godard's Le Mépris (1964) or Cassavetes' Opening Night (1977). Such gestures enable the director to employ shades of knowingness like veils that cover and uncover the narrative. This method allows the viewer to be seduced by subtle evocations of ideas and images. The use of theatricality can make fiction a form of non-fiction. For example, The Larry Sanders Show (1992-1998) used theatricality as an auto-fiction that revealed more about the late-night industry than late-night talk shows themselves.

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This show and autofiction, in general, work so well because the impossible organization of chaos and depravity that makes possible the innocent, crass, and sometimes sublime pleasures of cinema are the machinations of show business. The business of showing us our dreams is a play of imitation (mimesis) between viewers and filmmakers. This confluence of factors that go into the making of cinema is revealed as a crooked conspiracy in Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974), a big mess in François Truffaut's Day for Night (1979), and a tragic confluence of narcissists in Vincente Minelli's The Bad and the Beautiful (1953). By using Hollywood as a background, we appreciate more layers of context and, therefore, more possibilities for insight into the nature of control and creation.

The ticking bomb in the opening shot of Touch of Evil (1958) is an apt symbol for the moral ambiguity that makes the whole project of poetry and cinema intelligible. A bomb is placed in a car driving out of a shady border town of vice and corruption across the border to the land of the free. Art is like this: The explosive is the sheer magnitude of the immersive experience of the ritual of art, and it is in the trunk of a car traveling across the border between fact and fiction. If the artist is on one side of the border, the other side is surely the attention of the audience.

In the middle, our dreams and subtle thoughts are woven with the intricate fabric of fantasy. At its best, fiction mimics life with a sense of rhythm and harmony to offer us wisdom about ourselves. While fiction is always somehow about us, it is often us who are often about something else.