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There is a functionality to some level of cultural conformity. It is difficult, if not downright depressing, to endure the cognitive dissonance that comes from a continuous rejection of the values of one's cultural context. And we need not. For example, those sensations of patriotism we felt after September 11 were legitimate—provided we did not cultivate them to the point of an idolatrous Manifest Destiny, or accept the media's rightly inspiring tales of altruism at Ground Zero as grounds for a belief in inherent human goodness and a denial of our depravity. We are called to be both prophets and priests—lone voices of an alternative consciousness and leaders who confirm the ideals of a community. When Dark, paraphrasing Kafka, suggests that "if reading a literary text doesn't facilitate a skull-hammering awakening, we're wasting our time," I wonder: who can endure such a steady delivery of blows to the head?
While Dark's passionate prose inspires us to find a new framework for daily living, he offers little in the way of what such a framework might be. He praises apocalyptic's function of "unmasking the fictions we inhabit," but says little about apocalyptic's ability to enlighten us as to what is not fictitious, or how to tell the difference. He especially praises O'Connor and The Simpsons for satirizing our ideals, revealing our absurdities, and questioning our assumptions. But after such a demolition, what do we have left? To counter the dangers of my fondness for the stuffy New York Times, for example, I read that bastion of irony, The Onion, which masterfully deconstructs the mythology of the establishment media. But The Onion is decidedly incapable of helping me form a coherent worldview. "Everybody's lookin' for answers," Dark quotes George Clooney in O Brother, Where Art Thou? Can the enlightened soul, awakened by apocalyptic, offer any? "As a Coen film ends," writes Dark, "I have the distinct pleasure of knowing I've seen something good without knowing exactly why." Can we hope to do no better?
Dark cautions against invoking words like "God, truth, glory, good, life, humanity" with much certainty, at the risk of believing we've "gotten to the bottom of what we're talking about." But this admonition may lead us to abandon many useful questions: What is good? What is quality? Why are joy and suffering worth knowing? Where are we going? The beauty of art is its ability to edify as well as erode, to aggressively articulate what is real as well as what is a lie.
Take two examples which Dark applauds in passing but which warrant more treatment in his book. Baz Luhrmann's film musical, Moulin Rouge, is a vivid spectacle that enriches our appreciation of the four virtues its Bohemians repeatedly profess: "truth, beauty, freedom, and love." These potential religious buzzwords are given inventive flair in the captivating love story of Christian and Satine, which pivots on the question of what is true and beautiful behind the glamorous façade, and contrasts freedom and love with the cruel bondage of the Duke. Likewise, while Shrek is deconstructive—its primary inspiration seems to be the chance to thumb its nose at Disney—it also reconstructs, twisting the standard Cinderella narrative and bending it into a more authentic tale of soul-deep beauty and unglamorous love. The real power of art, of which these movies suggest popular culture is capable, is not only to awaken us to an alternative consciousness, but to help us define what our alternative reality is.
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