I Hate Art
After encountering aseop_'s post last week, I decided on a whim to glance through the Wikipedia article on "space opera," or, more importantly, the discussion page for it. For those of you who don't want to read all that, the part relevant to this post is the comments people made about how space opera glosses over actual science and full characterization, thus creating a shallow, light story. I don't remember how directly it was stated by the writers, but I got the sense that they looked down on these stories with such low aspirations, that try to just be cheap entertainment rather than having real significance and accuracy.
This is similar to some of the problems I had with PAC back when I tried to put up with it. It wasn't until I started attending their showings that I realized that for all my life I've been able to put up with really awful shows without even knowing there was anything "wrong" with them. And the fact is I don't see anything wrong with that. There were a few to which I have found moral objections, but for the most part it was just entertainment. That all changed when I went to PAC and was unable to enjoy them because of those viewers who found it necessary to share all of their hatred. I am actually quite fond of hatred in general, but I don't like it coming in the way of my entertainment, particularly if there is no moral basis for it. Is the rationale that the creators of the show made it substandard with the express intent of causing viewers to suffer?
As readers of this journal should be aware, one of the greatest dreams of my life is to become a hack writer. You can see from my previous works ( 1 2) that the only purposes to which I even attempt to apply the writing are ridiculous action sequences, large amounts of gore, and those particular themes that interest me. I don't have the smarts or the patience to want to even try to make these things meaningful to any human being; that would only mean I'd have to work many times as hard and still have a good chance of merely being labeled as "pretentious." Why does entertainment have to have meaning? Why can't one just enjoy it for what it is?
The other day, it was suggested to me that I should try to avoid the problems I have with getting Project Homuncupunk drawn by just writing it as prose. This is all very well as an exercise, but the idea that such a thing should ever be published simply fills me with dread. Other than the reasons I have already put forth, a significant motivation to want to work in comics is the fact that I have a sense that comics are still not seen as "literature" or "art" by mainstream society. As long as I remain in a fringe (?) medium, I should have to put up with only a minimum of normals giving me bad reviews because my work is ultimately pointless. The shadows forbid that any of my ideas should ever become a film with a full theatrical release-then I'd have to suffer the humiliation of being degraded in every newspaper in the nation.
Incidentally, I was somewhat heartened by some reviews in Leonard Maltin's guide, where some movies have good reviews just because they're entertaining. Nonetheless, the better half of the blurbs are complaints about the projects that don't meet human standards and thus are to be reviled. It feels like even if I were able to please some niche audience, I would still have to put up with the rest of the world hating me for creating something that it doesn't enjoy.