Realism is not an objective good

I've been thinking about realism and naturalism and verisimilitude, and the anglophone assumption that all artists strive for same.

Hi,

It seems I’m falling into a pattern of doing these newsletters each Wednesday. It’s not by design. I just tend to be less sociable in the middle of the week, so Wednesday-ish is generally when I have excess thoughts that I can’t offload on my in-person brain trust.

I also have a horrible cold, by which I mean a cold; I cannot imagine a cold that isn't horrible. The whole debacle is non-stop sensory overwhelm for me. I can't breathe; splitting headache; all I can think about is my nose and my cough and how unfair it is that such a punishment would be levied at me, an innocent person who never hurt anyone and always separates their waste.

Only with this latest cold, however, have I joined an important set of dots. First dot: my being autistic means my tolerance for sensory change can be fairly out of whack with the general population's. Second dot: illness consists of precisely that, sensory change. This also tracks with my outlandish hatred of weather fluctuations and why it takes me so long to finish an ice cream. Everything is either too hot or too cold for me. Hell on earth!

Third dot: as human beings, we reflexively assume that others' internal experience is the same as ours. This means that I find it baffling, even infuriating that anyone can simply carry on with their life when they have a cold, and I'm sure many would be equally perplexed that I find this ailment so debilitating. But, yeah, it is what it is. A cold makes me useless to anyone for several days, and there's not much I can do about it; I can't will myself into having a different brain. Besides, the binary nature of my attention — either I'm unbearably conscious of something or it simply does not exist to me — is also what lets me summon the forms of focus that people appreciate. I could not be such an extreme individual in all the good, celebrated, rewarded-for-it ways if I were not also an extreme sufferer of colds.

I still hate them, though.

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I've been thinking about realism and naturalism and verisimilitude, and the anglophone assumption that all artists strive for same. You encounter this attitude frequently regarding musicals. 'It's unrealistic that they would all just start singing', say people who have never heard of figurative art. Or on epistolary moments in contemporary novels: 'Would people really write all those paragraphs to each other?' No, probably not, and what of it? Have you ever considered that maybe the author didn't care about realism in the first place?

There's nuance to this, of course. (Not to be a nuance guy — but there is.) What I find jarring is when there's a general level of realism maintained in a work, and then certain details bely it. If I am being asked, for 80% of a novel, to believe that the protagonist's money woes are real and binding, then I will be irked if they magically inherit a small fortune at just the right moment. But even then, it's not the statistical improbability of the event that would irritate me; it's that a source of narrative conflict was conveniently whisked away to falsely engineer a happy ending. I don't rely on novels to understand the practical workings of the world. I come to them for narrative, for language. If something doesn't make sense within the world of the novel, then it disrupts the actual storytelling. And the more closely the world of that novel generally resembles our own, the likelier it is that some lapse in realism will undermine the world-building. But the importance of realism is not inherent. It's just situationally important for some forms of storytelling.

I recently saw The Substance, a great film to illustrate this point. Within the world of this film, the hosts of daytime aerobics shows are unbelievably famous. A newly birthed adult clone, without any documentation verifying her identity, can smoothly navigate the immigration-obsessed USA and become the new host of the show. She can extensively renovate her own apartment in half a second and go missing for a week at a time without repercussions.

People love picking away at such nits, as if they were proving to their media studies teacher that they'd actually seen the film. But none of this matters within the world of the story. The Substance is internally consistent and believable on its own terms. Everyone plays along with the supposed fame of aerobics instructors, the seamless social rise of the Sue clone and all the rest of it. Body horror films are supposed to be figurative; the clue is in the word 'horror'.

Nabokov's Lectures on Literature brilliantly describe how middle-class 19th-century English novelists rarely had much direct knowledge of the aristocratic circles they wrote about. Dickens, for one, frequently bungles the Gordianly complicated titles. But these writers created worlds that checked out internally, and that's all that matters for telling a story. A novel's job is to be a novel, not a sociological treatise. And body horror's job is to be body horror. If the world of The Substance had otherwise been granularly realistic, this would have been out of sync with the corporal madness we are asked to accept. A movie ending with a two-faced monster works better if all preceding elements are stylised.

Thematically, I didn't love The Substance. 'Beauty standards' as an object of critique feels quite vague, quite liberal. Besides the odd jab at one cartoonish male exec (named, of course, Harvey), the film's main satirical achievement is to punish a woman's fear of growing old by – get this – ageing her. So I have some sympathy with those who found the movie's feminism superficial. But I don't think the problem is that it was simplistic. Adding layers of meaning wouldn't have made the 'critique' any sharper; it still would have lacked a clear direction.

Since the director Coralie Fargeat is French, I thought I'd look up some French opinions. The podcast Débande Annonce has a great episode where broadly the same point is made: The Substance isn't subtle, and it's good.

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The stray cat on my road, Bulette, does surprisingly well in these frigid climes. This is the third Berlin winter I've known him, and by now I'm convinced he's immortal. The first two winters, I heavily considered taking him inside my apartment, but he never chose to follow me over the threshold and you've got to let these things be. He is fundamentally a street cat. I am not, but that's another matter.

Till next time,

N