In the back of cab, Cornel West talks to Astra Taylor about philosophy and art. At a certain point, his attention turns to pleasure. He talks about bodily pleasure, intellectual pleasure, then aesthetic pleasure. He cites a couple artists - Beethoven, Mayfield, The Beatles - then he stops at Melville, oh my god, Melville. “You almost have to throw the book against the wall because you’re almost so intensely alive that you need a break! It’s time to take a break, get a little dullness in your life, take Moby-Dick and throw it against the wall…” There are some aesthetic experiences, he says, that are “just too much.”
“There are certain things that make us almost too alive: it’s almost like being too intensely in love – you can’t do anything. It’s hard to get back to chronos, it’s hard to get back to everyday life, you know what I mean? The kairotic dimension of being in love with another person – everything is so meaningful you want to sustain it. You just can’t do it, you know? You’ve got to go to the bathroom, get a drink of water!”
[You can skip to 6:38 if you just want to watch the part that we quote above.]
West’s description gives voice to a feeling we’ve had more than a few times of being overwhelmed, overpowered, and nearly overtaken by art. He gets at the ambivalence at the heart of the experience and speaks about it in bodily, material terms. The reaction or response to this feeling of “too much” isn’t exactly positive or abstract. Throwing a book against the wall isn’t an act of pure joy and it isn’t purely cognitive or emotional. It’s the bodily expression of a kind of discomfort, frustration. This frustration, moreover, isn’t offered up as a universal or general outcome of reading Melville or whomever. Not all people will be compelled to read Moby-Dick and, of those that do, not all will be moved to huck it wallward. The analogy to lovers is, in that sense, perfect. Your relationship to that person, to that experience, is yours alone and it involves all of you for better and worse.
Being intensely in love and encountering art that’s “too much” are upsetting, awesome, and deeply singular experiences. They are pleasurable and punishing at once. They’re both consoling and devastating. They are entirely about you and also entirely about the other person or work of art. They are also totally and entirely contingent. They happen as the result of a decision (to meet someone, to experience something), but by no means is their happening guaranteed.
Neither intense love nor great art - thankfully? unfortunately? - happen often. Meeting someone or experiencing something that is “just too much,” that “make[s] us almost too alive” is rare. More often than not, we encounter things that range between “way too little” and “pretty OK.” The experiences don’t inspire ambivalent or fraught responses. The painting is nice enough or pretty bad, the movie interesting enough or kinda dull, the person pleasing enough or not for us, and so on. We remain intact and unbothered as things transpire.
Despite the fact that most of our experiences of people and art make us feel just a regular amount of alive, we often find ourselves hesitant to engage with certain works of art because it means taking the risk of being made to feel too alive, of encountering something that’s “just too much.” The analogy to being intensely in love is, maybe, helpful here too.
If you knew, say, that later today you would go somewhere and encounter someone and experience intense, indecipherable love - would you go? To be clear, this isn’t the nice, sustained love you feel for partners, friends, family, etc. - but the kind of shocking, disorienting love. As much as love is nice and all, it’s a scary proposition. It might be exciting, but it’s also daunting. The same - for us and maybe you too - obtains with art.
If we were promised that tonight we’d hear a devastating, beautiful, etc. song - would we listen? As with the promise of love, the promise of art sometimes feels like a threat. It’s something like “would you care to get avalanched by an avalanche?” On some days, definitely. On others, no we’ll not do an avalanche thank you. We might often want better than our regular, everyday mood of “pretty OK” - but faced with the promise of “just too much” we might just as often opt out.
We are never, though, in the position of being promised these outcomes. There are no guarantees that that person or that work of art will destroy us in the best possible way. There’s no telling whether the tangled good and bad of “too much” is going to happen. This is true even with art that has already had that effect. You might be bored or frustrated by an album one day and unravelled by it another. You might be annoyed by someone some afternoon and undone by them later that evening. There’s no predicting if or when such experiences might occur.
Given that these outcomes are never guaranteed and always only possible, we find ourselves sometimes worrying about them in advance. We don’t know if this is a common experience, but it is common to us. It’s like a pleasing form of dread or an exciting kind of anxiety. It’s hard to describe. It doesn’t - to be clear - happen all the time. Usually it crops up when we’re going to watch or listen to or read something that other people have hyped up in a certain sort of way. Or when we plan to engage with work by an artist we really like, admire, etc.
We contended with this feeling all day yesterday prior to seeing Beau is Afraid which has both been hyped up in a certain sort of way and is a film by a filmmaker we really like, admire, etc. So, yeah, we were a little spun.
Ari Aster’s movies - since The Strange Thing About the Johnsons - have messed us up. They’ve delivered a version of the too-muchness that West talks about. This means that whenever a new one comes out we’re faced with troubling excitement and/or eager dread. We want to see what he’s done, but worry about what it might do to us. And - every time - we’re freshly fucked up by what we see.
This isn’t - to be clear - exactly a form of praise. His films often inspire as much frustration, annoyance, and disgust as they do awe, admiration, and delight. Just like wanting to throw Moby-Dick against the wall, we often want to turn his movies off as we’re watching, go get a drink of water, bring some dullness into our lives, etc. We have mixed feelings, in other words, about Ari Aster’s movies.
So, yesterday, we spent a good amount of time going back and forth between wanting and not wanting to see this movie. When we eventually purchased tickets, we were lowkey hoping that we’d accidentally bought tickets to the dubbed French version which would give us a plausible enough reason to leave the cinema with the film unwatched. (Oh, sorry, we hate dubs! Oh well, guess we’ll have to wait!)
No such luck, though.
We sat, then, and watched this story of a man named Beau overwhelmed by the world and everything in it. He is, from the first scene, on his back foot and always caught off-guard. He is prompted to make decisions, but cannot. His every waking moment (and also his every dreaming moment) is fraught with discomfiting possibilities. There are seemingly right answers and proper behaviors, but they’re impossible or unknown to him. Nothing makes any sense and he is thrust from event to event to event forced to deal (or not really deal at all) with whatever assaultive or incomprehensible thing confronts him. For Beau, the entire world seems to threaten (or promise) to be “too much” and, as a result, he continually refuses or is rendered unable to act.
Beau is Afraid is a film about anxiety (obviously). It also works to trigger a certain anxiety in the viewer, namely, the anxiety of never quite knowing what to expect or how to process it. The sets, sound design, performances, script, and everything else teeter between the extremes of too little and too much. Certain plot points proceed too slowly and others too quickly, certain characters get too little or too much time on screen. The camera is alternately unobtrusive (e.g. incredibly slow, almost imperceptible zooms) and obtrusive (e.g. sweeping, acrobatic pans). All of these contrary impulses and designs means that the world that Beau occupies and our experience of that world is uneven, unhinged, and altogether unpredictable. Just as Beau is thrown in and by the world, so too are we. We can’t, though, just shrug and stay confused.
Just as we’re being aesthetically fucked with, so too are we being affectively fucked with. We are forced to constantly decide how we understand and feel about what’s happening on screen. Trivial moments (smoking a joint) are filled with foreboding while horrifying moments (facing a naked maniac) are presented ridiculously. At every turn, we have to make a decision. Is this moment lamentable or laughable? Is this scary or fun? Is this a parable or a shaggy dog story? Is this whole film a tragedy or a farce? It is a film that constantly asks us to decide what kind of film we’re watching.
This isn’t subtle. Aster continually underlines the fact that we’re watching a film (or dealing with artifice more broadly). Beau, for example, fast-forwards through security camera footage to reveal future events in the film. Beau’s mother’s company logo appears sporadically throughout the film in key moments. The film plays deliberately with myth, archetype, contrivance, and cliche. Nods to cinema history reoccur sometimes subtly and sometimes overtly. Aster visually cites his earlier films quite clearly. Many parts of the film are call attention to themselves as fake (e.g. the dummy cadavres, the woman seemingly paused, the enormous penis monster, the very CGI-looking CGI). There’s also, most tellingly, a play within the film which is populated with people in un-lifelike masks, partly animated, and telling a slightly revised version of the Book of Job. Over the course of three hours, we’re constantly reminded that we are viewing an intensely artificial story filled with implausible and impossible people, places, and things.
The film is essentially goading you into treating it as “just a movie” only to, ultimately, force you to tarry with the ethical consequences of that aesthetic judgement. If it’s all just a movie, then who cares what happens to Beau? He’s just a character. If all this is just and merely a bit of entertainment, then what possible moral stakes can there be? These are just pretend people and all this is just a distraction. If this is more then just a movie, well, what then? You can’t help Beau. There’s no way to transgress the boundary of the screen. Should you leave the theatre? Refuse to observe at all? Would that make any difference? Neither treating the film as just a film nor treating it as something more than just a film seem like good or practically meaningful options.
The film positions the viewer as not only a passive observer of Beau and his world, but forces us to act as an active judge of it and to sit with the consequences of that judgment. Just as we are forced to decide whether any moment is funny or sad, full of pathos or bathos, so too are we ultimately forced to judge Beau along moral or ethical lines. Is he culpable for the state of his life? Is he responsible for his fate? If he is responsible, how ought he be held to account? If he isn’t, then what does he deserve? What - if anything - can we do with or as a result of these judgments?
The ways that aesthetic judgment and ethical judgment are interwoven seems (to us) to be at the very center of what Aster is up to. To our eye, Beau is Afraid is a version of 8 ½ that instead of interrogating what it means to make art interrogates what it means to observe and judge it. Art is powerful and powerless, artists are prophets and jesters, depending on who is doing the looking and judging.
Is art a consolation? Is it a distraction? Is it all just pretty paint to decorate the walls? Is it poisonous? Can it help us? Or only ever hinder? Does it matter at all? Or does it matter too much? It depends. And what follows from these acts of judgment? What does it mean to make certain aesthetic and ethical judgments? It’s unclear. The film has no seeming answers for these questions or, rather, it didn’t have these answers when we watched it last night. We were forced - after the credits rolled - to leave the theatre. There was no more movie to watch or judge. We then had to decide what (if anything) to do with what we’d seen and felt and thought.
At various moments across Beau is Afraid we wanted to figuratively throw it against the wall. Both because it gave us that “too much” feeling, but also because it really annoyed us in parts. We felt and thought alot of things good and bad. It did exactly what we wanted and didn’t want it to do. We are presently worrying over whether we want to go see it again tonight or never see it again.
Legit this movie has fucked us up. Do(n’t) go see it.
Excuse us, we’re now going to go get a drink of water.
We can't quite let go of this one, but we also don't want to edit it continually. Let's just note here (quickly) that the particular anxieties about maternity, masculinity, class, and sex are all as (albeit differently) compelling as the art stuff. The one thing the film seems entirely indifferent to is ethnicity and (especially) race, but that's sadly kind of in line with the rest of Aster's films. It's a nightmare world, so hard to know what (if anything) to say about the presence or absence of anything in the narrative itself. Anyways, that's enough about this movie that folks have (probably) said too much about already.
I wanna see this movie. I don't wanna see this movie. Don't you just hate it when your day starts with a fucking dilemma?