Depending on where you’re sitting, you’ve heard the name “Xavier Dolan” way too much or never at all. If you’re interested in indie/queer cinema and/or Montreal artists, then you very likely have strong feelings about both Dolan’s movies and him as person. You maybe have a favorite film of his (Mommy? Laurence Anyways?) and at least one you cannot stand or refuse to watch (The one with Kit Harrington? It’s Only the End of the World?). You probably have feelings about some comment he made in some interview or his campaign against Carol when he was on the jury at Cannes. And if you’ve never heard of Xavier Dolan? Well, then, you’re probably not particularly interested in any of those things - problematic young auteurs or French Canadian film or a certain branch of LGBTQIA+ art.
While it seems that almost no one wants or needs another word about Xavier Dolan, we’re going to talk about him (sort of) for a bit. Sorry, then, to everyone.
Xavier Dolan, for those who need the refresher, tends to write, direct, and star in all his own movies. He often does even more than this (e.g. works as costume designer, editor, writes the English subtitles). There are a few exceptions (notably regarding casting himself), but his penchant for taking on many of the various aspects of a film is how his public image was formed and it follows him still.
He makes, for lack better words, stylish melodramas. Folks tend to either love or hate his stuff. You can get a sense of his sensibility from the music video for Adele’s “Hello” (which he directed). Every choice he makes is DOING SOMETHING and the something he’s doing is not to everyone’s taste. His films, if we can summarize them as a whole, sit awkwardly between arthouse festival fare and casual commercial entertainment. They’re usually too unusual or obscure or moderately unpleasant for folks who just want to enjoy 90 minute stories about pretend people doing pretend things, but too accessible or slight or affected for highbrow critics. We’re not here, though, to give you an overview of his career. We want, rather, to talk about his decision to end it.
In an interview with El Pais the other day, Dolan said he’s retiring from filmmaking. [The interview is behind a paywall, so we’re relying on secondhand reporting here.] Dolan’s apparently fed up with moviemaking. Funding his most recent project - a limited series called La nuit où Laurier Gaudreault s'est réveillé [The Night Logan Woke Up] - proved almost impossible. It required personal investment and that personal investment isn’t translating into wide distribution or commercial/critical success. Beyond the financial trouble of making film, he seems to be done with the emotional trouble too. Some select quotes:
“I don’t feel like committing two years to a project that barely anyone sees. I put too much passion into it to have these disappointments. It makes me wonder if my filmmaking is bad, and I know it’s not.”
“I don’t understand what the point is of telling stories when everything around us is falling apart. Art is useless and dedicating oneself to the cinema, a waste of time.”
If this is the first time you’re reading quotes from Xavier Dolan, we’re guessing you (like most) are immediately tired of him. It probably does him no favors if we mention, here, that he was born in 1989. Still fewer favors if we draw attention to the Wikipedia page dedicated to the numerous awards he has been nominated for and/or received. While Dolan’s films have a lot of defenders, Dolan as a man has relatively few. He is an unabashed Millenial. He feels he deserves better treatment. He should have an easier time doing what he wants to do. He looks around and sees nothing but disaster. He doubts the use and value of art even after having devoted most of his entire adult life (thus far) to it. Worst of all, he takes himself and his work seriously.
[We’re not going to talk about this here, but young people today taking themselves and their work seriously seems to put the world on edge. Greta Thunberg might be the clearest example of this. People seem to lose their minds over certain young folks - activists, artists, etc. - not because of what they do but rather because they take themselves and the output of their efforts to be meaningful in and of themselves. Taking the attitude that one’s value and values are not contingent upon universal appeal and do not need to be authorized by elder generations (or (really) anyone at all) seems to send a certain contingent of folks spiraling. Dolan fits this bill, too. People, we’re pretty sure, hate him in part because he thinks his work is important (even when everyone so often insists it isn’t and can’t be).]
Folks low-key hate Xavier Dolan and maybe you, having heard a little about him, hate him too. You might be, as some on Twitter or Reddit currently are, pleased that you are learning of this man for the first and last time at once.
We don’t really feel any type of way about Xavier Dolan as a filmmaker or person. We don’t love or hate his films. We don’t think or know much at all about him as person. He’s someone we attend to almost exclusively because we try to keep up with the rare Montrealers who get noticed beyond this island. We aren’t really, then, interested much in his retirement in particular, but rather what it means that a young and (by most measures) wildly successful artist has decided to give up on art because the conditions of its creation and reception are inhospitable or unpleasant.
It’s tempting to resent Dolan for taking his ball and going home. He occupies, by all accounts, a privileged and rare position (esp. for a French Canadian filmmaker who works mostly in French). Those who strive to create things for others but are nowhere close to getting Dolan-level attention, money, opportunities, etc. might (rightly?) wonder how he can be so frustrated and ungrateful and unappreciative. He has what many deeply want, but it isn’t (it seems) altogether good enough so he’s stepping away. The nerve.
But if he can’t secure adequate funding to make the work he wants to make and doesn’t feel like he’s reaching an actual audience and finally isn’t getting fair treatment from critics/audiences - why wouldn’t he walk away? If it’s costly (financially, emotionally, etc.) to make something and no one seems to acknowledge or enjoy what you make, then who wouldn’t stop making stuff altogether? This, from where we’re sitting, makes total sense.
Dolan’s reasons for quitting are clear enough, but what’s mostly unclear to us is why people aren’t sympathetic or attentive to the fact that Dolan seems to feel himself to be in the exact same position as almost every creative worker in Canada (at least).
Money is hard to come by and, when it does come, it’s insufficient to live the way you want to live (or, truly, live at all in most cases). Critical and popular attention is shortlived and often shallow (if it exists at all). The effort necessary to produce art isn’t clearly balanced out by the results of creating it. The fantasy that art has observable social or political usefulness is impossible to maintain in good faith at present. Dedication to a vocation seems, in our current regime, quixotic at best and self-damaging at worst.
Dolan is, despite his radically different stature, more or less experiencing the same thing that defines the life and times of most every artist we’ve ever encountered.
You might, here, say that real artists create art for its own sake. They shouldn’t be doing it for the money or external validation. Art is its own reward. This might be partially true, but it’s not totally true.
There is a reason you do not see or hear about people performing plays in their living rooms for nobody. There is a reason people do not immediately destroy the paintings they’ve painted. Art offers the illusion that it’s an autonomous good unto itself, but it isn’t. It needs to be received to be completed. Typically, you need to sustain the fantasy that it will be received by someone somehow to create it at all in the first place (even if that someone is just your future self). If you cannot envision a receptive audience (including yourself), then the whole thing falls all the way apart. Making movies, writing poems, etc. etc. etc. is arduous and awful work. [We’ve talked about this in a post somewhere before, but can’t recall which.] Creating something (whatever that something is) is hard and if the outcome of that hard work is merely a shrug or nothing at all - well, there’s little reason to bother (unless driven by some pathological compulsion that, truthfully, one might be better off without). These facts are especially salient if there is no material compensation or promise tied to all the effort.
The dismissive and ugly knee-jerk reactions to Dolan’s announcement from people who (supposedly) care about films (and, hopefully, cultural products more broadly) seems to indicate a couple of things that, to our eye, have been simmering in the background for a while.
There seems to be a vocal contingent of people who consume media with absolutely no respect, regard, or appreciation for the people who create that media. They want the objects, but are indifferent, ignorant, dismissive, and/or contemptuous of the labor (practical, intellectual, and emotional) necessary to make those objects. People who occupy this position do not seem to care if anyone other than their faves has a tough time and, even then, their faves are constantly shifting and exchangeable. The health of the industry (and all the workers within it) is beyond their concern so long as its output keeps pleasing them.
More troubling than the reactions of (some) audiences, other artists do not seem to want to accept that almost all artists - no matter their perceived success or acclaim or whatever - are struggling to finance their stuff (see, for instance, Oscar-winning Guillermo del Toro’s recent comments about trying to get funding/go-ahead to make what he wants) and secure meaningful reception right now. The struggles faced by folks are, of course, all relative - but it’s a bad fucking sign that everyone’s individual boat - from oceanliner to self-fashioned raft - seems to be sinking at the same time for the same reasons.
So audiences don’t know or care to know much about the labor conditions necessary for the production of the objects they consume and other producers, likewise, don’t seem to want to accept or acknowledge that conditions are bad all over (despite certain disparities and differences). It’s a bad scene.
It’s almost as if this particular badness is widespread and not exclusive at all to the art/culture industry. It’s almost as if it’s, what’s the word, a structural problem? Maybe having to do with how money is apportioned, how labor is compensated, how products circulate, and how value is measured? These circumstances might even be so widespread that people other than Xavier Dolan might be feeling some type of way about trying to keep participating? It might seem like solidarity between cultural consumers and producers is called for? Like unifying against the various institutions that control and profit from cultural products is necessary? Who knows though? Maybe Xavier Dolan is just insufferable and singular? It would be crazy to take the words of a problematic (TM) gay indie filmmaker to be indicative of a generalized rot afflicting culture at large. Look around! Beyond Xavier Dolan, everyone is doing so well.
Thank god incredible directors like Greta Gerwig and Chloé Zhao still have the funding to make personal work like the Barbie movie or Eternals and that all the young writers who did interesting first features are doing dialogue rewrites on studio biopics or action franchises. Thank god amazing actors like Marion Cotillard and Viola Davis are doing superheros and marquee summer movies rather than offering smaller, human-sized performances in diverse and small projects. Thank god novelists are able to survive off their work only by taking adjunct gigs teaching MFA students or selling their stories to TV producers. Thank god the poets know how to write good ad copy and the videogame writers know how to work 54 hour days for months at a time punching up lootbox descriptions. Thank god the painters are able to launder wealthy dollars or moonlight as graphic designers. Thank god sculpture is only recalled as an artform when some deranged municipal government adorns their city with it and upsets all the citizens. Thank god music is now purely charitable. Thank god critiques of art circulate as bitterly snide single-line remarks on social media platforms and actual critics hussle for rent money writing lists or reviews expropriated by aggregator sites for zero dollars. Thank god audiences (ourselves included) spend more time talking about what’s coming soon rather than what’s already out and treat cultural products like fast fashion or organic produce (always-already almost expired).
Everything is going supergreat and this one filmmaker who has shown such promise and mounted admirable efforts to communicate something personal and different for the world is just being another spoiled Millenial fucking baby and he probably won’t even retire anyways so why extend any sympathy or even take his words or seeming situation seriously at all? He’s just annoying and definitely not a canary in the cultural coalmine cheeping a warning we ought to somehow heed. It’s best to just forget about Xavier Dolan, but - then again- maybe you don’t have to. Problem solved.
P.S. This high horse was a rental. We’ll get down off it immediately after we send this out.
P.P.S. Les amour imaginaires is the Plateau-ist Plateau movie to have ever Plateau-ed, so if you’re interested in a picture of indie sleaze, hipsters, or that neighborhood’s perpetual vibe - check it out.
y'all are describing the Plateau from the late 80's early 90's I think. It's not like that now/anymore.
A high-horse rental LOL - gonna use that
"The effort necessary to produce art isn’t clearly balanced out by the results of creating it. " yeah
improv was not mentioned during the tirade ;(
"Maybe having to do with how money is apportioned, how labor is compensated, how products circulate, and how value is measured? These circumstances might even be so widespread that people other than Xavier Dolan might be feeling some type of way about trying to keep participating? It might seem like solidarity between cultural consumers and producers is called for? Like unifying against the various institutions that control and profit from cultural products is necessary? "