Perhaps art isn’t as necessary to physical survival as healthcare and housing and affordable produce for the love of god, but when it comes to our spiritual survival, I believe art is a human right.
It’s not an extracurricular. We need it. It does something fundamentally cell-altering to consume it and, certainly, to make it.
It edifies. Some could argue personal edification is merely a nice-to-have, but I’d disagree.
Our lives deserve to be edified.
I’m rewriting a script right now that’s requiring me to dive into the depths of my grief and my rage. It’s asking me to charge through the resistance I have to this particular scene or that shade of a character, smush my cheek up against the glass and, without flinching, face it.
And if I can see the whole process through that way, smushed into facing it, the film may do something similar to the person who watches it.
Art is a way for us to know ourselves and know each other.
But it’s dangerous to know each other. We may reveal something. We may accidentally tell the truth. We end up with nowhere to hide.
I believe it’s only when we have nowhere to hide that we can conjure some sort of magic from the mundane.
That’s what happened the first time I watched the air catch in Kate Winslet’s throat as Jim Carrey said “okay” in Eternal Sunshine and the bottom dropped out from my previous understanding of what love does and what love expects.
It’s what happened when I watched What Happened Was and felt uneasy with every one of Tom Noonan’s fork clinks or swigs of wine or scoots on couch, and convinced myself I was reading the whole date wrong, until I realized I wasn’t reading it wrong at all, and integrated those contradictions into a little more self-understanding.
It happened when a hopeful Miranda July pressed the sticker button in her car in Me and You and Everyone We Know and my heart began to feel like a swollen grapefruit.
It happened when the brightness of Kōji Yakusho’s eyes seemingly leapt into the sky as he walked out of his front door in Perfect Days.
And when Florence Pugh said “I want to be great or nothing” in Little Women.
And when Colman Domingo looked out from the prison windows in Sing Sing.
And when two little girls stood crying in the door frame in The Florida Project.
Art undoes me, and then does me back up.
It leaves me different. It leaves me new. And I believe, in my soul of souls, that this experience is owed to every human being who touches down Earth-side.
We get grief and rage. We get pain and hopelessness. We get injustice and war and death. It only seems fair to me that we get art to expand our capacity to hold all of these things. Seems only right if we have to handle those things, we oughta be equipped.
Art stands us up as we’re falling down. And there are years we’re perpetually falling.
I don’t view artists as teachers. I see them as meaning-makers. Breath and forks and stickers and happy-sad eyes and paint aprons and windows and ice cream cones — these are our raw materials.
These small, meaningless things are how we make meaning. We merge whatever subconscious matter is in our guts with the seemingly meaningless and cumbersome material world to find a story. In a world and government and media hellbent on telling us what to think, it’s no small thing to decide for ourselves.
I believe the world needs more meaning-making, and more people willing to put their necks out there and give us an example of what they see and feel. Perhaps the breath, perhaps the fork. Perhaps the space between the tree limbs. Whatever it is. Give me an image you love and I’ll find your heart. And through finding yours, I’ll locate mine.
People have a right to this.
I believe people have a right to this.
And whatever infrastructure builds and collective actions we take to make non-dependent filmmaking a materially sustainable path, I don’t want to forget why it matters. The livelihoods and the sustainability matter, yes.
But the meaning of it all, the art of it all, that matters too.
We have a right to be moved by unsayable, unspeakable, unmistakably mundane moments.
We have a right to transmute our pain into something we can bear.
We have every right. Let’s not forget it.
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