Is Conservatism Anti-Art?

[Contains spoilers to the film The Invite]

There are several reasons why conservatives lag in contributing to the arts. For one thing, they are blacklisted. Movie studios and publishing houses ban their opinions and ideas. This is not only true on the individual level, where politicians like the late Dianne Feinstein collude with Hollywood moguls to terrorize and suppress those who create non-leftist content like The Path to 9/11, 24 and Zero Dark Thirty. It’s true on the corporate level as well. Note the lawfare being waged by attorneys general from twelve blue states to prevent Paramount Skydance’s acquisition of Warner Bros. As the Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins Jr. succinctly puts it: “The fight is about politics, not business.” The left can’t bear the thought that a company run by Trump-friendlies should take over a company that controls several lucrative franchises, not to mention CNN.

For another thing, most creators, left and right, who put ideology before aesthetics make bad stuff. Art is about people and people are more complex than philosophies, political or otherwise. Woke-leftist content has laid several major films and franchises low. Likewise, of the few conservative works that do see the light of day, many are sodden with ideology. Politics is bad for art.

But is there something more? Something endemic to right-wing creators that keeps their material from excelling. My answer is a decided maybe.

The other day I saw the film The Invite. Of the three small, made-for-adult films that came out this summer, it was by far the most artistically successful. Both Tuner and The Drama were interesting efforts but foundered in the third act due to their creators’ shallow moral understanding. What the films portrayed as redemption was not redemption, and it made their endings feel flat and unresolved.

Not so The Invite, directed by Olivia Wilde, and starring Wilde, Edward Norton, Seth Rogen and Penelope Cruz.

The film is based on a Spanish novel called The People Upstairs, and was adapted once before as a Spanish film called Sentimental. Were it not for Wilde’s lively direction, it would be little more than a filmed stage play: four actors, one interior location.

The story tells of an unhappy couple (Wilde and Rogen) who invite the people upstairs (Norton and Cruz) to dinner. The upstairs couple’s loud and enthusiastic sex life has been disturbing Rogen but intriguing Wilde. Unbeknownst to him, she’s been parading around the house naked, fully aware that Norton is watching her. As the evening unravels ala a gentler version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Norton and Cruz reveal that they’ve been having orgies. Wilde and Rogen mock them for framing their shallow perversions as profound self-revelation, but they’re also aroused — no surprise, since they themselves haven’t had sex for a year. Hilarity and catharsis ensue.

Now. I found all four of these characters annoying. For the first half hour of the movie, I was not certain I would sit through the rest. Then I saw that the writing — by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones — was strong and smart, and the acting, especially Wilde and Norton, was excellent. So I went on watching for aesthetic reasons and, after a while, I was drawn into the drama and came to feel compassion and affection for the main couple.

For me, at the most basic level, this is what the arts are all about: a deeper appreciation of and connection to the beauty and complexity of life. The truth is, you cannot really know someone unless you love them, you can’t love them unless you feel for them, you can’t feel for them unless your heart is trained to find their humanity — and art is one of the main tools we have for training the heart.

But what if I had judged the film on purely conservative grounds? The behavior of the characters is not particularly moral. Though there is no nudity, and what sex there is is delicately filmed, the conversation is so graphic and perverse that I had to look up one of the terms. (The things people get up to!) The Norton-Cruz couple, who violate every sexual law of God and man, is treated realistically and without condemnation. I found them dishonest, predatory and dysfunctional, but another viewer might have been more sympathetic. And while the ending makes a gratifying statement about the durability and worthiness of marriage, it’s conditional, and leaves other options open.

Life is like that. In fact, it’s exactly like that: conditional, confusing and full of moral gray areas. And to whine that you don’t want to see life in the arts, but only that version of life which confirms you in your certainties, is to blind yourself to the thousand viewpoints that come together to create the kaleidoscopic design of human experience.

There’s an old zen saying: “Do not seek the Truth; only cease to cherish opinions.” Or to put it another way: Judge not, lest ye be judged. This does not mean you should abandon your morals or your understanding of sin. It simply means that a work of art is a safe place to put them aside for a while and see the world without limits. When the art is good and true, you return to yourself with a greater capacity for understanding and forgiveness. I believe this is the heart and purpose of Christian non-judgement.

Olivia Wilde is a member of the famously left-wing Cockburn family. Her aunt — my crime writing colleague Sarah Caudwell — was a dear friend of mine, and frequently belabored me about the head and shoulders for my burgeoning conservatism. I loved her and, after 26 years, still grieve her death. Yet for all Wilde’s fervent feminist activism, the character she portrays here is a homemaker and mother, desperate to be appreciated and desired for her wife-work, mother-work and physical beauty. Like many political leftists I have met, she lives a conservative life.

My question is this: could an artist as far to the right as Wilde is to the left portray such a range of characters with the same tenderness with which Wilde portrays these? Well, I could. I have. But how many others are there who would do it — and how would the conservative audience greet their work?