Introduction

(Chapter 1 of the book Idealism: The Forgotten Principles of American Cinema)

This book was based on a series of theoretical texts that I wrote over more than 10 years on my blog. Writing film reviews in the 2000s and 2010s, I began to realize that everything I loved most about American entertainment was in decline, deteriorating - everything that had been an inspiration to me in American popular culture during my childhood and adolescence in the 80s and 90s was being forgotten, abandoned and sometimes even attacked.

I hope the book doesn't seem motivated solely by a sense of personal nostalgia. As we saw so humorously in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, it's a common phenomenon for each generation to believe that there was a "golden age" in their youth, and that the current culture is decadent, pessimistic and worthless. But once I've explained the fundamental elements of what I've come to call "Idealism", I hope to convince you that there has indeed been a remarkable change in culture in recent decades, and that Idealism doesn't just concern my personal taste, but principles that describe a real category of art and entertainment, which coincidentally was on the rise when I was growing up. Yes, I inevitably have a special fondness for the entertainment of "my time" and this will become evident throughout the book, but when I look to the past and think in terms of universal principles, I see that Idealism was as present in American culture in 1939 as it was in 1989.

This is not the first time that the US has gone through an "Anti-Idealist" phase. The fact is that culture is like a pendulum and is always swinging back and forth. "Idealist" and "Anti-Idealist" forces are always fighting each other, alternating in power and fighting to see who will be the dominant force of the moment.

What determines these changes are the prevailing ideas in the culture, the predominant philosophy in a particular era, which ends up impacting the behavior, trends and art of that period. An explosion of Idealist entertainment occurred at the end of the 70s, along with a renewed sense of optimism about the US, after the period of turbulence and pessimism that characterized the late 60s and early 70s. Think of the emergence of filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, George Lucas, artists like Michael Jackson, and the kind of entertainment they created from then on. Something changed in the culture, and suddenly the population went back to admiring heroes, went back to looking for a sense of innocence, of optimism, went back to valuing ambition, and suddenly entertainment began to reflect these values. There was an explosion of new talents that would become the entertainment icons of the following decades (and our great references to this day). Entertainment not only became more innocent, more optimistic, but also became grandiose, highly sophisticated. Everything in the US had to be "larger than life", ambitious, innovative, high-tech; superstars were popping up everywhere. There was something Olympian about the efforts and talents demanded of artists at that time. An almost superhuman level of skill and performance was expected - and all this was being employed in productions aimed at children, young people, families, not just to impress critics and intellectuals. John Williams has a musical talent on a par with the great composers of the 19th century, but he wasn't writing music for concerts, he was writing for people to eat popcorn and cheer on Superman and Indiana Jones at the movies. It was as if making the audience dream and feel good was the noblest mission in the world, and the best minds and talents on the planet were committed to fulfilling it.

This attitude was observed not only in the movies but also in various areas - in advertising, technology, business. Think of how Steve Jobs revolutionized computers at that time, how Michael Jordan took sport to another level, how Whitney Houston's voice set the standard of excellence for all the singers who came after, and how even in unexpected areas like illusionism we had the emergence of a star like David Copperfield. This period from the second half of the 1970s to the end of the 1990s was a small "golden age of Idealism", and it was the last period in which this spirit prevailed in American culture. By the end of the 1990s, entertainment had begun to become darker, more self-critical: the artists of the "golden age" began to lose their hold on the culture, less talented imitators who emerged didn't have the strength to replace them, and 9/11 served as a final blow to American optimism, officially making Idealism a thing of the past, and since then we've been plunging into one of the most cynical and darkest eras in the recent history of Western culture.

My aim with this book is not to call for the end of other types of art. It's not to turn all art into Idealism nor to say that only that should exist. It's not to condemn those who like other types of art and prefer to produce other things. If good Idealistic art were being produced abundantly today and being appreciated, I wouldn't mind if other artists were producing other things. All styles of art can co-exist peacefully, and it's up to the viewer to decide what they want to consume or not. The problem is that when Anti-Idealist forces gain too much strength in the culture, they tend to repress and destroy Idealism, so that it practically ceases to exist (and when it does, it is no longer appreciated as it should be).

What I want with this book is simply to make creators and viewers aware of what Idealism is, to explain its essence, its fundamental ingredients, to give it a philosophical basis for its existence, and with that perhaps to make it rediscovered and appreciated again.

INITIAL CONSIDERATIONS

In this book, I'm going to focus mainly on the art of cinema, not only because I consider it to be the most complete and influential of the arts, but also because it's the one I know most intimately. However, the basic principles of Idealism are applicable to all forms of art, and I will provide examples of this throughout the chapters.

This will not be an extremely technical book. It won't be a manual on how to make a movie, how to write a script, how to become a trained filmmaker ready to shoot. Idealism is about broad principles, not about applying those principles to every aspect of art (which is why they are principles that can be applied to different arts). It is not a substitute for specific knowledge of the techniques and skills that each particular art requires.

Talent and technical knowledge are indispensable, and one of the main reasons why art is becoming increasingly impoverished is that, in addition to the loss of certain ideals and values, there is also a loss of technique, of the whole craft of entertainment. These techniques are no secret, they haven't been hidden from anyone. If artists are abandoning technique, it's not because of a lack of access to it, a lack of books on the subject, but because of a lack of belief in the philosophical premises behind such techniques. It's not difficult, for example, to draw a beautiful face, once you've studied a few notions of facial harmony and proportion. But if you believe that beauty is an outdated concept, that projecting beauty into art is morally dubious, what motivation will you have to master these techniques? So if today's culture has become cynical about beauty, self-esteem, pleasure, happiness, reason itself, it's only natural that artists are ignoring techniques that were developed on the basis of these principles. No one is going to adopt and apply certain techniques unless they are convinced of the purposes behind them. 

Many of the ideas I will present here were based on my own original observations, but obviously I have been influenced and benefited by the ideas of many people who have written about art and cinema in the past. I learned a lot from Alfred Hitchcock, for example, in the book of conversations with Truffaut, I learned a lot from screenwriting "gurus" like Robert McKee, Syd Field, or by reading interview books of great filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg. But the biggest influence on my philosophical understanding of art was certainly Ayn Rand and her books on aesthetics, especially The Romantic Manifesto. Rand's theory of Romanticism has great similarities with what I'm going to call Idealism here, and although I disagree with Rand on several of her positions, Objectivism provides important philosophical foundations that will complement and support my ideas, for those who are interested in delving deeper into this line of thought later. However, it's important to point out the differences between Rand's Romanticism and my vision. The main one is that I focus much more on entertainment than on what Rand called "serious art". I even tend to use the two terms interchangeably, because in Idealism there isn't really a contradiction between art and entertainment. Rand sometimes said this too, but although she expressed sympathy for things like James Bond and detective stories, in the end she considered popular art to be an inferior form of art, something less sophisticated and less important. For her, great works of art necessarily had to be philosophical, intellectual, have something explicit and profound to say about ethics, human nature. Rand didn't see the viewer's pleasure as such a primordial issue in art. She didn't have a great appreciation for humor, for example, she didn't consider contemporary music to be real music, she didn't have much sympathy for fantasy, she abhorred the horror genre, nor did she consider cinema to be a fully developed art at the time. Idealism is already favorable to all this and assumes that popular art is just as important - sometimes even more important - than "serious art" (sophisticated art that does not care about entertaining).

If you think about what actually introduces changes in culture, in people's behavior, what kind of art most influences people to choose their careers, shape their personalities, educate their children, decide what kind of life they want to live, how they will dress, what will be that special song they will play at the highlight of their weddings - you will see that entertainment is much more than a pastime for most viewers.

Even in Rand's life, popular art played a key role: it was by reading escapist adventures like The Mysterious Valley, watching American action films from the silent era, and listening to her favorite operettas that Rand got the inspiration and emotional fuel she needed to move to the US (where she went straight to Hollywood to work on Cecil B. DeMille blockbusters). That is to say, even though Rand rarely emphasized the vital importance of entertainment for human beings, I believe that on some level she would sympathize with the vision presented in this book.