News Reporter: Act Four: The best thing art can do after tragedy is unsettle us

Wednesday 15 March 2017

Act Four: The best thing art can do after tragedy is unsettle us

Alyssa Rosenberg on culture and politics

Tilda Swinton and Rocky Duer in the movie adaptation of “We Need To Talk About Kevin.” (Courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories)

Every week, I answer a question from the Monday Act Four Live chat in the Wednesday edition of this newsletter. You can read the transcript of our March 13 conversation here, and submit questions for our March 20 chat here. This week, a reader uses a gripping book to ask a big-picture question about art.

I recently read Mohsin Hamid’s book “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” after watching Mira Nair’s film adaptation. I was pleasantly surprised by the nuance with which it explores terrorism and Islamophobia and the way it captures the climate of post-9/11 America. If you’ve read or watched it, what did you think? How effectively do you think pop culture has dealt with 9/11 and its aftermath? What role do you think art should have in processing tragedies or other current events and generally topical issues?

We discussed the first two questions this reader posed in the chat itself. The short version: I haven’t watched or read “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” and I think Hollywood’s seeming inability to depict Muslims who aren’t terrorists is a major failing. But I wanted to tackle the third question here a bit more fully.

For the most part, art takes a lot longer to produce than journalism or commentary do. This isn’t always true; “Saturday Night Live” or “Full Frontal With Samantha Bee” may be able to jump on a developing story faster than a magazine feature writer, for example. But for the most part, it’s going to take a lot longer to write a novel, produce an episode of television or make a movie than to report out the major facts of a tragedy.

This can be a disadvantage: you lose some immediacy, and in that time, a theory may have been proven wrong or an emotional mood may have passed. But it can also give artists time to see how the prevailing narrative around a disaster evolves. As a result, art can push back against those narratives or encourage us to try to see events from different perspectives.

To take one example, Lionel Shriver’s 2003 novel “We Need to Talk About Kevin” took readers inside the experiences of the mother of a fictional school shooter, providing a chilly, complicated portrait of how a troubled child affects a marriage. The book isn’t necessarily accurate — the parents of school shooters are all different, after all — but it resisted a simple story about what someone like Sue Klebold, the mother of one of the Columbine shooters, might have done or failed to do as a parent. For me, at least, Shriver’s novel created space for Klebold’s 2016 memoir, which revealed a reality that was more mundane than the horror Shriver imagined, to be read and absorbed rather than treated as a freakish curiosity.

I’m hesitant to proscribe a role for art in the aftermath of tragedy: the power of art, after all, is that it’s protean and not confined by the niceties that govern something like political debate. But the art about tragedy that I like the best often makes me feel uncomfortable about what I assume, or interested in learning more about what I genuinely don’t know or understand.