William Wallace's A Week in the Life of Michaelangelo follows the world's most celebrated sculptor through a the romantic back-looking gaze of veneration. While Wallace takes great care to illuminate the artist's difficulties, daily minutia, and treatment by other members of society with whom he had direct or indirect contact, he often glazes over his foibles, as is common of anyone whom we, as a present culture, deify. Wallace is fair, though, in contrast with historians who encase in marble the famous artist, himself, to preserve their pristine impression of his genius.
Why do we deify people? Individually, I see it as a beautiful justification for the variety of personalities and personal attributes we find in a world of people who are, indeed, not just like us. Culturally though, why do we zombies choose a lord? Why do we imbue a real person with the entire catalog of personal virtues in order to worship them? While plausible that a real person can be gifted with equal measures of some contrapuntal and even contradictory virtues (supreme perfection and supreme speed, for instance), its unrealistic and unfair to practice deification on human beings. But this is how folklore is borne.
As a filmmaker, I find that filmmakers often seek to do the opposite. A historical figure is so bound up in his tall-tale icon, it takes a certain measure of defamation on the part of the filmmaker to bring the genius "down to our level." However, the genius, depending on the nature and sturdiness of his fame can often be reduced to some cheating, swindling ne'er-do-well, and we lose our respect for either the figure or the filmmaker, depending on who we see as the least honest. Because he's dead, does it make it safe to deify the soul of the artist? As a culture, are we simply setting ourselves up for failure? And if that artist was still alive, are we more likely setting him up for failure.
I find in my own personal form of feminism the same problems of deification found in the art historical realm. Culturally if women are or were raised by the romantic and idealistic, upon a pedestal like vestal virgins carved into Michaelangeo's masterfully chosen marble, then there they must rest, frozen in mid-animation and essentially dead to be allowed to continue to exist. A pedestal is no place for a living being. There, under splendid shafts of light, they become stiff in an attempt just to continue living. But once the deity leaves his or her alter-cage, we the idealizers, the cruel romantics, unjustly feel lied to. Who were you that you tricked us so long?! You are nothing but an impostor, a fake and whore whose sole intention is to pretend to be something we will worship!
As woman, we unbound our feet, walked right up to these ignorant romantics and said "enough is enough!" But to avoid a sexist judgment, there are also women who idealize men by created gender roles emphasizing ideas like physical strength, guardianship, etc. there is a something about the discovery of someone who is in touch with the parts of ourselves that we are not, that encourages idealism from the latter. We see sensitivity in artists and assume the possessor of this quality was simply born special. But art is not a medium's occupation. It simply takes a practiced degree of spiritual searching and self reflection, both at our ugliest primal expressions, and at how ugly our individual egos are until we can lose our faces in making. Perhaps spectators are secretly as afraid to lose their egos as the artist who becomes lost in his/her work.
But perhaps it's just this ironic tension that has us making and spectating in the first place.
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