The Art of Entertaining the Troops
Two ways of going wrong as an artist
White Christmas is a great movie. Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen (see pic) sing songs by Irving Berlin and dance their way through a heart-warming tale that gives the audience what they want when they want it. It’s funny, nostalgic and sentimental; a shot of Christmas serum delivered straight into the vein.
The movie is not really about Christmas, although that’s when it takes place. The main plot is the plan to honour the neglected Major General Thomas F. Waverly. It harks back to the good old days of World War Two, hence the brilliant song Gee, I Wish I Was Back in the Army. It's pure entertainment.
What’s the differences between Art & Entertainment?
I mention it because the movie contains another song that has nothing to do with Christmas, but does relate to a theme of this Substack: the role of the artist. Or should we say artiste? You can already sense there’s a difference. The artist may be a dancer in a chorus line, smiling and high-kicking in a mainstream musical. The artiste, darling, is not a crowd pleaser. That dancer may be more interested in choreography.
‘Choreography’ is the title of a song in White Christmas that highlights the difference between art and entertainment. I highly recommend you take four minutes to watch it through. It’s great fun, and Danny Kaye is one of the all-time great performers.
Here are some of the lyrics:
The theater, the theater, what's happened to the theater?
Especially where dancing is concerned
Chaps who did taps aren't tapping anymore
They're doing choreography
Chicks who did kicks aren't kicking anymore
They're doing choreography
The alienation of art, as opposed to entertainment, is highlighted with the lines:
One and all keep us guessing
What the heck they're expressing
Instead of dance it's choreography!
Entertaining the Troops
1950s was a time of change in the arts. The mass media was making use of the ‘entertainers’ who had honed their craft entertaining troops in the armed forces, many of whom had their roots in music, like Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe. At the same time, fellow Brit, Bob Hope, made a good living in the USA with broad mainstream comedies that tended to be patriotic and cheeky, rather than satirical. After all, there was a war on. The results was a mainstream culture designed to make you feel good. And after a hard day working, what’s wrong with a bit of delight and entertainment?
But another artistic movement arose from a new generation who had not served in the armed forces and saw the world very differently. In the UK, the 1950s saw the rise of the ‘Angry Young Men’, a group of working class or middle-class writers who wrote about their disillusionment and rage, typified by John Osborne’s play, Look Back in Anger. Plays like this, and others in that tradition, were not designed to make you feel good. Quite the reverse.
This paved the way for the ‘Satire Boom’ of the 1960s, with Peter Cook, Beyond the Fringe, The Establishment club, Private Eye and That Was The Week That Was. And then the Monty Python team, which radically turned sketch comedy on its head, taking it away from the broad music hall sensibility into the surreal. Older audiences found it bewildering.
Meanwhile, in the USA, West Side Story opened in 1957, only three years after White Christmas was released. They could not be tonally and choreographically more different from each other.
Give The Punters What They Want
In pursuing a career in the arts, then, one is always in danger of falling off the horse on one side or the other. On the one hand, there is always the temptation to just ‘give the audience what they want’. This rather implies that such a task is easy. In many ways, succeeding in the mainstream is the hardest thing of all because, although you can’t please all of the people all of the time, you really are aiming to please as many people as possible for as long as you can. Creating a sitcom, for example, that can be enjoyed by three generations is incredibly hard and rare. Get it right and you can make millions. Get it wrong, and you’ll be a laughing stock, and not in the way you intended.
It is easy to look down on ‘Entertainment’, citing lines from Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death to justify what is sometimes just snobbery. For example:
“With television, we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present.”
Or:
“Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture’s being drained by laughter?”
Postman’s critique is a little grumpy, but fair. Certainly, there is an awful lot of TV which is TV for its own sake, and the only aim is to keep people watching. And that’s just as much the case in rolling news like CNN as reality soaps like Made in Chelsea. Postman would agree, but Charlie Brooker has made a brilliant critique of rolling news here. I highly recommend the first three minutes:
Be True To Yourself
The other danger is to refuse to pander to the whims of the audience and please yourself. The only thing that matters is self-expression and authenticity. Maybe this sounds like a modern problem, in a world fuelled by narcissism and Pixar-dust, but this is not a new thing.
The way we tell art history encourages this view that the artist is the visionary who is doomed to be ignored or overlooked. Last year, I went to a Van Gogh exhibition and was reminded that he only sold one painting in his whole tragically short life-time.
Failure in one’s own lifetime is not inevitable, even if you rip up the rule book of your genre. The Twentieth Century contains plenty of artists who succeed whilst refusing to go along with convention of the mainstream: e e cummings who wrote poetry that rejected form, scansion, grammar and punctuation; Piero Manzoni canned his own faeces in 1961 and decided it was art, rather than a failure of plumbing.
Where do Christians fit into this?
In some ways, the problem for the Christian artist is no different from any other artist. Some of us are suited to the world of entertainment, and others to fringe art. Each has much to learn from the other. They depend on each other. Mainstream formats turn stale without reinvention and innovation just as experimental art becomes self-indulgent and indecipherable without an audience of any kind to keep it honest.
In that way, the fringe art scene is the research and development department of the mainstream. Hence a play at the Edinburgh like Fleabag ends up on television, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the writer-performer, ends up in a Star Wars movie. Likewise fringe performers can learn a lot about stage craft from crowd pleasers like Bob Hope or Michael McIntyre who make it all look very easy.
But how can one be an artist in a Christian way?
We’ll look at that next time when I’ll write about some matters arising from the life of Ralph Vaughan Williams, the son of a vicar, and editor of a hymnal, who was reluctant to call himself a Christian. But given his own deeply Christian culture and history, I think he was onto something. Why not have a listen to our conversation about him with Matthew Mason on the Cooper and Cary podcast?