HAYAO MIYAZAKI AND THE CALL TO ATTENTION
On art in modern times, strangeness, and the value in seeing.
The modern cultural climate favours a particular kind of artist. Having occasionally brushed up against the fringes of the publishing industry myself, the questions that the big money makers in the business are asking smack of a capital-entrapped worldview which – though it drapes itself in humanitarianism – can’t help but view people through a utilitarian lens. What is this artist’s personal history and how can we sell their image? Is their work something that supermarkets will want to stock? What themes does the artist tackle and how well do they reflect modern affairs? Sell the work to us in two sentences or less.
The root of all evil snakes its way even through the offices of those who are supposed to curate the finest of human expression – but to cast stones at the publishers themselves is to find that there are no adequate targets, no heads of the hydra whose removal would be significant enough to deplete the hunger of the beast. The culprit here is not the individuals involved, but the spirit of the age.
The deification of commerce and the outright necessity of economic generation within a capitalist structure makes people act and speak in the interest of commerce itself; a tongue and gavel we all feel the judgement of in our struggle to get by, and the whip that drives us into hustle culture, or job-juggling, slouching ever towards burnout.
The ideal artist of the corporate age is aware in advance of the directives and parameters of their work. In the act of creating their art they are seeking not surprise, not exploration, not mystery, but didacticism. There is a naïve, unspoken, and deeply materialistic belief that we modern people – excluding those of us who we are not in agreement with, of course – are at the vanguard of moral and intellectual development, and therefore the art that we produce should be resolutely modern in its moral and intellectual spirit. Artists are being asked, more or less, to contract the horizon of their expression so that it not trespass beyond the remit of the modern sensibility (I am not talking here about modern sensitivity, which is a separate and multifaceted issue that must be handled with the proper degree of empathy.)
The ideal artist of the corporate age does not strike out on their own path away from the dictates of modernity. No, all the building blocks we need are already right here – there’s no need to make our own. All the shapes we might want to make have already been figured out; all the ready-made moulds into which we can pour our raw, unrefined material. Look how shapely it becomes – look how neat and clean and modern it all is.
Artists are being encouraged to look no further than the playpen in which they are put by their financial caretakers. Told: entertain us; tell us what we want to hear, tell us that you’ve done your calculations with the little blocks and abacuses we’ve provided you with and that we were right all along. And you’ll see that we’re right when you’ve modelled your art on our designs, and it sells.
This in itself is nothing new – though, like everything, it seems worse than ever in the screaming void of the internet age – it makes perfect sense that the most popular artworks of any era would be the ones that reflect the sensibility of that era, or else repackage the aesthetics of a nostalgia-ripened bygone time in a cloak of modern values (Stranger Things).
But ironically, many popular contemporary works of art actually critique the very system that proliferates the modern spirit (aren’t we all tired of the late-capitalist dystopia?) – but they do so from within that same spirit and perennially attack the symptoms of the problem while ignoring the root, leaving the system to stay afloat on a sea of criticisms which all miss their mark. The Hunger Games, Squid Game, Parasite… all enjoyable productions to varying degrees, but what they all have in common besides their massive popularity is the same formulaic critique of modern life: rich people bad, poor people good. But what salvation do they give us from their reality-adjacent dystopias? What other modes of life do they explore? The solution to the protagonist’s problems is often to simply shoot the messenger, so to speak. To topple whichever representative of capitalist tyranny happens to be their personal oppressor, but then what? Back to the grind? Enemies may be defeated, but nothing has been transcended.
Likewise, the modern world is all but invited to be portrayed as under attack from external forces, but it is not to be brought under investigation itself, except in the manner mentioned above where its evil is compressed into a villainous person or organisation. There can be struggle but ultimately no salvation beyond a return to normal.
But normal is a world in which we are working too much for too little. A world where we subjugate ourselves to the demands of a market that does not for one minute have our best interests at heart. Where the average person is unhappy and unfulfilled in their work, struggles to find purpose in life, and sees no way out but to escape through binge-watching TV shows that may superficially critique modern life just enough to scratch an itch, but that present no alternative vision of how we might live.
There is an undercurrent of suppression at work here; a suppression of the capacity of the artist to ‘see with eyes unclouded’, to quote the great Hayao Miyazaki, to whom we will return later. The artist yearns to explore the wild terrain of the human soul. But when everything is mapped out, there’s no need any longer to venture into the territory. Why risk muddying yourself, getting all scraped up, getting eaten by a bear? Because the artist does not mistake the map for the territory. Maps miss out so many crucial details. They are entirely without the real felt experience of living.
To accept the worldview of the financiers as gospel is to attribute a higher level of insight – a higher genius1 – to them than to the artists they employ. It is to commit to the assertion that the world of spreadsheets and statistics – statistics that miss out on so much crucial nuance in their bulldozing simplification of reality – on which the majority of major financial decisions are based, is a world possessed of more insight than anything an artist could produce.
This is an assertion that can only be true if we accept monetary value as the highest value, and if we agree that all of the virtues pertaining to art at its finest – wisdom, spiritual exploration, aesthetic pleasure – are entirely subsidiary to the projected figures that a work is likely to generate. All cultural currency is viewed simply as currency. And any artist who protests is simply not savvy enough to understand that their place is in the market – and only in the market.
But artists have always resisted taking directives from financiers. It is in their nature to eschew instruction from those of a non-artistic temperament. It is an offence to the artistic spirit to be told in advance what the goal of its labour should be. Arthur Schopenhauer said: ‘Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.’
And again, we are back to the attack on the artist’s right simply to see for themselves. Artists are supposed to be seers. This is a word that needs some unpacking, however. Framed by the snake-oiled lens of commercialised mysticism, it tends to conjure up the image of a bejewelled prophetess stationed behind the drapes of a tent, scrying the trajectories of predictably mundane lives for a nominal fee, or through the lens of historicised religious accounts we might imagine a wise person in contact with the gods, granted visions inaccessible to those less favoured.
Usually, a seer is thought to see visions of the future, like scenes from an as-yet-unreleased film – visions of life exactly as it will be, with a Coming Soon tag looming over it all like a watermark on a digital image – but I think this is a simplification projected onto certain great minds by those whose insight is not so attuned to universality. I think a better way of understanding the seemingly prophetic faculty attributed to seers is that they see below the surface of things as they present themselves, into things as they are – and by extension, as they have been and as they will be. Patterns repeat; they do not hide themselves.
Born as we all are into cultural milieus that provide us with ‘corrective’ lenses intended to frame the world for us in a certain light – a seer is one who sees, perhaps not all the time but at certain times, without those lenses. Often, this is not well received by those who exist within the same cultural milieu; ‘No prophet is acceptable in his hometown’ is one of those Bible quotes cited often enough to have become a received wisdom even to non-Christians.
Enter the artist. It is remarkable the double-lives that artists manage to lead, sometimes seeming a world apart in person from the ideas that they express in their work. The artist exercises their faculty of insight in their art so that they don’t have to become a prophet. Because is it any wonder that a prophet would be frowned upon by their closest neighbours? To have someone around pulling back the curtain on reality at every opportunity would be – to put it frankly – incredibly annoying.
But nevertheless, the artist, like the prophet, is one who is committed to the attempt to see without corrective lenses, even if the impulse isn’t always allowed free rein in their day-to-day lives. This – in principle – separates them from the philosopher, or the sociologist, or the ethicist… the artist is supposed to show us things ‘with eyes unclouded’ by any motive other than the showing. Show don’t tell is one of the first maxims learned on almost any writing course. Like dowsing rods for truth, they are supposed to uncover what they find and jump out of their own way in order not to taint the purity of its communication to us. But the artist as channeler is an idealised image. The reality is much murkier.
To see entirely without the tint of cultural bias is near-impossible – even some of the greatest artists are celebrated almost synonymously with their homeland: Ozu, Molière, the Brontë Sisters – they show a truth purer than most but still coloured by their cultural environment, as well as their own personal vision. And therein lies the singularity of great artists. Even removing the distorting cultural lenses does not mean to see things in a pure and unaffected light. Anaïs Nin, in Seduction of the Minotaur, quotes a Talmudic aphorism which expresses this idea very clearly: ‘We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.’
And yet, it is the artists who most virulently commit to showing the world as they see it who tend to be celebrated as achieving the highest degree of universality. As Russian as Tolstoy and his characters are, they are nevertheless ensouled by a universal spirit. But it is not always easy to sink into the works of the great artists and reach the stratum of the universal – engaging with the kind of art made by artists uncompromising in their vision is, as Harold Bloom says in How to Read and Why, a ‘difficult pleasure.’
To experience these artists is to be privy to an uncanny attention to detail which situates us firmly in their worlds, and which does not simply repackage a perspective that they have adopted from the culture at large, but places us behind the eyes of a seer. We are invited through their works into worlds made unfamiliar because of the attention lavished on them by a mind that is not our own. The singularity of many great artists appears at first as a kind of strangeness or impenetrability. But when something appears strange to us it is usually a sign that there is something edifying there for us to discover, if we are willing to lend our attention.
The sense of strangeness only tends to last, however, until the artist’s spell has done its work and their world is – for the span of time in which our attention is held – our world. Then the unfamiliar becomes familiar. Strangeness, in and of itself, is no quality. It is always relative. To say that something is strange is to elucidate nothing of the substance of the thing in question, but only to set it at a remove from everything that would comparatively be considered normal. The affectation of strangeness for strangeness’ sake is purely cosmetic – an affectation that many artists adopt as a form of bedazzlement in lieu of possessing any deeper singularity of vision.
Likewise, I’m sure we can all relate to having met people whose insistence upon their own strangeness is founded predominantly on a pronounced standing apart from the normal, but whose inner world is so fixated on manning the battlements of their war against normalcy that they are essentially as subject to the status quo, or even more so, than those who live in ignorance or acceptance of their own adherence to it. Which simply means to live attuned to the prevailing spirit of the time and place in which you live, because normality is relative too. Dig one layer below the labels normal and strange and you’ll find that they hover around a thing, or a body of work, like an external atmosphere, but constitute nothing of the body itself.
In the world of cinema, you don’t have to look far to see moviemakers trapped in this self-conscious weirdifying of themselves, which only ends up producing a kind of photo-negative of banality. Everything is not what you expect it to be, and predictably so. Everything Everywhere All at Once was pretty fun as an action blockbuster with some moments of heart, but its weirdness felt like a bag of tricks already pre-packaged and free to use: people with sausages for fingers, someone bleeding but actually it’s just tomato sauce, unassuming and unathletic types suddenly becoming master martial artists… all of it played for laughs.
I hate to cry bah humbug about a film which seems to have quickly become so beloved – as I said, it was a pretty fun watch at the cinema, and a bag of tricks is in the end not supposed to be taken too seriously – but the reaction to the multi-Oscar winning film seemed to suggest that it was the most wildly inventive thing to hit the screens in years, and even one of the most profound. It’s the only film I’ve ever been to where a complete stranger saw me buying a ticket and went out of his way to praise it to me – promising that it was an antidote to the recent Marvel movies and contained all the ‘nutrients and vitamins’ that they were lacking (even if I don’t fully share his opinion, I appreciated his enthusiasm). Sadly, I left unconvinced by the insistent strangeness of the film – it was wacky, maybe, but not weird. I was not left with the impression that I had witnessed anything out of the ordinary.
I enjoy unconventional films as much as the next person – but my issue here was that this film touted for its wildness and irreverence felt chained to convention like a prison-mate. It foregrounded an artificial weirdness rooted in bait-and-switch style subversions of pre-conditioned expectations. It presupposed an audience couched firmly in a resolutely ‘normal’ worldview, on whom their tricks would land (this is also how shock-value works).
On the other hand, artists like Andrei Tarkovsky, Franz Kafka, and Jorge Luis Borges do not presuppose a banal audience – although they do occasionally frame their stories as a journey for their protagonist from the banality of the everyday into a phantasmagoria of their creating. But crucially, the strange settings and situations into which they lead us feel like authentic emanations from the singular minds of their creators. The deeply well-read Borges’ interest in mathematics and metaphysics allows the formulation of something like his infinite Library of Babel. Kafka’s debilitating paranoia generates visions of obscure persecutors and labyrinthine worlds of office-clerkdom. Tarkovsky’s preoccupation with the obscurity of the depths of man and the hope of despairing souls led him to show us the infamous wish-granting Room in Stalker, or the swirling, clouded, and purportedly conscious planet Solaris (in the film of the same name). With these artists, it is authenticity all the way down.
There are strangenesses that are draped in normality, and there are normalities that reveal their strangeness when viewed in a certain way. In the end, it comes down to what we are being asked to see, what we are being asked to notice. A regular scene of a domestic kitchen with seemingly nothing out of place can become strange if we find our attention being directed unexpectedly to the corner of the ceiling, or a puddle of liquid on the worktop. Similarly, the most apparently fantastical visions can quickly become normalised in the hands of an artist who draws our attention to the universality of those visions. The movement from the regular to the strange (as in most horror films), and from the strange to the regular (Pixar are fantastic at this) are two inverse techniques that both attempt to pry – or scry – beneath the surface of the presented world.
We are wired both biologically and socially to notice certain things. Over the years a sense of generality comes to coat our day-to-day life like the onset of rust – the product of the repeated noticing of only a fraction of reality, a wearing down of the edges of those things to which our attention most frequently returns. By the time we reach adulthood the primary channel of our focus is supposed to have been dug deep enough that we can follow its course into maturity relatively unencumbered by doubt as to the correctness of that course. The novelty of childhood – the impulse for exploration, the need for discovery – has ideally atrophied by now if we are to be a healthy and functioning member of society. No longer do things seem strange. Reality has been normalised.
So when things appear genuinely strange we know that we have been taken out of our usual mode of noticing. Our social survival is no longer the primary condition; curiosity has again taken precedence. Strangeness is always in the details, in the specificity. It tells us that we are looking now with a different purpose. If we are looking at an apple, for example, it is no longer simply a thing to be eaten, an interchangeable representative of all other apples and, more broadly, of all food digestible by human beings – no, it is this apple. Imagine now the patient camera, our organ of attentiveness, advancing slowly on the motionless thing. Forget all other apples. This is an object all of its own. Its very essence has changed under the altered nature of our gaze. It suddenly becomes the vestige of a mystery.
The mystery that is inherent in all great works of art – that seemingly bottomless depth, that unanswerable question, the elusive answer to which seems to be hidden microcosmically in all of the things the filmmaker chooses to frame, or the novelist chooses to describe – is the effect of the artist’s attention. Perhaps when we consider the intention of the artist in a given work we should interpret that word in reference to attention – the intention of art is not something to be meticulously planned out beforehand (and even if it is, the process of creation shapes plans to its own will), but it is the result, or the after-effect, of the attention paid by the artist. In other words, the intention of a work of art is its own existence. If it could express all that it contains in another form then it would have no need to take the one that it has. I can’t recall where or from whom I heard it, but I remember hearing of a poet’s answer when asked to explain one of their poems: ‘You mean you want me to say it worse?’
In the heart of all creators is a revelation that can only be spoken through their art, and it is through the things on which they lavish their attention, and to which they thereby draw ours, that the liturgy of that revelation is spoken. For someone like Andrei Tarkovsky, the patterns of damp on an old wall, or the debris in a puddle of water, for Wong Kar Wai, the neon above doorways, reflections in glass, for Yasujirō Ozu, an empty room still resonating with the significance of a life-altering conversation. These are like words spoken in a prayer, or an incantation. These are the phrases in the hymn of who’s utterance their films are the voice. Art is the prayer of the self, spoken to the self, and once transcribed – into film, literature, music – we are invited to witness the private prayers of artists, to imbibe ourselves in their unique sense of life as in a baptismal font.
Nobody else’s impression of life will ever quite match our own, but when one strikes close to our nature, it can lead us along the path to its discovery, it can guide our attention like a master painter holding the hand of an apprentice at the canvas. Artists invite us to notice the things that speak to them – and the more things we see that chime in our own heart, the more complete becomes the aesthetic landscape of our interior2.
As we familiarise ourselves with that interior, its impressions resonate outwards, not only into the things that we choose to pay attention to in our lives, but by extension into our conduct and our disposition. Prosaic education teaches from the top-down, like laying bricks; aesthetic education teaches from the bottom-up, like planting seeds. It can’t be quantified what has been gained by, say, watching Persona by Ingmar Bergman, in the same way as what can be learned by reading a textbook on nuclear fission can. But if we respect the intention of the art that we engage with by giving it our full attention, then gains however unquantifiable will be made.
The seed that sprouted into this essay was my recent viewing of Hayao Miyazaki’s latest film The Boy and the Heron. Originally, I had planned for this to be a more focused examination of that film – but it seems like I’ve reached this point having said quite enough already. So instead I want to simply pay tribute to Miyazaki – though the 82-year-old claims The Boy and the Heron will not be his last film, it certainly feels intended to be the final addition to his oeuvre.
In contrast to my earlier tirade against Everything Everywhere All at Once3, I found myself enraptured in my cinema seat by what on first impression seems like the strangest and perhaps most edifying film that Miyazaki has ever made (that being said, I don’t think it’s his best, but that’s hardly a mark against it – the bar he has quite unapologetically set for all animators to come is so high they might as well name a constellation after it).
I was struck by the impression that I was watching, for the first time in Miyazaki’s career, a real theatre of the unconscious production. This is, more than anything else, what makes The Boy and the Heron feel like the last word from Miyazaki. You can of course argue that all of his films, by way of being his creations, are a window into his unconscious, or his dream life. Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, Castle in the Sky… these films are nothing if not dreamlike. But Spirited Away is famously indebted to ancient Japanese myths and legendary creatures, and many of his other films are adaptations of books, explorations other minds.
The Boy and the Heron feels like the first time he has used himself as the primary material out of which to shape a film – perhaps apart from The Wind Rises, but that film was much more content to stay on the surface, this one plunges right into the depths in a way that can’t help but feel more illuminating as regards Miyazaki’s own inner landscape. He has established himself time and time again as a master of his craft, and now we may be seeing the seeds of what has informed his previous works sprouting into more unadultered forms. The garden stakes are off this time around.
The reason it was Miyazaki who sent me on this train of thought is because his filmography is one of the finest examples I know of a call to attention. The things that he invites us to notice are amplified by his commitment to animation – he is famous for his meticulous storyboarding of films. Every frame of his animations and everything that happens within them is put there intentionally. The effect of his films gathers moment to moment by what we are shown: ‘The creation of a single world comes from a huge number of fragments and chaos,’ said the man himself. Each moment of noticing is a tile in the accumulative mosaic of the whole, an expanding resonance.
There are endless YouTube essays in praise of Miyazaki’s attention to detail – at this point the shot of Chihiro putting on her shoes in Spirited Away practically has its own fandom – so I won’t labour the point here. But a few of my favourite examples from his films are: Kiki eating alone at her table in Kiki’s Delivery Service, distant planes against a stark blue sky in Porco Rosso, Chihiro’s legs dangling out over the water as the train passes below the balcony in Spirited Away, Mahito crying while reading a novel in The Boy and the Heron, Sen sucking the blood from the wolf’s wound in Princess Mononoke…
I mentioned earlier that artists can often live quite astounding double-lives between their daily life and their work. Miyazaki comes across as resolutely pessimistic, almost perennially stressed, bad-humoured and argumentative – someone hounded by the conditions of a society that he seems to be at odds with almost as a point of principle. ‘Modern life is so shallow and fake,’ he said. ‘I look forward to when developers go bankrupt, Japan gets poorer and wild grasses take over.’
The grasses of the paradisical worlds he shows are envenomed with the desire to not be the grasses of this world – ‘Beauty will save the world,’ proclaimed one of Dostoevsky’s characters in The Idiot… in Miyazaki’s visions beauty has not so much saved the world as reclaimed it; mosses have found purchase on rusted machines, buildings are aswarm in greenery – there is an implicit insistence on beauty in Miyazaki’s films, a quiet resistance against the uglifying forces of modernity.
It is quite obviously fallacious to label Miyazaki as merely a creator of children’s films, though there are many that still consider him primarily as such. But it is true that most of his films appeal to a younger audience – and their aesthetic edification, the ‘nutrients and vitamins’ that my stranger-filmgoer promised me I would find in Everything Everywhere All at Once, are invaluable to young minds. After all, this is a man who proclaimed: ‘I would like to make a film to tell children “it’s good to be alive.”’ This, I believe, he achieves, moment to moment. His films are monuments to attentiveness.
I use the word genius here not in the egoistic sense, but more in line with the ancient idea of the spirit of genius that alights on certain minds most conducive to it in moments of inspiration.
Anyone who has played Tears of the Kingdom could envision this process like the lighting up of the underworld with the lightroots.
Which I was really not intending to be as scathing as it was, I honestly don’t hate the film all that much.
Beautiful essay.