I'm not entirely sure why these three quotes are so easily relating to each other in my mind, so lets see if I can work it out, if only for my own satisfaction.
But it’s not something, really, that anyone needs to watch today. In ten-minute chunks it can be fun enough if you can get over your natural repulsion at the racism, but should certainly not be shown to the children who were its intended audience...
Andrew Hickey, Batman on Screen: Batman (1943) blogpost, 2014
BRIGER: OK, let's - let's talk about the part that you can't relate to. It seems that H.P. Lovecraft - you know, from his fiction, his poetry, his letters - that he was racist. When did you realize that first?
LAVALLE: Well, here's the funny thing - so I didn't realize it when I was 10 or 11 reading these stories. And I read pretty much all of them. And in some of them, he's pretty blatant about his particular hatred - particularly of black people. When I was 10 or 11 and I read these stories, I read them only for the wild and outlandish plots and the large cosmic dread sort of thing. And in a way, I was naive and I could overlook what should have been blatant clues about the uglier sides of H.P. Lovecraft's personality and his ideas. ...when I was, like, 10 or 11, I just didn't even see it. I think I just couldn't have processed it. And then when I was about 15 or 16, I started being like what is this dude - what did he just say? And it was the kind of thing that you would say, like - if you were walking down the street and somebody said that, you'd smack them in the mouth. So why did I say that it was OK on the page? And yet by this point, I already loved the stories, so it made for these very conflicted feelings.
Victor Lavelle, author interview, 2015
Certainly the juxtaposition of the first two makes some kind of obvious sense, I think, since both are clearly concerned with making political reading of particular texts, whether that is the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, or one of the early 1940s Batman film serials. Andrew Hickey's Batman review stuck in my mind from when I first read it a couple of years ago. While I don't doubt that he is quite correct in his judgement that the serial now looks deeply racist with it's yellow face depiction of it's Japanese villains, I also remember watching it as a child during some school holiday, and didn't grow up to be a particularly racist person. Not that I would dream of suggesting that I am somehow incapable of saying or writing something racist, if only inadvertently, but it does make me wonder whether a serial of this sort is really 'dangerous' to a child audience as his remark seems to suggest?
While I would probably easily see it if I were to re-watch it now, as a child I was completely unaware of any of the racism which Hickey points out in his blogpost. Some of this may be down to just how old the serial is. It's style is far removed from anything a child of the eighties was going to be especially familiar with. A more likely explanation is simply the context in which I lived: brought up by Guardian-reading liberal-left parents, with school friends whose families came from India and Pakistan. Some old film serial from the 1940s was unlikely to make much of an impression on whatever I might come to believe about the Japanese or any other national or ethnic group.
But for me this still gets at one of the difficulties with any politicised reading of art or popular culture. While, obviously, the art we encounter as children (and as adults) has some effect on what we then come to believe about both the world and, especially, people from different backgrounds and cultures, it's clearly not the only thing which shapes our beliefs. How 'dangerous' a film serial or book is is surely going to depend very much on the context in which it is encountered.
In my second quote Victor Lavelle describes not just the experience of a child being unaware of the racist subtext to works that child enjoys, but also the conflicted feelings this can generate for the adult - or, as here, just the slightly older teenager - who has learned to see how the things he or she used to enjoy can also embody some very ugly attitudes and prejudices. It's one of the reasons why going back to beloved childhood favourites can sometimes turn out to be a real disappointment. And I also don't doubt that such feelings are going to be much harder to deal with for someone who belongs to the group which is being stereotyped or subjected to such prejudices in this case. I'm very fortunate really; it's easier for me to overlook racism or sexism or homophobia in a book or a film, to read around such attitudes as it were, because I belong to the groups which are rarely if ever subjected to that kind of prejudice, at least here in Britain.
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Parenthood changed the way I view characters. And the way I view humanity. I would’ve thought that you have a lot more input into raising a child, into how they turn out, than you actually do. The best you can do is sort of help them realize who they are, and not dissuade them. It’s not as interesting in a way to be a writer when you come to grips with that. You want to believe characters are controlled by the events in their lives, but that happens so much less than you’d think.
Dan Clowes, author interview, 2016
Aside from Ghost World, I've not read much of Dan Clowes' work. The description of Patience, however, makes it sound like something I'd really like to check out.
Anyway, that aside, it's less obvious just how much this quote has in common with the other two. It comes back to that issue of childhood, and the extent to which we are influenced by the culture around us. One shouldn't overstate this of course. I rather imagine that, as a successful cartoonist with several films made out of his work, Dan Clowes has been able to provide his son with a relative level of comfort and security which has ensured his child has avoided some of the more obvious traumas which can easily result from a less privileged childhood. But I suspect that's not quite what he's addressing here in any case. He's not, after all, denying that the 'events of our lives' leave their marks upon us, but merely suggesting that their impact is rather more complicated than might easily be supposed. In any case, how any of us respond to a traumatic event or experience is to some extent going to be dictated by the person we already are.
And from the point of view of a writer of fiction, I would imagine that a relatively clear sense of cause and effect (however nuanced this may be in practice) is, to some extent at least, necessary if your fiction is to be coherent. Real people are always much more complicated than fictional characters, after all, hence part of the reason why modernism became so complex with its attempt to represent human character in all of it's complexity.
Unlike the first two quotes, Clowes isn't concerned here directly with a child's relationship with and understanding of art, but it surely chimes with what I've been trying to explore in this short blogpost? If even the 'events of our lives' - and surely, we might think, this refers to something of far greater import than the art we encounter? - can leave less of a mark than we might suppose, what hope for the books we read, or the films we see?
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None of the above is intended as in any way to constitute a definitive judgement. There are a number of conclusions which I could draw from what I've written here which I don't agree with. I don't, for example, believe that we shouldn't be concerned about the books which children are reading, or the films and television they are watching. Nor do I think that the ideological content of a work somehow doesn't matter, and that we shouldn't criticise works which we find to be sexist or racist or homophobic. The whole point of didactic works of art, after all, of whatever political stripe, is that they are an attempt to change the hearts and minds of the people who encounter them. And they do, surely, in some way. But how? It seems to me that it's very hard to define precisely how any of us are effected by the things we read or watch, beyond whatever personal, visceral reactions we may each experience.
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