Juan Villoro
There were times when people relied on myths and cosmogonies to explain the budding of a flower or a person’s character. Superstition and religions reassure without needing to be proven. In this context, harmony depends on not passing salt from hand to hand or attending Sunday mass.
Science challenges these preconceptions and shows there is nothing more rational than asking questions. Since not all of them have immediate answers, knowledge takes place in the field of uncertainty, which explains why so many specialists are nervous.
The problem with understanding reality is that you then have to cope with it. Even so, it is worth knowing the evils to their ultimate horrors. There is no point in imitating the ostrich or assuming the obscurantism of those who affirm on the Internet that the earth is flat and that vaccines are harmful. Having said that, I dare to propose we move a little away from the real thing.
For millennia art was inspired by actual events to represent them fancifully. In the Netherlands, the Adoration of the Kings could be set in a snowy landscape: the Christ Child received his iconic gifts while the people skated on ice. The image was not considered implausible, as everyone knew painting constructs another reality.
The actors of silent films overacted because no one thought that what happened on a screen was natural. The spectator accepted the convention of being in front of something imaginary, in the same way that in the theater, he admitted that a cardboard arch symbolized the entrance to a castle.
In its origins, television told stories as wild as those of silent films. Let’s review the black-and-white programs of the 1960s. No contemporary producer would accept plots like these: a talking horse, a housewife who casts a spell by wiggling her nose, a spy with a telephone in his shoe, a Martian who lives in a garage, a dolphin who solves family problems, an island where castaways live wonderfully, a space expedition in which a Russian sneaks in. Those programs had a high regard for human beings: they believed them capable of enjoying rigorously imaginary affairs.
Everything changed at the end of the 20th century, when technology unleashed the greatest thirst for reality the human species has ever known. Color television, location shooting, and, above all, the appetite for veracity, made art imitate life. If a character had dinner, the soup had to have a fly in it.
Realism became the dominant ideology, as evidenced by the passage from the golden age of television to the golden age of series, when The Sopranos, The Wire, Six Feet Under, and Breaking Bad appeared. These undisputed masterpieces approach reality with a forensic criterion; they do not seek to make the viewer admit an invented world; they provide incontrovertible data: the autopsy of a character, the secretions that incriminate another, testimonies from courts, hospitals, funeral homes, the places where the last things happen.
The passion for copying the real has changed the most modest customs. Those who do a television interview ask the interviewee to pass the microphone cable under his shirt to look “natural” (as if the viewer does not know it is a program!).
I come to the core of my argument: art risks mimicking the environment to the point of not contributing anything new to it. In Mexico, the challenge is not that someone writes a novel about druglords and violence since almost all of them are about that, but that writing about druglords and violence also talks about something else. In journalism, the challenge is not to ignore the urgencies of politics, but to show that the universe is a little broader.
One of Tolstoy’s greatest lessons is that life multiplies its possibilities even in the limit moments. In War and Peace, the battle of Borodino does not suspend the parallel plots of the characters. The fire does not extinguish the dreams, the loves, the longings, the opportunities that are lost but remembered.
The task of art is not to imitate reality but to attribute other possibilities to it. In the face of an overdose of data, nothing is as rebellious as thinking that things can be different. To change the world, we must imagine it.
This was originally published in Spanish by Reforma on August 19, 2022