Objective Correlatives

 Like many Americans, pretty much the only time I see new, popular, contemporary films these days—the latest family-friendly CGI gem, say, or the latest Oscar-winner, etc.—is over family vacations, when we're all looking for a way to pass the evening together. And since these occasions only come around so many times a year, they always have a remedial quality: we're trying to catch up with what some of us, or some of our friends, have already seen and raved about during the interval since our last meeting. 

And with all these films lately, I seem to be having the same repetitive experience of let-down. Someone will highly recommend the film to me and explain its main theme. I will be instantly impressed. "That sounds amazing! So relevant! So on-point!" Then I will see the film, and it will feel strangely hollow. The resonant and appealing theme was there all right. But was there anything else? And if the theme was all there was to it, then what was the point of watching it, instead of just talking about it? 

Two years ago, for instance, the de rigueur family film that everyone had to watch over their next vacation was Encanto. A friend sold me on it easily. "There's this girl who's part of this huge family and they all have magical powers—except her!" my friend said. "Oh my god!" I replied. "That's like me! That's like you! That's like all of us! So relatable! So perennial! The fundamental human dilemma—the universal insecurity of every member of every family—what if I'm not the special one?!"

Then one actually watches the movie and.... that's about it. The premise is there, with all its thematic potential. The main character Mirabel struggles to maintain her positive attitude and family affection in the face of being snubbed for her lack of magical powers. She converses with one magical family member after another as they reveal that having supernatural powers isn't all it's cracked up to be, and that beneath the appearance of good fortune they have struggles of their own...

All still sounds resonant enough—but the problem is, each of these story and character beats is accomplished through simply talking (or, god help us, singing) explicitly about the character beat in question. The sister blessed with superhuman strength sings about how she feels overburdened by the pressure of family expectations. The popular, pretty sister sings about how she, well, also feels overburdened by the pressure of family expectations. And so on. 

Where's the actual story?, I kept thinking. Where's the quest? Where's the MacGuffin? When is this movie actually going to get started, instead of just talking about all the things the movie ought to be about. 

Alas... the real film never started rolling. The talking about the themes went on for a full ninety minutes.

This past week, visiting my parents in Florida, virtually the same thing happened again, with another must-see hit of the year. We, like most Americans, don't actually watch most of the Oscar-nominated films each year. Still, we are tuned in enough to the news coverage to recognize when we have been set an agenda and assigned a task. If everyone is going to be talking about Everything Everywhere All at Once, we ought to see it. So we dutifully paid our twenty dollars for streaming and turned it on. 

The film starts out endearing and strong, with funny and heart-wrenchingly relatable moments between members of a three-person family. There were a good, solid ninety minutes of this film scattered throughout its two-hour-and-ten-minute run-time. The problems really start in the second half of the film, when you begin to realize the full extent of thematic material the film intends to take on, and how little time remains to address all of it meaningfully. 

Once again, we had here a film with an outstandingly resonant thematic premise: a middle-aged woman finds herself paralyzed by choice: she wants to be a singer, a writer, something amazing. Her secret fear is that she has squandered all of these possibilities by a simple inability to commit to or follow through on any of them. Enter at this point the sci-fi fantasy set-up of the film, in which she is suddenly given the option to inhabit parallel universes, one of which exists for every possible microscopic choice she could have made. 

As she begins to explore these universes, she is forced to confront an evil version of her daughter with pan-universal awareness, who has been cursed with the ability to simultaneously inhabit every possible branch in the quantum proliferation of possible universes, and has concluded that all are equally random and pointless. The daughter therefore takes it upon herself to annihilate every possible universe through a super-blackhole constructed from a "donut with everything on it." So far, so charming. 

In order to rescue her daughter from a nihilistic conclusion that threatens to destroy her and everything else, the mother must, by the end of the film, realize and persuade others that her sweet husband's approach to solving problems through kindness is more effective than it appears, realize and then persuade others that, even with the panoply of new universes available to her, all are equally beautiful and equally flawed in their own ways, and therefore she would still choose to inhabit the original world with her original daughter, and so forth. 

You begin to see the magnitude, I hope, of what needs to be accomplished in the last forty minutes or so of the film. And, alas, instead of finding some way to allow all of these revelations, moments of insight, and self-discoveries to emerge organically from the events of the narrative, our writers regrettably opt to take the Encanto shortcut. The characters simply start saying all of this stuff directly. 

The sweet husband monologues about how everyone should be kind to each other; the mother tells him how she is suddenly convinced that he was right all along. The daughter in the original universe storms out of their family's laundromat; the main character follows her out and monologues about how she loves her, despite her imperfections, and would still choose living in the "real" universe with her (why?) over all the other possible universes she has glimpsed. 

One can imagine various plausible reasons why the characters might have reached all of these insights: the problem is that we are shown none of them. The characters just suddenly start asserting that they have discovered all of this, and now believe it to be true. We have the sense our screenwriters are stumbling over themselves in a rush for the exits at around the ninety-minute mark. When the credits finally rolled, therefore, I was once again left feeling somehow unsatisfied and hollow. 

Had I majored in English in college or made a more formal study of literary theory and criticism at some point in my life, I might have been able to identify more quickly exactly what was inchoately bothering me about these films: they had a lack of "objective correlatives." As it was, I had to encounter this to-me unfamiliar term from a comment in T.S. Eliot's 1964 preface to his The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, where he complains it is all the young people these days know about his critical methods. 

This led me eventually to pick up the earlier book of Eliot's literary essays, The Sacred Wood, in which he originally propounded the concept of the "objective correlative" in a brief essay on Hamlet. Eliot's bold and contrarian claim that Hamlet "fails" as a work of art is based on the assertion that the Prince of Denmark's wild emotions and paralyzing indecision exceed any cause he is given for these emotions in the events of the story. They therefore lack an "objective correlative"—that is, a concurrence between what the characters are talking about and feeling and what's actually happening on the stage. 

We can disagree with Eliot (or at least, with Eliot at the time he wrote this particular essay) that such a criticism fairly applies to Hamlet. We might protest that Hamlet's reaction, even if extreme, is in fact related to the events of his family life. Do not teenagers react disproportionately all the time to far more mild stimuli than those the Prince faces? Eliot says yes, they do, but Hamlet is too old to have the adolescent's excuse. 

One still doesn't feel that Eliot has it right, however. The objection really appears to be that Hamlet's emotional response to his situation is not a healthy or a rational one, not that it makes no sense. And if literature were to be always confined to the domains of the healthy-minded, and every character were to be required to act their age with corresponding dignity and maturity, our culture would be much the poorer for it. 

Besides, the very disproportion between Hamlet's feelings and the events of his life is precisely what suggests—to my mind—that the play is actually effective, as judged by the standards of the "objective correlative" test. The things that Hamlet tells us he is feeling don't fully correspond to the events on the stage; it is true—but this merely suggests that he does not fully know his own mind and lacks perfect awareness of his own motives—a hint at the realms of the unconscious that has often invited Freudian and similar readings of the play, and that has made it peculiarly suited to the modern age. 

This lack of congruence is part of what ensures the play is not merely a set of monologues explaining its themes and emotions, but actually requires its series of events in order to reveal the deeper subconscious motives at play. The events, therefore, do actually serve to provide an objective correlative, which Eliot defines as "the complete adequacy of the external to the emotion." We just need to recognize that there are externals at play in Hamlet's family dynamic—possibly Freudian ones, but certainly subconscious ones—that go beyond what he is able to consciously articulate. 

Even if we doubt Eliot's assessment of Hamlet, however, the theory of the objective correlative he introduces through it nonetheless goes a long way to explaining the problem with many contemporary popular films. It is—in substance—the same thing the writers on the website TV Tropes are complaining about when they label something as "character shilling"—the device whereby lazy screenwriters, instead of showing us how a given character manifests certain positive traits, simply have other characters attribute these traits to them verbally, explicitly, and at great length. 

This is, in essence, what's happening in the two films discussed above. The characters need, in order to flesh in the skeleton of the plot, to reach certain insights at certain times. Mirabel needs to discover that her siblings, whom she would otherwise envy, actually have problems of their own. The protagonist of Everything Everywhere needs to realize that she loves her husband and her daughter, in even their flawed, this-universe forms. 

And each time, the screenwriters choose the lazy path: instead of providing an "objective correlative" in the form of external events that explain why characters would have these realizations, it simply has them drop what they're doing and declare they have changed their minds. 

I said at the outset that, if films are going to simply be a series of characters telling us their emotions and the resolution of their themes in explicit terms, then what's the point of seeing the film? One could simply hear the same insight summarized by a friend and derive the same value from it. 

In extreme form, therefore, aesthetic theory might posit that any film or work of art whose theme can be extracted and summarized—interpreted into words, that is—must be an artistic failure. Eliot, earlier in the same essay we have been discussing, asserts that "Qua work of art, the work of art cannot be interpreted; there is nothing to interpret[.]" One is reminded of the painter Francis Bacon quoting the ballerina Pavlova's response to a question about what her dance of the Dying Swan "means"—"if I could tell you," Bacon quotes her, "I wouldn't dance it." Bacon was saying that the same is true of his paintings—if they had a meaning that could be rendered in words, then they wouldn't need to be paintings. 

I think, however, that this aesthetic theory goes too far. It is possible to have a theme that can be summarized meaningfully in words, but which gains greater texture through narrative drama, such that there is still value in portraying it in a film. In much the same way as a key insight from one's own psychological development may sound trite, or fail to move one's hearers, when one states it nakedly and devoid of context, but can acquire reality and profundity for oneself through a life experience that illustrates it—so too, a plot can put flesh on the bones of a bare theme, in a way that makes it live. 

The problem with so many contemporary films, therefore, is not that they have themes that can be so easily summarized—it is that they are nothing but these themes. Their characters serve as mouthpieces for the artist's main idea; thereby playing the exact same role as the friend who summarizes the key takeaways from the movie for you after seeing it. The film therefore defies interpretation for the exact opposite of the reason Eliot says the true work of art should defy interpretation: these films have already told you explicitly what they "mean" for you, leaving you no room for elaboration.

The theory of the "objective correlative" therefore gets us closer to understanding the problem than the theory of the uninterpretable work of art. It is perfectly fine—indeed, ideal—for a film to have a theme and for its characters to have realizations. It is even okay for them to tell us about them explicitly. But the realizations have to correspond in some way to the events of the film. We have to understand why what has just happened has led them to think in this new way. Otherwise, each realization is simply a miraculous creation ex nihilo, and we might as well have conjured it from thin air ourselves instead of watching a film about it.