“It pays to be obvious…” (Asimov)
You ever notice how things seem so blatant nowadays? Everything’s in your face and right there. Reductivist headlines blare incessantly. Songs describing sex leave nothing to the imagination. Many treat no aspect of life as fully lived until it’s blabbered about on social media. Everywhere, it seems, bodies are displayed as a fete to liberation, and art is sacrificed on altars of meaning, message, and agenda.
Hardly anything in popular culture invites real thought or deep engagement. We’ve become a loud and obvious people, thoroughly discounting the power of subtlety.
Houston Coley discusses an example of this in an essay about this year’s Civil War movie. Critics obsessed with WhAt ThE mOvIe Is SaYiNg have given the film bad marks because it deftly avoids being pinned down in existing, real-world political narratives. What it is saying can’t be reduced to a screaming headline or a one-sided political screed, making it almost useless to media machines that fuel sociocultural faultlines. That’s a sign of good art—an ability to resist reduction and oversimplification, a capacity for resilience in the face of criticism. Sure, the inability to get a handle on something is unsatisfying for minds trained to process information in soundbites, tweets, and reels. We are always asking what is it saying? and are put off by the suggestion of a mystery too subtle for our tastes.
The trend toward anti-subtlety has even crept into academia. Dr. Stephanie Rocke sees it everywhere and is especially appalled by its rise in the humanities. She laments that professors have “traded mystery for the soulless misery of measurement” and that academia’s new “closed interpretive framework does not make room for the mystery of life and is the poorer for it.”1
Subtlety, mystery, suggestion. I’ll use these words interchangeably to refer to art, stories, speech, and behavior that hold more than they seem to contain at first glance. Stories that don’t readily show their hand. Art that takes some mental, spiritual, and emotional labor to comprehend. Contexts that invite us further up and further in.
“The lack of mystery in our modern life is our downfall and our poverty.”
(Dietrich Bonhoeffer)
The shift toward blatancy and away from mystery and suggestion might not be new, but it’s definitely become more noticeable. One writer observes an alarming rise in the number of children’s books that eschew the show, don’t tell rule in favor of ‘obvious, heavy-handed lessons.’ “The preachy picture book is far more common than it used to be,” Rebecca J. Gomez says. “And what’s worse is that these books are often praised as timely and/or poignant rather than being criticized for their heavy-handedness.”
A recurring complaint about social media is that irony, sarcasm, humor, metaphor, etc., are often lost in translation or completely missed by audiences too lazy or too impatient to assume that words aren’t always to be taken at face value. Social media is, as one philosophy professor put it, “a perfect marriage of form and content, a profoundly unsubtle medium for a profoundly unsubtle individual.”
There are, however, advantages to unsubtlety:
It’s easier to put a person or work of art into a box and apply a label.
Unsubtlety requires less thought. The lesson at hand is the lesson at hand.
It’s easy to draw lines around groups of people and say who’s in the group and who’s not.
Those who engage in unsubtle communication know that what they communicate is understood clearly by their audience.
Subtlety, on the other hand, requires a mature communicator and a mature audience, both willing to bend brain and heart to a presented narrative. It is labor to submit to the art or speech of another, to grapple with it and search out its subtleties. And it should be. Not having to work even a little for our art makes us value it less. Culturally, we’ve gotten out of the practice of such labor. We’re short-shrifted, being force-fed simplistic, bombastic commentary in the news, on social networks, and increasingly in our art. An over-abundance of heuristics moves us quickly from what the thing is to what it is saying, bypassing a potential wealth of meaning.
Art, news narratives, children’s picture books and the like should not be intentionally and unnecessarily obscure of course. There’s no merit in deliberately confusing and misleading one’s audience. (If you’re trying to collect a spouse, being aloof and mysterious has advantages, I’d think. But what do I know? A conversation about personal subtlety deserves its own essay, which might be forthcoming.)
Communication, clear and direct, leaving nothing to the imagination, has its place. But humans are remarkably subtle creatures. Even the most down-to-earth extrovert cannot reveal himself fully to another in a singular moment. There is always a process of discovery. Humans are wired that way. And this is why we should bring subtlety back.
We learn better, we learn more, and we learn more deeply when we work out meaning for ourselves. When I leave the theater with questions, I know I’ll return to the movie again. The subtle film reveals its secrets over time—and only when I am ready to receive them. Going further up and further in is not merely a matter of opening a door and passing through. It is a journey, through forests and over hills and up waterfalls. The journey is where the discoveries are made and where lessons are learned. When we take such journeys, our intellectual, emotional, spiritual, imaginative, and psychological muscles are exercised. We become stronger, brighter, more capable people.
Currently, a friend and I are reading Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. Chesterton is as direct of a writer as they come, but his work overflows with subtlety. I’ve been through each chapter two or three times and I still don’t get everything; his writing isn’t the lessor for it. I know the subtleties of Orthodoxy, its mysteries and suggestions, will grow inside me and unveil themselves with time. As I meditate on the book, cultivate its place in my life, and imagine how it applies to this century, its truths (its lessons, its morals, if you will) will stick, as they are the product of my effort to grasp. Little of it is being handed to me.
Our unsubtle culture lends itself to intellectual, moral, emotional, imaginative, and spiritual laziness. We want something only if it’s easy to get. Why think through the implications of a politician’s policy proposal when a pundit can tell us, quite simply, whether we should like it or not? Why take up the cross if it brings moral conundrums and family conflict? Why read the article when we can get everything we want from the headline? Why patiently attend to the mystery of another person when we can get sex at the swipe of a finger?
The lack of subtlety in art, and our acceptance of this condition, is only one signifier of greater cultural decline. The muscles by which we engage with mystery, with life on a deeper level, are atrophying. Our imaginations are no longer being prepared to digest a meaningful feast, as Saint Paul might say; we’re stuck on baby food.
I hope the pendulum swings the other way. Eventually, we must re-embrace mystery, subtlety, suggestion.
Mystery, in its naivety and in its infinity, is the ultimate provocateur; the catalyst, when all answers seem to be found, that says, “actually, there is more—put your minds to this conundrum.” Mystery is priceless. Mystery is immeasurable. Mystery gives meaning to life; through mystery the ennui of finite knowledge that leaves no challenge to humanity—no reason for existence other than the hedonistic pursuit of pleasure—is avoided.
In a mysterious world there will always be something that fully engages our most valuable assets—our minds, our hearts, our souls. In a mysterious world the joy of discovery is forever possible—for mystery lies just out of our grasp…2
In a blatant and anti-subtle culture, we have nothing for which to grasp. And without anything to grasp, we’ll lose much that we already have.
asides + signal boosts
In a recent Gray Area episode, host Sean Illing and guest Derek Thompson consider how the billion subcultures brought about by the internet and media are very much like cults. —> Listen: Everything’s a cult now
Internet friend and SFF writer Abigail Falanga has started a substack, promising behind-the-scenes author stuff, “deep philosophical ponderings,” and “rants about things like Star Trek and Pride & Prejudice.” —> Check it out: The Magnificent Missives of Abigail Falanga.
I’ve had two songs heavy in rotation this week (listen at your own risk): Taylor Swift’s “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” a sad song that has no business being a total bop but somehow is, and Kendrick Lamar’s “euphoria,” a diss track to end all diss tracks in the same way WWI was “the war to end all wars.” Consider this a tease for a potential second Taylor Swift piece. Also, I planned to say more about the Lamar-Drake beef, but there’s been four (or five, depending on how you count) new tracks released this week alone. It’s very entertaining and dramatic and not at all confirmation that art imitates life because, in this case, it’s all one and the same.
Stephanie Rocke, “The Misery of Measurement: Humanities and the Loss of Mystery,” Eras Edition 15, Monash University, Australia, 2014.
Stephanie Rocke, “The Misery of Measurement: Humanities and the Loss of Mystery,” Eras Edition 15, Monash University, Australia, 2014
Thank you for the mention! I am lamenting along with you, particularly when it comes to the lack of subtlety and metaphor in some popular music (in addition to picture books, of course).