Fuck Moral Art (Patreon)

In Melanie Tem’s under-read werewolf classic Wilding, a brutalized and neglected young woman named Deborah struggles to find the strength to abandon her newborn child. In James Joyce’s Ulysses, banned for obscenity for many years in multiple countries, a married man estranged from his wife by the death of their infant son masturbates while watching a young woman near the shore until he notices her clubfoot, which repulses him. What is the moral of these stories? Who is good, and who is evil? Is Molly Bloom’s shitty hookup, Blazes Boylan, the “villain” of Joyce’s Dublin epic? What about the brothel madam Leopold Bloom imagines forcibly feminizing him and fucking him up the ass? Stephen Daedelus’s alcoholic father? His pompous roommate Buck Mulligan? Maybe it’s the dead dog rotting on the beach.

In a recent piece at Polygon, games writer Khee Hoon Chan argued (correctly, in my opinion) that AAA video games are awash in fake-deep moral quandaries and uninteresting depictions of shitty people doing shitty things. Chan then goes on to say — and here our opinions sharply diverge — that games, and fiction in general, should return to clear-cut conflicts between Good and Evil, morally unambiguous stories in which it’s plain where our sympathies should lie. If you’re starting to feel tired of seeing people retweet takes like that with “this is just the Hayes Code”, imagine how it feels for artists to see people actively campaigning for a return to that stifling, moralistic climate of creative restriction. Chan goes so far as to state that we don’t need ambiguity or moral complexity in fiction because real life is complicated enough.

As an independent artist, I’ve watched the ideas bubbling under the surface of Chan’s piece grow in prominence for nearly half a decade now, drawing supporters from militant younger queer people, diehard adult fans of children’s cartoons, and other disaffected groups. In concert with a cresting wave of vocal fan entitlement to popular art — beginning, arguably, with the backlash to the Star Wars prequels in the early 2000s and continuing at a constant rate (Mass Effect 3’s ending, Game of Thrones, #ReleaseTheSnyderCut) — up through the present — these sentiments have helped to congeal a prevalent culture of moralistic censure, one with no real impact on the vast edifice of corporate art but which can devastate the careers and lives of independent artists in the blink of an eye.

I know it’s déclassé to call your ideological opponents Nazis, but in this case the proponents of moral art — art in which good guys are good, bad guys are bad, and everything shakes out fairly in the end — are dabbling in a central tenet of fascism: a return to traditional values. Chan’s discussion of “clear, objective” morality is a direct invocation of Nazi attitudes toward art, unintentional as it may be. The mythologized past as a place of purity and moral clarity was a pillar of Nazi ideology and features prominently in America’s own long and bloody fascist tradition. I’ll leave it to Gary Brecher’s excellent piece on Victorian fiction to elucidate primly moral art’s close relationship to perhaps the single bloodiest period of global imperialism in human history, but it’s undeniable that the form of media most directly focused on clear formulation and transmission of morality is propaganda.

Chan goes on to claim that the preponderance of morally ambiguous stories in games and other media leads to heightened real-world sympathy and protection for oppressive forces like the police — an institution supported in large part by a culturally accepted belief, kept intact by racism, classism, and homophobia among other forces, that people are divisible into Good and Bad groups. Some of Chan’s examples are salient — black revolutionaries being portrayed as just as evil as their former masters in Bioshock Infinite, for one — but she goes on to treat this as the inevitable result of morally ambiguous storytelling rather than a product of wealthy white developer Ken Levine’s own repugnant beliefs. When it comes to mainstream video games her observations are shrewd, but the conclusions she draws from them are baffling and become even more so with her assertion that they ought to apply to all art. 

Who benefits from a lack of moral ambiguity in fiction? The people classed as subhuman, or the people in power? Who benefits from continuing to instill in the public the idea that Good and Evil are cleanly divisible and, as Chan says repeatedly, “objective” categories? Look at the Walt Disney Corporation, a monolithic media empire which built itself up on straightforward movies about Good and Evil and which now enjoys a virtual monopoly on blockbuster film production, as well as a growing stranglehold on repertory screenings and whether or not certain works of art continue to exist in physical form. Their current films are so sanded of nuance as to be completely frictionless, challenging nothing, stating only what tests well and raises no hackles. And the public has embraced it. As Ryerson states in her article linked above, even Martin Scorsese’s comment that Marvel movies are “less art than theme park rides” drew down a whole fandom’s worth of wrath on the director’s head.

By positioning itself at the heart of culture — pay close attention to the way Disney treats movies like Black Panther as first-of-their-kind artistic revolutions, the way it hides behind women and people of color when facing general criticism of its work — Disney has secured a strong grasp on popular perception of good and evil. As I’ve discussed elsewhere, Black Panther contains a scene in which a heroic white CIA agent uses a drone to shoot down and kill black arms dealers trying to start an anti-imperialist black global uprising. Its progressivism is a consciously exploited smokescreen for virulent American propaganda, its use of clear-cut Black and White morality (the racial connotations of which are a subject all their own) smuggling a pro-status quo message to its viewers and defenders, who are instructed to think of it as a crucial cultural touchstone.

Belief in absolute objective Good and Evil is an abrogation of one’s own ability to feel empathy and to stand in judgement, a rejection of the human capacity for change and the healing power of true accountability. When Leopold Bloom returns home at the end of his long, wearisome day, both he and Molly have been unfaithful to each other, have thought hateful things, have compromised themselves and wounded others. As they reconnect by making love, Molly drifts into remembering a dalliance with an English officer. This is the reality of the human condition, a contradictory mess of overlapping emotions and motivations which can never fully connect or reconcile across the bounds of individual personhood, and I spit on the idea that art must make it clear who in that bed is good and who is evil, who deserves love and understanding and who gets joylessness and ashes. Fuck that. Fuck it. Fuck moral art.