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“The writer’s role is to be a menacer of the public’s conscience,” Serling later said. “He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehi

“The writer’s role is to be a menacer of the public’s conscience,” Serling later said. “He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism and he must focus the issues of his time.” Good quote. It's been weird to see the belief growing the last few years that art should (or even can) be apolitical, and an artist's job is to make art uninformed by their political needs. Such an art doesn't exist of course, and I'm thankful to see a classic acknowledge that not as a necessary deviation from an ideal, but as an ideal in its own right.

at_a_remove 4y ago
This will be unpopular ... as a long-time horror fan, I found Serling's episodes to tend toward the heavy-handed, the obvious, often schmaltzy. I favored the Beaumont and Matheson far more, even decades later.
- ghaff 4y ago
  I'd have to look up who wrote what episodes although it looks like Beaumont wrote some classic ones. The Twilight Zone was always something of a mixed bag but, because it was episodic, from the distance of time we can easily pick and choose and skim the cream.
SoftTalker 4y ago
There are a few videos on YouTube where Serling talks with groups of aspiring writers. He is quite passionate about writing and storytelling. He also smokes incessantly, which lead to his untimely death at the age of 50.
- ghaff 4y ago
  I assume there are video interviews with Serling where he isn't smoking but you probably have to search a bit.
leephillips 4y ago
The point of view to which you object is not by any means recent, and it has always been prominent, if not predominant. I find most art with a political message as its purpose intolerably dull. I know where to go if I want to wallow in politics. Art should deal in the sublime.
- ascagnel_ 4y ago
  Art whose political message overrides its art tends to be dull. Art that intertwines itself with its message is far more interesting. If you want a fun experiment, compare the video games Cyberpunk 20777 and Umurangi Generation: both released in 2020, and both make political statements. In one, the political statement is steeped throughout the game, but it gives the player enough space to draw their own conclusions; in the other, the political message is forced onto the player in a fairly haphazard way.
  - selimthegrim 4y ago
    What did you make of Disco Elysium?
    - Miraste 4y ago
      Often, the best satire exists in a state of cognitive dissonance, with absurd characters acting in obviously ridiculous ways that nevertheless feel like the product of the exact same systems that govern our lives, with the obfuscation swept away. Dr Strangelove and Catch-22 are my favorite examples. The 60s US nuclear policy wasn’t really set by generals named Jack Ripper who want to inflict atomic hellfire because of baseless conspiracy theories… except that’s the chain of order the bureaucracy produced, with a longer timeframe and more words. Catch-22 is a comedy because the betrayals, idiocy, and soulless power moves all occur in one squadron with one or two links between people, instead of over the breadth of the theater and spread over many people so every step looks reasonable. It’s very hard to make this kind of satire because condensing and heightening narratives like that makes it so, so easy to tilt things a little more in favor of your ideas, which immediately loses that ephemeral sense of reality and turns your satire into a sermon with clown makeup. This is why there are so many attempts and so few successes. I’d say Disco Elysium is one of those successes.
nescioquid 4y ago
There's more to life than the political, so why should there be only political art? I see the pressure for art to be political to be somewhat unusual, precipitated by the times. In the 30s, there was a strain of artists who condemned any art that wasn't overtly political. This really seems the exception, probably a cyclically so. There is a lot of religious art, and probably more normative in the West is art based on the artist's personal expression. Nevertheless, every artifact of culture can be placed within its context and declared political in some way. Probably we can use the politicization of art as an indicator of a society's health, i.e. is this a culture that no longer believes in itself?
- crooked-v 4y ago
  > There's more to life than the political Everything is political. If you think a subject isn't political, it's because that subject isn't controversial to you personally.
  - function_seven 4y ago
    To write "everything is political" is to water down the term "political" so much that it loses meaning. If I paint a picture of a sailing ship cresting a wave, is my art political? I see beauty in the sprays of water, the upward cant of the ship, the sails full of wind, the gulls in the background, etc. How about a bowl of fruit? Or a blacksmith forging horseshoes? No, not everything is "political". Yes, politics affects most aspects of life, but that does not mean everything is political any more than "everything is sexual" or "everything is financial". Money and sex also permeate our lives in small and large ways. My painting of the fruit bowl is not a commentary on sex, nor is my blacksmith painting making any sort of statement on money.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - uoaei 4y ago
      Everything having to do with maintaining relationships between persons is political. This also includes one maintaining the relationship with oneself. So, everything in your subjective experience, as centered on the personal narrative (ego), is political.
jjulius 4y ago
>Such an art doesn't exist of course... ... what? Art absolutely can be apolitical. A piece of music can exist without political meaning; a beautiful oil painting of a garden likely doesn't have politics attached to it. I could go on and on. Some art has something to say while other art exists simply for the sake of existing.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  Only if you have a narrow modern definition of politics based on eg political parties and elections. Just as a very simple explanation with this example: a painting of a garden has politics embedded within it if not everyone has recreational access to that garden. A painting of a garden by a member of the family that owns it is just a painting, "apolitical", where a painting of it by someone who shouldn't be in it could be transgressive, or even threatening. These things are small and may seem like a stretch but this is politics. It's kind of like that joke "gamers think there are two genders: male and political." What we think of as political or not is itself an embedding of politics, not a neutral external fact derived from the universe.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - jjulius 4y ago
    My definition of politics extends beyond governments, political parties, yadda yadda. I also think that your response supports my assertion that your absolute - that apolitical art does not exist - is false. >... a painting of a garden has politics embedded within it IF not everyone has recreational access to that garden. And if everyone does have recreational access to the garden? >A painting of a garden by a member of the family that owns it is just a painting, "apolitical"... I am unsure how to take this sentence as anything but you agreeing that that piece of art is, in point of fact, apolitical. Please point me in the right direction if I'm off base here.
    - giraffe_lady 4y ago
      I put apolitical in quotes there for a reason. Likely to be perceived as neutral, not politically active or making any particular statement. But that perception isn't from nowhere and doesn't mean it's not political. You can refute any specific thing I say about a garden or whatever. But there will always be things. Everyone has recreational access, but does everyone have recreational time? Can everyone get the paints needed to recreate it? etc. Something is apolitical from a person's perspective when it embeds their political assumptions, basically. It's not necessarily wrong to describe something that way, but that assertion needs to carry with it a context within which it is neutral. Whether a specific viewer will receive it as political is a fact about the observer, not the piece of art.
TheCoelacanth 4y ago
Growing belief? It's hard to square that with the enormous amount of censorship Serling faced.
lostgame 4y ago
What the hell is political about some random instrumental lofi track? To claim no art can be apolitical indicates either your field of view of art is massively limited in scope or that you just haven’t experienced enough art.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  Who has access to the instruments to make it and who doesn't? Who has had exposure to the musical forms it is based on? These things aren't universal or evenly distributed across the planet, why is that? There's the politics. I'm not claiming that all art has an explicit political position. Just that all art exists in a context that is impossible to perfectly separate from politics.
  - lostgame 4y ago
    This is what we call a 'tenuous' connection, rather than a direct connection. It is not a result of the intention behind the art, which is the message. 'Run the Jewels' is objectively political music. 'Pussy Riot' is political music. The tunes on the LoFi girl channel are as apolitical as it can be. Lounge Jazz? Like...there are so, so many examples. I seriously got a chuckle from your comment, though - made my day tbh. :)
  - dahfizz 4y ago
    > I'm not claiming that all art has an explicit political position. Just that all art exists in a context that is impossible to perfectly separate from politics. You could say the same thing about anything. Every single piece of art is about oxygen. The artist had to breathe while creating the art; it's impossible to separate the art from the oxygen that enabled it. All art is oxygenated. It's a pointless and un-insightful comment to make. Just because you can draw a tenuous connection between a peice of art and politics doesn't make the art about politics, and more than the art is about oxygen.
sammalloy 4y ago
> It's been weird to see the belief growing the last few years that art should (or even can) be apolitical, and an artist's job is to make art uninformed by their political needs. Interestingly, this is a somewhat old belief. When you read about art history, a lot of these ideas about an artist being apolitical were associated with the classicist tradition and the French Academy, I believe. Later on, when the Impressionists and others challenged these views, they courted controversy for introducing political topics into their artwork in very subtle ways, from the way a woman posed, to what she wore, to even the colors that the painter used. So this is really an old debate that’s been around for a long time. It later became more of an issue in the 20th century as the old ways of doing art began to be replaced with modern art. I recall reading about it in terms of censorship and the red scare in the 1950s. Remember, before the free speech movement in the early 1960s, artists and writers were frequently attacked by the establishment for addressing political issues, and artists and writers who steered clear of these things were often rewarded and elevated by the then status quo. Those who didn’t stop and challenged the establishment could be blackballed as we saw in Hollywood in the film industry at that time. This also famously applied to artists who tried to address LGBT issues, which were pretty much forbidden and met with punishment. These people were frequently derided as "agitators" in the popular media of the time, a term that is rarely heard these days. Years before this, musicians like Billie Holiday had tried to address racism in the US, and the FBI went after her and other musicians who tried to raise awareness about the hardships they faced and they destroyed their careers. In many ways, just like today, elements of the US government acted like morality police, and their litmus test was politics. If you were a political artist of any kind, you were put on a watchlist and monitored. My understanding is that this is still true in many countries today. There’s also the popular and somewhat established conspiracy theory about abstract expressionism. On the one hand, some experts argue that it was a form of soft power to fight communism and to promote the American value of freedom of expression. But I have an altogether different take. In an earlier period of my life, I spent a lot of time investigating abstract expressionism and immersing myself in it. And I came to the conclusion that it could have been viewed as apolitical in one sense (and psychological in another), which would also work as a propaganda/disinformation tool to disengage the audience from current events and political concerns, in effect fulfilling the goals of its proponents, such as mitigating social and political dissent during the Cold War, the civil rights movement, and the various cultural issues at the time. Perhaps this is one reason why, during the height of the post-9/11 period, during two wars, a Great Recession, a housing crisis, an opioid epidemic, and the loss of personal privacy, there was a resurgence of apolitical abstract expressionism in the US. Maybe people were attracted it to because it took their minds off of real issues. When you spend a lot of time around abstract expressionism, you realize that it acts as a mental palette cleanser of sorts, and diverts your cognitive attention away from political controversy and social concerns. If this truly was a soft weapon as the conspiracy theorists claim, that it could possibly act to pacify people and keep them silent. My take only, of course.
WalterBright 4y ago
The idea that art should always be pushing an agenda, implicitly meaning the artist is somehow more civilized than the rest of us plebes, is pretty arrogant. Given Depp/Heard, Smith/Rock, etc., does anyone really think that artists are morally superior?
jollybean 4y ago
? No ... this is a problematic statement. To suggest that art cannot be 'apolitical' is ridiculous. Most art is fairly apolitical. A lot of art doesn't even make a statement. And FYI much of the criticism over 'politicization' of art, generally has to do with 'which politics' the artists has chosen, which medium, and which corporate giant etc..
NoOneNew 4y ago
I think the problem with "political beliefs" is do you really believe in them or do you want to be apart of a club? Pretty much anytime I've had a calm political discussion with someone, I've found out that they're a scatter chart on that political leaning grid instead of a solitary point. Yet they still say I'm this party. Or they're just a parrot for whoever is the poster child that week for whatever party. Political beliefs when parroted as a clear cut, right/wrong for every situation is what makes people's stomach churn to projectile levels. Political beliefs when presented as a complex flaw of the human condition that makes us all realize we're better off burning it all to the ground and sleeping on grass again... then enacting a system to severely punish anyone who tries to bring it all back, which would require a group to enact said system with then another group to oversight that group... oh shit wait...

at_a_remove 4y ago

This will be unpopular ... as a long-time horror fan, I found Serling's episodes to tend toward the heavy-handed, the obvious, often schmaltzy. I favored the Beaumont and Matheson far more, even decades later.

ghaff 4y ago
I'd have to look up who wrote what episodes although it looks like Beaumont wrote some classic ones. The Twilight Zone was always something of a mixed bag but, because it was episodic, from the distance of time we can easily pick and choose and skim the cream.

SoftTalker 4y ago

There are a few videos on YouTube where Serling talks with groups of aspiring writers. He is quite passionate about writing and storytelling. He also smokes incessantly, which lead to his untimely death at the age of 50.

ghaff 4y ago
I assume there are video interviews with Serling where he isn't smoking but you probably have to search a bit.

leephillips 4y ago

The point of view to which you object is not by any means recent, and it has always been prominent, if not predominant. I find most art with a political message as its purpose intolerably dull. I know where to go if I want to wallow in politics. Art should deal in the sublime.

ascagnel_ 4y ago
Art whose political message overrides its art tends to be dull. Art that intertwines itself with its message is far more interesting. If you want a fun experiment, compare the video games Cyberpunk 20777 and Umurangi Generation: both released in 2020, and both make political statements. In one, the political statement is steeped throughout the game, but it gives the player enough space to draw their own conclusions; in the other, the political message is forced onto the player in a fairly haphazard way.
- selimthegrim 4y ago
  What did you make of Disco Elysium?
  - Miraste 4y ago
    Often, the best satire exists in a state of cognitive dissonance, with absurd characters acting in obviously ridiculous ways that nevertheless feel like the product of the exact same systems that govern our lives, with the obfuscation swept away. Dr Strangelove and Catch-22 are my favorite examples. The 60s US nuclear policy wasn’t really set by generals named Jack Ripper who want to inflict atomic hellfire because of baseless conspiracy theories… except that’s the chain of order the bureaucracy produced, with a longer timeframe and more words. Catch-22 is a comedy because the betrayals, idiocy, and soulless power moves all occur in one squadron with one or two links between people, instead of over the breadth of the theater and spread over many people so every step looks reasonable. It’s very hard to make this kind of satire because condensing and heightening narratives like that makes it so, so easy to tilt things a little more in favor of your ideas, which immediately loses that ephemeral sense of reality and turns your satire into a sermon with clown makeup. This is why there are so many attempts and so few successes. I’d say Disco Elysium is one of those successes.

nescioquid 4y ago

There's more to life than the political, so why should there be only political art? I see the pressure for art to be political to be somewhat unusual, precipitated by the times. In the 30s, there was a strain of artists who condemned any art that wasn't overtly political. This really seems the exception, probably a cyclically so. There is a lot of religious art, and probably more normative in the West is art based on the artist's personal expression. Nevertheless, every artifact of culture can be placed within its context and declared political in some way. Probably we can use the politicization of art as an indicator of a society's health, i.e. is this a culture that no longer believes in itself?

crooked-v 4y ago
> There's more to life than the political Everything is political. If you think a subject isn't political, it's because that subject isn't controversial to you personally.
- function_seven 4y ago
  To write "everything is political" is to water down the term "political" so much that it loses meaning. If I paint a picture of a sailing ship cresting a wave, is my art political? I see beauty in the sprays of water, the upward cant of the ship, the sails full of wind, the gulls in the background, etc. How about a bowl of fruit? Or a blacksmith forging horseshoes? No, not everything is "political". Yes, politics affects most aspects of life, but that does not mean everything is political any more than "everything is sexual" or "everything is financial". Money and sex also permeate our lives in small and large ways. My painting of the fruit bowl is not a commentary on sex, nor is my blacksmith painting making any sort of statement on money.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - uoaei 4y ago
    Everything having to do with maintaining relationships between persons is political. This also includes one maintaining the relationship with oneself. So, everything in your subjective experience, as centered on the personal narrative (ego), is political.

jjulius 4y ago

>Such an art doesn't exist of course... ... what? Art absolutely can be apolitical. A piece of music can exist without political meaning; a beautiful oil painting of a garden likely doesn't have politics attached to it. I could go on and on. Some art has something to say while other art exists simply for the sake of existing.

giraffe_lady 4y ago
Only if you have a narrow modern definition of politics based on eg political parties and elections. Just as a very simple explanation with this example: a painting of a garden has politics embedded within it if not everyone has recreational access to that garden. A painting of a garden by a member of the family that owns it is just a painting, "apolitical", where a painting of it by someone who shouldn't be in it could be transgressive, or even threatening. These things are small and may seem like a stretch but this is politics. It's kind of like that joke "gamers think there are two genders: male and political." What we think of as political or not is itself an embedding of politics, not a neutral external fact derived from the universe.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jjulius 4y ago
  My definition of politics extends beyond governments, political parties, yadda yadda. I also think that your response supports my assertion that your absolute - that apolitical art does not exist - is false. >... a painting of a garden has politics embedded within it IF not everyone has recreational access to that garden. And if everyone does have recreational access to the garden? >A painting of a garden by a member of the family that owns it is just a painting, "apolitical"... I am unsure how to take this sentence as anything but you agreeing that that piece of art is, in point of fact, apolitical. Please point me in the right direction if I'm off base here.
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    I put apolitical in quotes there for a reason. Likely to be perceived as neutral, not politically active or making any particular statement. But that perception isn't from nowhere and doesn't mean it's not political. You can refute any specific thing I say about a garden or whatever. But there will always be things. Everyone has recreational access, but does everyone have recreational time? Can everyone get the paints needed to recreate it? etc. Something is apolitical from a person's perspective when it embeds their political assumptions, basically. It's not necessarily wrong to describe something that way, but that assertion needs to carry with it a context within which it is neutral. Whether a specific viewer will receive it as political is a fact about the observer, not the piece of art.

TheCoelacanth 4y ago

Growing belief? It's hard to square that with the enormous amount of censorship Serling faced.

lostgame 4y ago

What the hell is political about some random instrumental lofi track? To claim no art can be apolitical indicates either your field of view of art is massively limited in scope or that you just haven’t experienced enough art.

giraffe_lady 4y ago
Who has access to the instruments to make it and who doesn't? Who has had exposure to the musical forms it is based on? These things aren't universal or evenly distributed across the planet, why is that? There's the politics. I'm not claiming that all art has an explicit political position. Just that all art exists in a context that is impossible to perfectly separate from politics.
- lostgame 4y ago
  This is what we call a 'tenuous' connection, rather than a direct connection. It is not a result of the intention behind the art, which is the message. 'Run the Jewels' is objectively political music. 'Pussy Riot' is political music. The tunes on the LoFi girl channel are as apolitical as it can be. Lounge Jazz? Like...there are so, so many examples. I seriously got a chuckle from your comment, though - made my day tbh. :)
- dahfizz 4y ago
  > I'm not claiming that all art has an explicit political position. Just that all art exists in a context that is impossible to perfectly separate from politics. You could say the same thing about anything. Every single piece of art is about oxygen. The artist had to breathe while creating the art; it's impossible to separate the art from the oxygen that enabled it. All art is oxygenated. It's a pointless and un-insightful comment to make. Just because you can draw a tenuous connection between a peice of art and politics doesn't make the art about politics, and more than the art is about oxygen.

sammalloy 4y ago

> It's been weird to see the belief growing the last few years that art should (or even can) be apolitical, and an artist's job is to make art uninformed by their political needs. Interestingly, this is a somewhat old belief. When you read about art history, a lot of these ideas about an artist being apolitical were associated with the classicist tradition and the French Academy, I believe. Later on, when the Impressionists and others challenged these views, they courted controversy for introducing political topics into their artwork in very subtle ways, from the way a woman posed, to what she wore, to even the colors that the painter used. So this is really an old debate that’s been around for a long time. It later became more of an issue in the 20th century as the old ways of doing art began to be replaced with modern art. I recall reading about it in terms of censorship and the red scare in the 1950s. Remember, before the free speech movement in the early 1960s, artists and writers were frequently attacked by the establishment for addressing political issues, and artists and writers who steered clear of these things were often rewarded and elevated by the then status quo. Those who didn’t stop and challenged the establishment could be blackballed as we saw in Hollywood in the film industry at that time. This also famously applied to artists who tried to address LGBT issues, which were pretty much forbidden and met with punishment. These people were frequently derided as "agitators" in the popular media of the time, a term that is rarely heard these days. Years before this, musicians like Billie Holiday had tried to address racism in the US, and the FBI went after her and other musicians who tried to raise awareness about the hardships they faced and they destroyed their careers. In many ways, just like today, elements of the US government acted like morality police, and their litmus test was politics. If you were a political artist of any kind, you were put on a watchlist and monitored. My understanding is that this is still true in many countries today. There’s also the popular and somewhat established conspiracy theory about abstract expressionism. On the one hand, some experts argue that it was a form of soft power to fight communism and to promote the American value of freedom of expression. But I have an altogether different take. In an earlier period of my life, I spent a lot of time investigating abstract expressionism and immersing myself in it. And I came to the conclusion that it could have been viewed as apolitical in one sense (and psychological in another), which would also work as a propaganda/disinformation tool to disengage the audience from current events and political concerns, in effect fulfilling the goals of its proponents, such as mitigating social and political dissent during the Cold War, the civil rights movement, and the various cultural issues at the time. Perhaps this is one reason why, during the height of the post-9/11 period, during two wars, a Great Recession, a housing crisis, an opioid epidemic, and the loss of personal privacy, there was a resurgence of apolitical abstract expressionism in the US. Maybe people were attracted it to because it took their minds off of real issues. When you spend a lot of time around abstract expressionism, you realize that it acts as a mental palette cleanser of sorts, and diverts your cognitive attention away from political controversy and social concerns. If this truly was a soft weapon as the conspiracy theorists claim, that it could possibly act to pacify people and keep them silent. My take only, of course.

WalterBright 4y ago

The idea that art should always be pushing an agenda, implicitly meaning the artist is somehow more civilized than the rest of us plebes, is pretty arrogant. Given Depp/Heard, Smith/Rock, etc., does anyone really think that artists are morally superior?

jollybean 4y ago

? No ... this is a problematic statement. To suggest that art cannot be 'apolitical' is ridiculous. Most art is fairly apolitical. A lot of art doesn't even make a statement. And FYI much of the criticism over 'politicization' of art, generally has to do with 'which politics' the artists has chosen, which medium, and which corporate giant etc..

NoOneNew 4y ago

I think the problem with "political beliefs" is do you really believe in them or do you want to be apart of a club? Pretty much anytime I've had a calm political discussion with someone, I've found out that they're a scatter chart on that political leaning grid instead of a solitary point. Yet they still say I'm this party. Or they're just a parrot for whoever is the poster child that week for whatever party. Political beliefs when parroted as a clear cut, right/wrong for every situation is what makes people's stomach churn to projectile levels. Political beliefs when presented as a complex flaw of the human condition that makes us all realize we're better off burning it all to the ground and sleeping on grass again... then enacting a system to severely punish anyone who tries to bring it all back, which would require a group to enact said system with then another group to oversight that group... oh shit wait...