Advancement Theory:
"a cultural condition in which an Advanced Individual -- i.e., a true genius -- creates a piece of art that 99 percent of the population perceives to be bad. However, this is not because the work itself is flawed; this is because most consumers are not advanced."
-- Chuck Klosterman
Esquire December 2004
So that explains it!
The reason why a lot of the stuff I respond to is ignored by the rest of the public. The reason why movies and books I consider proof of divinely inspired talent is ridiculed by press and populace alike. It all makes sense now. It's getting clearer. Things are coming into focus...
Take Alexander, Oliver Stone's flick. I love it. Most of the world, um, doesn't. Most people who have seen it would like to burn the print they saw, torchbomb the theatre, piledrive the director's son. Fair enough.
But now this Advancement theory has come into play. It allows me to say: "Fair enough, fair enough, but the thing is, this film's too Advanced for you. In five, ten years you'll finally recognize it's greatness."
At which point I would be accused of being a pompous snob, because believing in the
'Advancement' theory implies that, if such a work of art is, in fact, Advanced, the minority who responds to it would themselves have to be advanced, no?
Maybe not.
Maybe there are just some works of art that are so far ahead of their time (or behind the time) that they generally just soar over the heads of most people, while a small group of odd, displaced others see something illuminating there.
I happen to believe Alexander is a movie like that. I think it's both intensely old-fashioned in tone and presentation while at the same time aiming for something that modern cinema hasn't quite evolved itself into, a mythic blending of eras and narrative apporaches that nobody else is attempting. Hence, people's confusion and lack of response. Maybe I'm blending my own aesthetic biases into my read of the flick, but I think that's the Advancement theory's strength:
it allows your own idiosyncratic responses to art to have a theory that validates their fundamen- tal oddness. It backs you up, in other words.
Some films are obviously Advanced. Take Stanley Kubrick's movies. Films like 2001, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and his final flick, Eyes Wide Shut, were both loved and hated upon release. People either thought they were non-sensical, pretentious messes, or glowing examples of cinematic genius. Nobody's indifferent to a Kubrick film.
I think Oliver Stone's film J.F.K. is Advanced. What's scary is that that film is so Advanced that when watching it, it seems light years ahead, in theme and style, than all films being made today -- and it was made fourteen years ago. In its dissection of the means by which the military
industrial complex has shaped the way we perceive reality, in its exploration of who owns and shapes and diverts the explanations for the events that shape our lives, it exhibits a level of Advancement that becomes more and more relevant with the ongoing Iraq-Halliburton-US Army connection. Stone was highlighting the importance of this stuff a decade and a half ago. Only now is that message starting to seem truly relevant.
Many movies and books are good, even powerful, but not Advanced. If everybody loves it and agrees on its worth, then it's not Advanced. If most people are left puzzled, disappointed, or even indifferent, there's a possibility it's Advanced.
Confused? So am I.
What I like about the theory, though, is that it allows personal interpretation to occupy a prominent place on the judgement of the 'goodness' and 'badness' of something. If everyone in America rushes to see a stupid action flick, than the intelligentsia proclaims the stupidity of the national public. If that same public stays away in droves from a flick, well, those same non-elected elite state that the film probably has nothing going for it, that the public sensed a turkey and stayed home. Well, which is it? Are the people morons or dilettantes?
Probably both. Satisfying taste on a mass scale is a futile quest. There is only You, and your response to things. If it doesn't mesh with what everyone else is thinking, we are taught to think of that as proof of our own deficiencies.
That's b.s. We are the sum and total of all of our experiences on this earth -- an amalgamation of our loves and trips and schools and jobs and fears and hopes and books read and music listened to. Sometimes, if we're lucky, our own DNA can mystically recognize its counterpart out there in the real world; we can link our own view of life with another's.
We are all Advanced, in our own way. (Except for maybe Dr.Phil; something scares me about that guy. Maybe it comes from living abroad, from having learned about familial and culture mores in Japan and Cambodia, but I can't help but think that all of his stuff is so temporally, geographically finite. Meaning, none of his advice would make sense twenty years ago, or twenty years from now; it would have absolutely no relevance in China, or Brazil, or Russia. And so if something's so short-term and of the moment, so locked into a specific piece of land, how worthy could it possibly be? Final verdict: Not Advanced.) We are all operating on wavelengths that most people's frequencies are not tuned in to. The next time you see a stranger on the street mumbling to herself, or dancing to their own beat, remember that they are not weird, or strange, just at a different level of Advancement. The next time you see a flick that you just...don't...get, think of it as being Advanced, ahead of its time, displaced in time. It will allow you to sidestep our judgemental culture and leave room in your head for that point in time fifteen, twenty years from now, when you'll see it again, and something will click, and its Advancedness will, finally, at long last, be revealed, and maybe even appreciated.
