The rebuke of mediocrity
When Orson Welles died, his friend and fellow film director Peter Bogdanovich said one of the greatest things anyone could say about a creative artist, or a friend. Bogdanovich said of Welles: “He was a rebuke to mediocrity.”
What constitutes such a rebuke? A certain restlessness, perhaps. An unwillingness to settle. Inventiveness.
Welles’ failures are more interesting than most Hollywood hits.
Also, impatience with cliché: Welles knew what it would take to make a commercial success. He knew the formulas. And he understood the Hollywood system. He just could not bring himself to play along. Not that artistic loneliness is fun.
There are some very fine filmmakers working today, and several who rebuke mediocrity. Celine Sciamma is one. Greta Gerwig is another. The film “Living,” directed by Oliver Hermanus and scripted by Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro, is a rebuke. The film “Drive My Car,” by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, is a rebuke of the blandness, depressing crassness, and even more depressing shallowness of our culture.
We are sometimes overrun by these qualities. There is so much cynicism and noise. Mediocrity depends on cynicism and noise.
If Daniel Patrick Moynihan was right that it is ultimately culture that determines the success of a republic (though as he also said, politics can lead and humanize culture, as in the civil rights movement), we may be in some trouble.
Remember the old “where’s the beef” commercial? When both the masses and the elites reflexively and consistently choose the slight patty made of sawdust and vegetable oil, we know that cynicism and distraction are winning. Our brains are being rewired by a mass media and a social media that have as their motives clickbait and profit.
So, how to renew a culture when much art has turned to statement and screed; much higher education to PC pandering; and even religion, as Pope Francis has noted, is dominated by what the pope dubs “ideologies”?
It will not be easy. Our current politics and journalism can’t help us much. And both should be seen as modest and limited pursuits, in any case. They are not about meaning.
But art, humanitarianism, and medical science are about meaning and can renew culture.
Modern rebukes of mediocrity come, not only from the Pope, but from a composer like Paul Hindemith; a writer like Flannery O’Connor or Joan Didion or Salman Rushdie; painters like Thomas Eakins and Andrew Wyeth.
Rebukes come from the helpers — the people who staff organizations like Partners in Health and Doctors Without Borders, and the people who run soup kitchens and food pantries in every city and town.
And rebukes come from medicine. It is the one part of society and history in which there is actually progress. The other day I heard the tale of a double lung implant. There is plenty of mediocre medical care in the United States, but most medical research is a rebuke to mediocrity.
I went to grad school at the University of Pittsburgh. I started in the social sciences, which are mostly quite mediocre (celebrations of the obvious and of postures). So I gravitated to political philosophy. But I am enormously proud of Pitt’s legacy in medical science.
Jonas Salk, now there is a rebuke to mediocrity.
As are so many of the research docs at Pitt, Johns Hopkins, the University of Michigan, and the University of Connecticut, to name a few. You spend a little time with such people, as I did a few years ago with Hopkins scientists and researchers, and your IQ and spirits seem to rise.
One key to rebukes might be seeking the harder thing.
Discovering political thought years ago, I stumbled across a book in the Coshocton (Ohio) Public Library called “Between Past and Future,” by Hannah Arendt. (No way most public libraries would stock that book today.) The writing was driving and powerful; the thought, dense and difficult. At last, some beef, I thought. It was also just beyond my reach.
Hannah Arendt’s life and work are monumental rebukes of mediocrity.
The great conductor Herbert Blomstedt is now, at 95, the oldest active conductor in the world. And he is on tour: Philadelphia. San Francisco. Chicago. Cleveland. He has to be escorted on stage. He sits to conduct. His gestures are so fluid that they are themselves a kind of inner music. He’s not keeping time. And yet he communicates profoundly with the players. He lifts. He transports.
Mr. Blomstedt also does tough pieces with few repeats. “I don’t like easy things,” he once said, “I like things that are hard.” Just beyond reach, he added.
Hence growth. Maybe art. And an expectation and mission for tomorrow.
“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” said John F. Kennedy.
That’s a rebuke.