The seduction of scale
MAY 6TH, 2016 — POST 123
Humans love big stuff. Big beds, big bowls of food, big muscles, big eyes, big cities. As long as we’re not talking about boils or icebergs approaching a ship, bigger is better. Our taste in cultural products is shaped by this love. Any list of the best songs ever written wouldn’t be complete without Bohemian Rhapsody, Stairway to Heaven, or Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5. A similar list of movies will invariably include Citizen Kane, The Grapes of Wrath, and Gone with the Wind. All of these, and doubtlessly innumerable others that would be considered in the same conversations, have one thing in common. From James Joyce’s Ulysses to John Ford’s The Searchers, in one sense or another, they’re Big.
Today I listened to a record I haven’t in years. Consolers of the Lonely, the second LP by Jack-White-side-project The Raconteurs, was part of my daily rotation when it was released in 2008. The best song of the record, and possibly the band’s best song altogether, is the final track on the record. Carolina Drama is a five-minute story of illicit love and confused pathernity. Whilst the scene is domestic, the presentation is grand. The details in the lyrics of hammers swung at guilty parties, of milk bottles smashed on the floors of this broken homestead, and the ultimate twist ending lend an epic quality to the narrative voice. This is one of those songs that can regularly prompt tears, especially when performed live. The From The Basement session of the song might its best recording. But in working through my like for the song, it was hard to pin down. I can point to the layered vocals that creep higher in the mix as the song reaches its climax, or to the slide Brendan Benson plays on the track, but neither are really enough. Which got me thinking: is the fact that so many of the most well-regarded cultural products are, in one way or another, epic that they are thought of so highly? To ask a secondary question, what is so seductive about scale?
Economy might be one reason. Even if the products mentioned here are often particularly elongated examples of their media, given the amount of ground they cover, there is a sense in which they are very economical. In the course of Citizen Kane, we follow Charles essentially from cradle to grave, getting more than snapshots of the formative points of his monolithic life. So even if we’re sitting there for a runtime over three hours, we’re getting a lot of story in return. Bohemian Rhapsody is renowned for its traversal of musical styles, an auditory degustation. The song’s containment and presentation of so much stuff is a feat of efficiency that draws a not-insignificant amount of praise. However, mere efficiency or value for money/time spent wouldn’t seem enough to alone elevate these products. My suspicion is that there is a lot more going on.
Certain schools of aesthetics delineate the concept of subliminity from the concept of beauty along lines of scale. Described in these schools as that which can be apprehended but not comprehended, the sublime is an almost divine aesthetic category reserved for dramatic landscapes like The Grand Canyon or feats of engineering like Hoover Dam. That which is sublime, so the line goes, is that which resists our capacity to form a total sense image, to “hold” something totally, because of its scale. Essentially, by this thinking, our capacity to make judgements becomes harder and harder to exercise as the product becomes larger and larger, extending beyond that which we can realistically “hold”. The epic then confounds us. The epic movie, song, or any product compells us to approve of it by presenting far too much for our criticaly faculties to assess. The epic product is perceived as limitless and altogether beyond human. So who is any one of us to say Stairway to Heaven isn’t great?
We’re in an era where the scale of the most successful cultural, particulary movie, products is being increased year-on-year, most notably in epic properties like Star Wars. Even though big movies like Avatar and Lord Of The Rings have mostly left the serious cultural conversation, there is an understanding that scale of these productions is correlated with higher box office numbers. How exactly scale affects us seems to be mostly inconsequential. It is my contention that understanding this, however, is what turns big movies into timeless epics.
