How Downton Abbey is the M*A*S*H of our times

Copyright 2014 - A. Barake

Robert Altman shoots high. He made indie movies through mainstream distribution mechanisms, his way, with no apparent compromises. Actors loved to work for him. He got the best and he got them to be their best.

His breakthrough M*A*S*H film was made more or less at the same time as other mainstream war films like Catch-22 and Patton, but his had a humanistic twist, not as black as Catch-22, not as jingoistic as Patton. The characters were iconic, and the setting eternal. So much so that the TV series that followed used the same set, ran for a record time and was much loved. Altman did not see much or any money from the series.

It is interesting to compare the movie to the series. It is a good example of how movies could go further, were more adult, in the real sense than TV. The sentimentality was absent, the self-censorship not there.

Fast forward to about ten years ago. Altman, in his mature years, make the perfect manor mystery: Gosford Park. The threads of social change in post Victorian England are captured. The futile snobbery, the emergence of movie making, the dark side of robber barons, and the unfairness of class, are all wrapped in the tropes of the genre, with a wink at the detective, hammed up by Stephen Fry, the upstairs downstairs, the shooting party, the sumptuous settings. The movie works, like all Altman movies, on so many levels that it almost becomes a documentary.

The script credit goes to Julian Fellowes, who afterwards, said that Altman took his script as a starting point, in the same way that Kubrick took Clarke's "2001 a Space Odyssey"  as a starting point (my interpretation, not Fellowes').

Fellowes got a hefty fee with which he bought one of the manors used for the set. He then famously went on to write the TV series Downton Abbey, with many of  the same characters and settings. It is a lavishly produced soap opera. Sentimental, full of short intertwined plot lines, but ultimately apologetic to and for the upper classes. Completely unreal, completely different than Gosford Park, hugely successful and profitable.

Downton Abbey is to Gosford Park what the M*A*S*H  television series was to the original movie. Altman's career was framed by two very similar show trajectories. 

Selfies

Add captioCopyright 2018 A. Barake

The usual trope about the necessary relationship between the individual's pursuit of art and its potential for universal appeal makes it a spectrum, or a see-saw, where some classic works seem to transcend the creator to the point of redefining them, think of Kafka for example, and others are callow self-centered curiosities,  vicarious navel-gazing porn, something we can escape into for a while, think of Leonard Cohen, or of Madonna.

Being a spectrum that ranges from the personal to the universal, and the laws of statistics being what they are (more on that later), most artists balance with one foot on each side of the fulcrum to make a go at it.

Since I am using a categorization argument, I must also talk of those who create entire new universals, new micro-cultures, new ways of seeing, by extending the culture. Movements are easier in groups, thus marketing attempts that wow the weak-minded critics, but once in a while, a huge, huge ego leave the packs behind, through mono-maniacal focus and dedication. This is a special  flavour of self-centredness. This is
what we label as genius.

The cost is to the normal. You cannot be outside the norm and live normally. Looking at examples, like Picasso, Frank Lloyd Wright, Hemingway, we see the huge personal toll on their close ones. Relationships have to come second to the work.

Since we learn by aping others, there will always be minor artists who embrace the self-centredness first and then hope for the universality.

What easier subject to study than the one we are in love with most. The self-portrait is a rite of passage, like the nude. Without a real muse, I can be my own. Even a muse can act as an amplifier to my ego.

There are so many writers, musicians, visual artists, who can do no better than tell us stories about themselves. The ones we hear above the din are the ones who tell us with style, those that rise above the averaging noise, that can be seen through the grass, but the intensity, quirkiness, and interest is no substitute for transcendence.

Define transcendence? It is a tear in the fabric of the ordinary. It can be a distillation of events that has not occurred to others - therefore something new, always a winning formula, but more commonly, it is a new
combination of the ordinary that falls outside the usual intersection of normal bell curves.

This brings me to the statistical discussion that I promised earlier. Someone wise said that statistics is the mathematics used to make sense of stories. What that means is that we can use statistics to understand how stories are related, and how likely they can related to patterns. And patterns are the stuff of
thought, of art. Patterns are things that occur because the environment is what it is, so a pattern is a tendency, and from there we can rise up through the layers of entropy towards culture, toward life and art.

Statistics came into its own in the early twentieth century, and became so useful that it is now essential in industrial production, in fact a Guinness employee - yes the dark beverage company - discovered a family of distribution curves that help us "know" the level of uncertainty of events or data from very scarce samples, from very short stories, because stories follow natural patterns.

Statistics is counter-intuitive because it is not about individuals, but about groups, about populations, and we are not naturally empathetic, we are competitive, we are locked inside one vision, inside the self and the self wants to think itself unique. Statistics is the tonic to free-will arguments.

Art has to be on the edges of the bell curves, yet it has to make the bell ring from there.