SHOW ME EVIL, CARELESS, CALLOUS AND BEAUTIFUL: WE NEED ART THAT REFLECTS THE BREADTH OF HUMAN NATURE

“In Michael Mann’s 2006 film “Miami Vice,” everyone is dialed to 11 for two hours and 14 minutes. Drug dealers have one-liners, and Colin Farrell palms a grenade in a cold-blooded threat to blow up himself and everyone else in the room. Jamie Foxx never doesn’t have his sunglasses on. Foxx and Farrell’s detectives drive alone down neon freeways while the wind blows their 2000s-ified greasy hair, and they stare cooly into the middle distance. Loads of drugs are tracked and stopped and raided. There’s a scene where Farrell’s detective Sonny Crockett mutters, deadly seriously, that “Somebody’s something’s gotta go somewhere some-when.” 

Cool guys staring at water, saying cool stuff — one of the best genres. In between gunfights and life-or-death phone calls so tense your heart stops, both men have other lives and other personas: women they love and a sense of humor and a need to escape for a little while. 

The final five seconds of “Miami Vice” contain the thesis. Foxx sits beside a hospital bed where the woman he loves lies injured, her life in danger because of his job. Meanwhile, Farrell leaves his house and the woman he loves and walks into the hospital, past a group of doctors and EMTs taking a smoke break. This is the world they may leave but will always re-enter: people whose jobs are life and death, who just need a break. I’ll always think first about how cool the movie is, but I keep coming back to it because it's more than that. These characters are imbued with full humanity — they experience the spectrum of our desires and instincts.

There is a certain resonant richness in all great art that works that way, a connection that only happens when something within us recognizes a genuinely human quality being reflected back at us. Sometimes the trait we see is bad; sometimes it is good. 

Art plays a vital role in our lives by illuminating the things about ourselves and our nature and our world that we would prefer to ignore. In October 2023, director Martin Scorsese released his 26th feature film, “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Like much of his body of work, the movie is a story of the rise and fall of evil men. Unlike “Goodfellas” or “Wolf of Wall Street,” though, “Killers” does not aim to take us on a roaring romp before the ultimate unraveling. Instead, this is a sober, somber, unflinching portrayal of how people get away with horrific evil. 

The film depicts the true story of a group of wealthy Oklahoma businessmen systematically murdering members of the Osage Nation for their oil rights. Yes, it is an uncomfortable viewing experience, but we have to see the worst in humanity so we can see with clear eyes and call a spade a spade. Art shouldn’t be news or a history lesson, but it can and always has taken on the mantle of showing society those things we don’t want to acknowledge about ourselves.

As people, it is natural for us to learn. Our brains are powerful information processors. But learning and knowing are different things. We can learn by being told, but we never know until we see and feel. 

But when I look around, I see an anti-art era. We don’t want to be challenged or have our perspective expanded or our eyes opened. You don’t have to look far for proof. The internet thought that “Oppenheimer” was wrong for focusing on the passivity of the bureaucratic rooms where atrocities are planned and that “Killers of the Flower Moon” was boring for showing us the unsuspenseful, un-mysterious process of mass murder. Sure, you can go to a movie or read a book to get away, to turn off your brain. Throw on “Ocean’s Eleven” any time, and I’ll watch the whole thing and be giddy about it. But if that’s all I ever do, I’m missing out on the “getting it” moments. Show me fun, yes, but also show me tragedy and evil and sadness — because we contain all those things in layers of complexity that make us human. I would hate to be limited only to my ability to be entertained. We are not just here to be amused. 

Films, books and art are generally good ways to learn about the world without experiencing every aspect of it. I hope I never encounter the depravity of the criminal underworld in “Miami Vice” or the arrogant evil in “Killers of the Flower Moon.” That’s why we consume art, though. Abstaining from things that make us sad or make us uncomfortable is unhealthy behavior. It is making a deliberate choice to be naive. 

There’s more to this than just showing us evil and depravity, though — we see the fullness of ourselves and our nature through the screen, the page and the canvas. Take “It’s A Wonderful Life,” for example. You could tell me that “no man is a failure who has friends” and I’d say, that’s a nice sentiment. But the movie does more than that. We begin by seeing young George Bailey save his brother’s life then grow up and save his father’s business. He says he’s going to “shake the dust of this crummy little town and see the world.” Instead, he trades that dream of travel and grandeur for a life of service in the same little town he couldn’t wait to leave. He puts in 20 years of ordinariness only to watch his life fall apart. He wishes, for the sake of everyone he cares about, that he’d never been born. At the very end, when it’s almost too late, the ordinary folks he’d given everything for show up and give everything for him. And in the front of a worn old copy of “Tom Sawyer,” George reads a note: “No man is a failure who has friends.” Now that is more than a sentiment. That is a story I’ll come back to every year, and you probably will too (and if you do not already, then let me recommend a new tradition). 

I think a lot about not feeling cliche, and most people probably do the same, which is obviously ironic. I want to feel that the concerns of my life are unique. Over and over, though, when that tinge of emotional narcissism kicks in, I remember this line by the writer James Baldwin: 

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

On the wall in my room, there are prints hanging in overlapping patterns. Some are music artists, but most come from movies. There’s a still of Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx in a dark taxi cab from “Collateral.” Brigitte Lin and Takeshi Kaneshiro sit in a neon room at a bar in “Chungking Express.” A car drives through puddles that reflect headlights and red lights from Mann’s “Thief.” These movies stay with me. Images stay in my mind from them because good art has a way of doing that. Movies, books, music, paintings, all of it. It sticks with you.

At both my most alone and at my most arrogant, it is art that reels me back in, that reminds me that I share everything, every hateful involuntary thought and every bit of righteous anger and every bit of longing for community, with every person in the world. Textbooks and classes get us to a point, but art is how we know ourselves and each other.