💬 Weekly Question: What artwork radicalized you?
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Art can shape how we see the world as children and, consequently, the adults we become. I know I wouldn’t be who I am without art, which I would go so far as to say provided me the empathy I have as an adult. I certainly didn’t find that at Sunday School. But art can also radicalize us, turning us into angry warriors for a cause however we choose to exercise that anger — through art, through volunteer work, through community organization, through, I suppose, joining a fascist death-cult like MAGA.
So, here’s this week’s question, which I hope will provide us a lot of fun answers and a chance to get to know each other even better:
What artwork radicalized you?
There are so many I could list, from A Christmas Carol and 1984 to They Live! and Do the Right Thing. But today, I think I’m going to go with a TV mini-series that taught that taught me to hate fascism, but, more than that, taught me to hate those who profit from or collaborate with it just as much. You’re either fighting fascism (in all its forms, political and corporate) or you’re helping it. It also taught me that the fight is intergenerational; our elders carry vital wisdom with them even if they don’t look or speak like us.
Anyway, here’s a clip from the TV mini-series V (1983).
I was radicalized by my parents so I can't say there's any one art work that changed my opinion in a political way. But in the fascism mode I'd have to say "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is hard to beat. It focuses on the intellectual Finzi-Contini family, Jewish aristocrats who live on an idyllic estate and are largely insulated from the anti-semitism sweeping the country, until they are not. It combines a lush romanticism with a devastating and creeping reality that sneaks up on them. It feels like that's how it happens. You are looking the other way and suddenly you're in this maelstrom of hate and now it's too late. Timely, right?
Fight Club. Is that weird for a girl who's never thrown a punch to say?