The Duties of Downton Abbey

[Over at Blinded Trials, my co-blogger Rose wrote the following post about Downton Abbey, with further reflection on the duties of art.  Several commenters indicated it deserved a bit more attention, and would be a good addition to recent main-page conversations along similar lines.  As Rose does not yet enjoy front-page posting privileges, I am posting this on her behalf.]

by Rose Woodhouse

If you are currently a film studies scholar, writing a paper arguing for the artistic merits of a film is probably a non-starter. It is completely obvious (to most in the field) that aesthetic preferences are merely expressions of political power. So any kind of critique of a film is always ultimately a cultural critique. Films are discussed as cultural objects, not as aesthetic objects. A film’s value is discussed only in terms of whether it criticizes the dominant ideology (good!) or reinforces the dominant ideology (bad!).

Let’s set aside the question of whether aesthetic value only ever amounts to the preferences of those in charge. A topic for another post! The question I want to ask is this: are films and television only valuable insofar as they criticize culture?

This kind of view often trickles its way into the popular press. I just finished watching Season 2 of Downton Abbey and (full disclosure) I was quite fond of it. (Season 1 more than season 2, but still really good.) To some, however, the show is problematic. The aristocratic class is portrayed sympathetically. Many of the lower classes are depicted as being pretty much okay with their lot, and approving of the class structure. So it needs to be explained why a liberal could love it. Going one step further, Simon Schama considers the show “cultural necrophilia.” He relates his biases:

But this unassuageable American craving for the British country house is bound to get on my nerves, having grown up in the 1950s and ’60s with a Jacobinical rage against the moth-eaten haughtiness of the toffs. They still knew how to put One in One’s Place. I’d barely crossed the threshold of one such establishment before its Carson had delicately knocked at the door of my room wondering when he could collect my trousers. He had not asked of course but assumed I’d want them Properly Pressed. I still remember the look on his face as he carried them off between thumb and forefinger as if removing a mysterious object in an advanced form of contaminated decay. Before “retiring,” I was asked by another servant whether I would prefer to be woken with tea or coffee. “Ah,” I said, “how nice. Tea if that’s all right.” “Milk or lemon?” he pressed on. “Oh, gosh, thanks, milk.” “The Jersey or the Guernsey herd, sir?”

I am indeed terribly sorry he had to go through that.

Then he goes on to argue the show is a disservice to the public.

This is the story of a specific family. Do you, or your family, exemplify your times in every way? Are you never an exception to your era, your class, your ethnic group? How dreary the fiction that always deals only with the generals, and not the particulars – always only with broad social movements, and never with the microsocial happenings in workplaces and families.

If you reject a film or show because it does not adequately critique its culture, you are basically saying that art should reflect your own social views. But why? You already have those views. You don’t need to be convinced. So art is…not for you? Really?

Art is then a lesson for those who don’t already agree with you. This strikes me as not only fundamentally condescending, but an proscribed understanding of art. Like so many wonders of life, like sex and love and marriage and children and friendship, it seems ridiculously limiting to claim that art serves only one function. And it seems especially to suck the joy out of art to insist it be only for educating others until they have as dark a view as can be mustered of rigid class structures and history.

I am not saying that there is nothing wrong with a system of landed gentry. Or that World War I was a walk in the park, or that women who wanted the vote did not go suffer to earn that right. I do question whether it is the sole job of every single work of fiction set in that time and place to educate people as to those facts. In addition to an education about broad social issues, art can also educate about interpersonal issues, about moral issues. And, dare I say it, some of the functions of art may not be educational at all.