Response Paper #1: On and Against Interpretation

In the twelfth episode of its final season, Bojack Horseman has the titular character face himself in a tell-all interview. He comes to terms with his toxic patterns, his self-hatred and more importantly reveals a crucial perception he has of himself:

I used to feel like my whole life was an acting job, doing an impression of the people I saw on television which was just a projection of a bunch of equally screwed up writers and actors. I felt like a xerox of a xerox of a person.

Bojack Horseman, 6×12

If you’ve seen a photocopy of a photocopy, you’ll find the lines get fuzzier and the image less clear. For Bojack, to be an imitation of an imitation is to become a continuously watered down and less distinct version of something. It is fitting that Bojack, an actor both in his own life and in film, contemplates his value within the lens of interpreting art itself. Fortunately for Bojack, the art scholars did not leave us with just the one lens to consume art. Bojack’s Xerox of a Xerox echoes the mimetic theory which postulates art is an imitation of reality. In this lens, Plato describes art as twice removed from reality: a painting of a chair is an imitation of a chair which is in turn an imitation of the Form of Chair. The modern style of interpretation however excavates and digs behind the text to find the one true subtext. According to Freud, all observable phenomena is manifest content and must be probed to find its true meaning in its latent content. Marx and Freud both propose that these events only seem intelligible but have no meaning without interpretation. More interestingly, Susan Sontag veers in another direction which posits that interpretation is the philistine refusal to leave the work alone and thus opts for criticism that focuses on a sharply accurate description of the appearance of the work.

In Against Interpretation, Sontag makes a case for sticking with the form of art. She argues that real art makes us nervous so it makes more sense when we (as audience, consumer and interpreter) reduce the piece to content and meaning. To think that art is only composed of items of content violates the art itself. She states that some art exists to be anti-interpretation and that a desirable criticism on the arts focuses more attention to form and utilization of the descriptive rather than the perceptive vocabulary.

Does stepping out of the box of interpretation minimize the work under the microscope? I used to think this was the case. I went into every art museum and film festival eager to absorb abstract pieces and inject my interpretation whilst conversing with my friends by the concession stand. It felt like an inevitable outcome after consuming media to discuss its meaning. I often used movie dates as a litmus test to see if my partner was “paying enough attention” to the subtext. Writing this all down now after a course of criticism and theory, I realize that I was minimizing the art. It is tempting to watch media like “The Woman Who Ran” and “By The Time It Gets Dark” and immediately work to decipher some hidden meaning in the visuals. However, as Sontag said, to immediately whittle something down to its content and meaning means that art is just an article of use for categorizing and understanding. It now seems very utilitarian to discard the idea of seeing something as it is. To quote one of my favorite English teachers in sophomore year of high school; “Sometimes you get stuck in your own head and lose the art along the way. Sometimes the drapes are just blue.”

To make a case for Bojack Horseman, to be a xerox of a xerox is not so tragic a fate. If Sontag were to hold that image with its fuzzy lines and unclear product, she would encourage us to give attention to its form, to abandon the perspective vocabulary for the descriptive and to simply experience it as it is.

A shadow world of meanings turns one world into another and another and another and almost disregards the existence of the meaning-giver.