Enthusiasms

Crewdson, Twilight

Magic realism has two strings to play on: it either treats the marvelous as ordinary, or the ordinary as marvelous. The latter is probably not part of any reputable critic’s definition of magic realism, but at the very least it’s closely related, and it’s a strategy that artists often use in tandem with traditional magic realism, which is to say “fantastic as mundane” magic realism. Gregory Crewdson plays on both strings in his two iconic series, Beneath the Roses and Twilight. Twilight, completed in 2002, is the earliest of the two, and in it Crewdson leans heavier towards the marvelous as ordinary string than in the later series. Still, it starts with a moody shot that doesn’t appear to contain anything that defies psychological or physical realism: the first plate in the book is of a house at dusk, yellow light streaming out from every window; the neighboring house is completely dark, and the street is empty. By itself, there is nothing to suggest the marvelous or extraordinary, but there’s a certain mood in the picture that, in the context of the rest of the series, gives the picture a sense of mystique. (That said, it remains one of the weaker pictures in the series.) It reminds me of Todd Hido’s pictures of houses at night, although those pictures are unstaged and yet are imbued with a natural vibe that Crewdson strives to replicate artificially.

Todd Hido, from House Hunting.

Twilight is set in the same nondescript American suburb/small town world as Beneath the Roses. There are magic beanstalks, there are mounds of flowers appearing out of place, there are mysterious glows and cones of light from the heavens, there are creepy bus drivers trying to lure pajama-clad children into empty school buses at night and there are towers of sliced bread on the forest floor being guarded by birds; almost all the pictures are set — you guessed it — in twilight. The first thing you notice is the lighting and the production value, the second thing you notice is the absurdity, or perhaps it’s the other way around. But then you notice something else.

There’s something curiously flat and expressionless about Crewdson’s characters. If you are worried that you might suffer from Crewdson’s Syndrome, be aware of the following symptoms: emotional dulling, as if someone drew a blanket over your feelings, making sure the emotional amplitude doesn’t get too high in either direction; disorientation; melancholy; rigidity and slowing of body movement, including prolonged rest in unnatural body contortions; sudden freezing of motion. Together, these symptoms affect almost all of Crewdson’s subjects. As I noted in my review of Beneath the Roses, the pictures, being photographs, do not contain narrative, but they are highly evocative: they beg us to imagine a before and an after. The flatness of his subjects counteract this impulse.

In all non-realist fiction, indeed in all fiction, there is a pact between audience and author: we call this pact “suspension of disbelief”, and it involves the suppression of skepticism on the audience’s part, a sort of permission to violate physics or convention given to the author, and in exchange for this, the audience receives a much more vivid experience of the fiction in question, losing themselves in the narrative, escaping for a moment the mundane reality that provides the setting for their reading, listening or watching the fiction. The doll- or sculpture-like qualities of the subjects in Crewdson’s pictures, their general lack of life or spirit, is an obstacle that threatens to derail the two parties before they can ever agree to such a pact. The expressions take us out of the fiction, remind us that what we’re seeing is staged, artificial, and this prevents or threatens to prevent our suspension of disbelief; this, in turn, makes it a lot harder for the author (Crewdson) to get away with the outrageous things he wants to get away with, while at the same time cheating the audience (us) out of a vivid, escapist or “immersive” experience of the art. I can’t feel part of the world the pictures present if I’m constantly getting reminded that that world is artificial.

Now, it might be a deliberate strategy on Crewdsons’s part, a familiar trick of alienation or fourth-wall breaking. If that’s the case, it’s a failure. Rather than enlighten us about some kind of metaliterary point, some kind of philosophical realization about the nature of fiction, it simply detracts from what is simply supreme craftsmanship. (There are enough people trying to “enlighten” us about meta-this and meta that, anyway). I criticize out of love: this is not intended to be a negative review. I find Beneath the Roses and Twilight to be first-rate photography. The use of light is beyond almost everything else on the photo scene today — although I’ve seen movie buffs scoff at it, saying in essence “way to master cinematic lighting 101, dude”. There is obviously an extraordinary creative mind behind these pictures. They delight in detail, rewarding repeat viewings; they take joy in color, in smoke and texture; their surrealism is, the above caveats notwithstanding, still ripe as starting points for spinning explanatory yarns of your own. Crewdson — or rather, his entire team, consisting of not only the director himself, but also a cadre of set designers, actors, technicians on location and post-processing gurus after the fact — does so much right, and his pictures are so seductive, that their failures become all the more important.

Sliced bread and birds (all the pictures are really untitled): one of the finest plates in the book, in my opinion. It evokes a picture of some kind of religion to me: like it’s a monument, or part of a ritual or myth. It’s subtle, but also in-your-face weird.

In other words, you don’t need me to tell you what’s so great about Gregory Crewdson. His works are often praised, seldom dissected; there are hundreds of websites where you can see jpegs of many of his pictures, and his books are still in print and affordable. There are few obstacles to seeing his stuff, and once you’ve done so, you’ll probably see their appeal immediately. You’ll be seduced by light and color and shape, you’ll find yourself wondering what’s going on, imagining backstories or hunting telling details that might unlock the secret. These are pictures with a low barrier of entry: you don’t need a special background or subtle aesthetic discernment to see what’s to like about Crewdson. What’s to like about him is much the same as what’s to like about the Hollywood productions they resemble, except tailored to the medium of photography, which means that instead of a narrative you get the suggestion of one. If you’re used to movies or books that move from A to B to C, it might take some adjustment to enjoy photographs that contain only B, only a fragment of B in fact, and demand that you imagine A and C for yourself, but I don’t think this is a major obstacle for the average person. It’s pretty easy to like Crewdson and it’s pretty easy to see why we like Crewdson. That’s why I choose to focus more on the ways we might dislike him.

These are above all pictures of mood. Everything in the picture is a servant of its prevailing mood. In most of Twilight (less so in Beneath the Roses), there’s something going on, even if all the players are moving in slow motion and with their emotional volume dialed way down. But what, exactly, is going on isn’t as important as the mood the goings-on are serving. Just like there really is no definite answer to the question “what was the color of Mr. Jones’s hair?” in a short story about a Mr. Jones that never mentions or implies the color of Jones’s hair, there is no definite answer to what’s happening in a Crewdson picture. We don’t know why the woman is lying on her back in a flooded living room, nor what the naked woman staring out her bedroom window at night is thinking about. All we know is what looking at the picture makes us feel.

That’s why I think the pictures would be stronger if they contained something — anything — that could reduce the alienating effect I refer to throughout this piece. The photographs in Twilight do two things to us: they evoke stories in our imaginations, and they put us in a certain mood. I think both effects could be stronger if Crewdson made it easier for us to suspend disbelief. One thing that might lighten the doll- or sculpture-like feeling of the actors is if they were allowed to move. As it stands, it appears that Crewdson instructed his subjects to stand perfectly still, with the result that even when they’re supposed to be moving about or doing something, it looks like they’re standing immobile and have been for quite some time; this kills the illusion that we’re seeing a moment taken out of a narrative — it gives the pictures a diorama effect rather than a movie effect. It doesn’t matter whether or not Crewdson ever told his subjects to stand perfectly still: in the final product, that’s what they appear to do. Another thing that could have shaken off the sneaking suspicion that Crewdson is dazzling us with amazing production values to hide a lack of substance: what if he’d allowed himself a bit more emotion? Both a wider range — less indifference, more rage, confusion, jealousy, joy, fear — and more extreme emotional amplitudes — instead of someone being mildly curious, how about some all-out enthusiastic Calvin (of and Hobbes)-like wonder?

Why is she looking past the magical greenhouse? What could possibly be more interesting off-frame than what’s in the frame?

Insofar as Crewdson has a project, it appears to be infusing everyday, middle class, First World-reality with a sense of disturbance and wonder. He doesn’t really articulate his project in detail, and that’s probably for the better. Nothing he could possibly say is going to be as interesting as what he has suggested through his pictures. Nothing the author could articulate is going to be as subtle and imaginative as the vaguely fantastic ideas he has helped us all generate by generously providing a starting point for our imagination. If he fails, it’s not because he lacks anything to say, because that’s an accusation you could level against almost every photographer. I think it’s a misunderstanding of the nature of photography to expect photographs to speak to you. Pictures aren’t words; that isn’t to say that photography can’t be without substance, but its “substance” is of a different sort than that of narrative art. If Cartier-Bresson or Atget or Adams or Frank or Wall or Soth or Crewdson had anything to say to you that could be easily said in words, they would surely have written rather than photographed. Rather, the failures (which must not overshadow the successes) in his pictures are of fully immersing us in his worlds. He fails when sending us down a road of imagination only to put out rocks for us to stumble on, so that we occasionally fall out of the fiction altogether.

But he also succeeds. Gloriously. And despite the justified comparisons to Hollywood, there is more depth to most any Crewdson print than there is to be found in a tabloid or a blockbuster movie. Occasionally he runs amok with detail, hyper-managing every square inch of the sizable prints so much so that it gets too much: one bottle of pills or clock showing midnight too many. I wonder if that isn’t preferable to someone so unconcerned with deeper meaning and so preoccupied with immediate satisfaction that he doesn’t bother to bake in any significant details at all.