Subtlety is overrated. I find I have less patience these days for slow burns and coy insinuations, for quiet stories that never quite go anywhere or actually say anything. When I was first studying writing and art, I resisted the idea that everything had to have a “message” – and I suppose I still do, confronted with that framing. No, not everything need have a message, in the sense of a little moral written on a slip of paper, made to be read after cracking open the stale pastry of the story itself, but all art must have a perspective, a set of values, some understanding it wishes to convey. Art is communication, and communication absent content is mere white noise.
I don’t think everything must be bombast and pedantry, but I find the presumed literary merit of allusion over elucidation implausible. Perhaps this all seems a misguided complaint in an era of action-blockbusters which are anything but subtle in their presentation, but even these are increasingly often assiduously scrubbed of anything that might be misconstrued for a perspective or rebellious streak of moral philosophy. This is similar to the modern plague of so-called “unbiased” reporting, and is problematic in much the same way – that which purports to be without bias, that which purports to be without message becomes, perhaps unwittingly, replicator of existing biases and messages. Once you scrub away any overt viewpoint, all that remains is that which evades notice, the insidious default, the ghost of the status quo.
If, as an artist, there’s something you feel strongly about, then it’s your duty to convey that feeling, one way or another. You can hem and haw however you like deciding the most effective ways of communicating what you care about, you can swap and rearrange where and when you integrate what matters to you, but what goes in must be precious to you, must hold meaning – or why would you bother in the first place?
However, while I argue that it’s a waste of time being needlessly and obtusely subtle about your beliefs, about the core animating themes of your work, I do think there’s also such a thing as nuance – and that this is actually often what we’re deriding when we deride works as ham-fisted, maudlin, obvious, or manipulative (and the rest of the time what we are deriding is probably a young and inexperienced artist’s inability to convey emotions and beliefs except through cliché). Nuance is that which adds complexity to a work, which deepens its meaning – and, while being overt and obvious with your beliefs might at first seem to work against this purpose, the only way you can discover a deeper understanding is by starting with bold strokes and then filling in the space in between – by declaring a bold thesis and then afterwards exploring its manifold implications, rather than starting from contextless events and eventually building to something that maybe looks like an idea if you squint hard enough.
Another caveat to this perspective is that, while I feel the artist ought to express their beliefs and emotions as powerfully as they can, many beliefs and emotions are confusing, contradictory, and not easily described. This is, as far as I’m concerned, all the more reason to immediately exorcise those beliefs which can be understood and described onto the page, the better to dig down deeper into them and approach the ineffable contradictions and confusions lying just beyond.
Sadly, the art that gets mocked as empty pretentiousness is all too often that which has a strong message conveyed through unusual aesthetic and narrative styles – rather than, what is much more common and beloved, stories about nothing in particular told in the most conventional ways possible, and which usually garners all the praise which might be expected.