“Every man’s memory is his own private literature.”
—Aldous Huxley
“The canon” originally referred to the books included in the Bible. In modern parlance the term has been co-opted to refer to the major works in any number of fields, genres, and subjects. The foundational texts of Western civilization, the seminal books of golden age science-fiction, the monumental films of New Hollywood, the landmark albums of classic rock, for example. Several outsized multimedia franchises have even found the need to define their own internal canons! But of course, even in the case of the Bible a consensus cannot be reached. On the other hand, people love their lists. And what is a canon, if not a curated list?
The problem with widescale canonization is that, relying on consensus as it necessarily does, it naturally gravitates toward a safe, predictable, middle-of-the-road quality, whereas those who truly love a thing are attracted to that thing in its extremes. Not only this, but it also attempts to calcify a subjective thing that not only differs from person to person, but also differs across spans of time for the individual. As a result, canons can strike the peruser as stuffy, stale, and obligatory. They may legitimate the bona fide pillars but they also round off the jagged edges, smooth the corners, strip away the eccentric outliers. But it is exactly those idiosyncratic works that are the lifeblood of the arts; those ragged curios that hum with passion and ingenuity while lacking in some way that the gatekeepers deem worthy of demerit. Not to mention that canonization often disregards entire genres, formats, and styles, or that artists and movements fall in and out of public favor over time, or that no canon would ever entertain works that are sublime only in part. No matter how you go about it, the finalized canon often feels like a lifeless compromise, even if several of one’s own favorites might survive the winnowing.
But even though the canon will remain a frustrating, fluctuating thing, a canon, or various canons, can provide great value. Specifically, I would argue that it is beneficial to the connoisseur, the critic, the creative, the aesthete, and the layman alike, to get a finger on the pulse of their own sensibilities by compiling a personal canon—a collection of works that have shaped their worldview, their thought processes, and their creative tendencies. You’ll never see every movie, listen to every album, or read every book, so you will never create the master canon. No one will. Don’t sweat it. You can sidestep this existential dilemma (which, in my experience, if given into, tends to sap one’s ability to enjoy whatever is in front of them at the moment), by putting some shape to your personal history of engaging with the arts and writing, speaking, and thinking about the things that you are truly passionate about. Hopefully you will find that your developing taste diverges wildly from any consensus, that you can’t quite put into words why a certain thing makes you feel a certain way, that you feel somewhat exposed as you try to rationalize your obsessions.
Following this exercise, the rudimentary selection of old favorites should be regularly held up against the abundant and mutating canons within which those very works might be found, in order to stretch one’s tastes, assimilate the classics, and make new discoveries. Laying out our individual touchstones in this way will lead to improved discernment, cultivated taste, and a deeper understanding of ourselves and our predilections.
One Canon to Rule Them All—Or Not
Once upon a time the inimitable Paul Schrader accepted a contract from Faber and Faber to write a cinematic equivalent to Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon, a curated list of quintessential motion pictures. Once he set about the task in earnest, however, he quickly realized his predicament: that while choosing his entries was easy, explaining the nebulous criteria for their selection was nigh impossible without a plethora of contexts.
And so he took a step back in order to study how canons had historically been compiled, to decide if crafting one for cinema was a worthy enterprise, and to determine if it was possible to put forth objective standards that weren’t skewed by personal taste. But after he had readjusted his perspective and approached the task from a wider angle, his efforts proved futile.
Secular arts needed secular institutions. The concert hall served the function of the cathedral, the art academy the seminary. With the rise of Romanticism, Kant became the new Augustine, and artists were elevated to the role of secular priests. All that was needed was a canon.
In the end, though Schrader did come up with a list of sixty films—broken down into three sets of twenty (gold, bronze, silver); though again, picking them was the easy part—he didn’t produce a commentary on his choices. Instead, he delivered a dense essay to Film Comment, titled “Canon Fodder” that touches on subjects as diverse as the formation of the biblical canon, the evolution of society’s conception of “art,” the diminished state of film criticism, and the potential futures of audiovisual entertainment.
Particularly refreshing is his discussion of the “nonjudgmentals” in the fifth section of the essay. In wake of Duchamp’s message that “everything is art”, as well as Warhol’s conflation of art with fortune and fame, critics and academics responded by settling into modes of analysis that did not involve evaluating the works in question as art. They would take various approaches—pleading special causes; examining how people respond to given works; or exploring popular entertainment as a cultural phenomenon. Some, like Warhol, decided that money and celebrity were the ultimate determiner of quality. In any case, they emphatically avoided assessing the value of art as art.
These critical approaches are still around in various forms, but perhaps even more prevalent is the uncritical stance that equates personal preference with inherent artistic value. Today, film criticism (the realm with which I’m most familiar) is populated by academics dissecting films as they relate to their chosen niche subculture—queer, black, feminist, what have you—but shamelessly dominated by undiscerning fanatics who worship at the altar of celebrity and brand IP. The former type has clear value but limited utility; the second is basically just free/paid advertising—which, of course, Warhol would say is a form of art itself.
That said, you’d be hard pressed to find an enthusiast or practitioner of any artform who didn’t believe there were at least some objective criteria by which an artwork can be assessed. Think about it for a minute. How could one possibly watch a thousand movies, read a thousand books, listen to a thousand records, and at the end of that process say that each is just as good as the others in all aspects? That your average bar band could hang with prime Stones. That your run-of-the-mill manchild posting reaction videos on Youtube is as skilled a filmmaker as Coppola. That your cat lady bloggers are comparable to Shakespeare. That your elementary school art instructor is a rival of Hieronymus Bosch. This becomes even more absurd in light of the wider conception of art that Schrader lays out in his essay, a conception which includes science and crafts—geometry, astronomy, architecture, etc. Imagine having a chair collapse underneath you while a rival sits upon his sturdy throne laughing at your misfortune. Are we to say that these two chairs are of equal quality? Of course not! Let’s refrain from taking such a silly stance.
(To be clear, I don’t mean to denigrate bar bands, Youtubers, cat ladies, or elementary school art teachers. Quality can come from anywhere, be that a modest acoustic act at an open mic night in a rural town or a rogue filmmaker who posts $500 feature films for free online. Indeed, regarding film specifically, there’s been an ongoing argument over auteur theory. Is it even possible to fully express oneself artistically in a medium that requires so many different sets of skilled hands? Cody Clarke would argue that individual expression in cinema has only been possible for a short time. But I digress.)
Let’s shift back to a narrower discussion of the “fine arts”—cinema, literature, painting, poetry, and the like—and ignore carpentry and calculus. Now, of course, there does not exist a universal mathematical formula by which any work of art can be objectively and thoroughly evaluated and then placed in a sequential ranking next to all the others. There are no ironclad metric-bound criteria that will dictate if a work makes the cutoff to be in the official canon. And even if such elaborate, multifaceted scales were devised, and each minuscule subcategory weighted properly relative to the others, to actually use it would have deleterious effects on our ability to enjoy the very art we wish to examine.
Consider that Bob Dylan’s guitar is perpetually out of tune; that the Mona Lisa doesn’t have eyebrows; that Jaws is replete with continuity errors. The horror! But wait—Dylan’s nonchalant approach brings the listener close; the lack of brows and lashes is part of the alluring mystery of da Vinci’s most famous painting; the apparent mistakes in Jaws allow for a more tantalizing experience. I’d posit that in a vacuum Spielberg would agree that the sun should not jump around in the sky between shots; however, it’s difficult to argue with the result he achieved by doing it. (Read Alex Withrow’s essay on the discontinuities in the opening sequence of Jaws.) In this way, new styles and movements emerge and the arts flourish.
But just because the ultimate scale does not exist does not mean that we cannot apply any standards at all. Schrader eventually lays out seven criteria by which he thinks a film canon could be formulated. He cites beauty, strangeness, unity of form and subject matter, tradition, repeatability, viewer engagement, and morality. Some of those deserve further explanation, but I’ve linked to the essay so you can go read his elaborations for yourself.
While I think his criteria are a legitimate basis upon which to create a more or less objective canon, I eventually wind up asking myself: what’s the point? It’s not as if I’m going to start bowing down at a golden statue of Alfred Hitchcock or Orson Welles just because we’ve decided they’re in the film canon. Or that I have to pretend I don’t like Stuart Gordon just because his movies are B grade schlock that serious critics dismiss. Or that I need to act like I’m above rocking out to Collective Soul just because the limelight has moved on. The whole reason for a canon is to present it to someone looking to expand their horizons and orient themselves in the vast history of art.
A Personal Canon
An alternative point of view, which more closely aligns with my own thoughts, comes from film critic Adrian Martin in a blog post simply titled “Canon”. In it, he advocates for a personal, idiosyncratic, subjective selection rather than a consensus. His criteria for selection includes: sacred principle—to treasure cinema in all its forms; public service—to provide a roadmap to his tastes that some might find useful in their own exploration of the riches of film history in the same way that he was guided by Jonathan Rosenbaum’s overview as a youngster; fetishistic ritual—to hold up those films that bring pleasure through intense study, including those that offer only short passages of transcendence for the viewer; and autobiography/archeology—to record his passions for posterity and trace the spiderwebbing of his taste across the years.
Schrader and Martin agree that it is futile to try to remove personal taste from the process entirely. When you’re looking to branch out, you must do so from your current position and orientation. You have no other choice. Taking someone raised on a diet of low-brow blockbusters and top 40 pop who wants to get a grasp of music and cinema and then having them watch Symbiopsychotaxiplasm and listen to Trout Mask Replica is a recipe for disaster. To uphold the analogy, those new branches would quickly wither and die.
And so I believe it is beneficial to define one’s own personal canon; a running list much like the one Schrader was trying to formulate, but that which applies specifically to you, not to society as a whole. This is exactly what Martin presented and implored others to formulate for themselves. What works of art shaped your tastes, opened your mind to new ways of thinking, inspired you to create your own personal masterworks? Which of them have that mysterious je ne sais quoi that ensures they’ll remain perennial touchstones?
After all, society does not have agency in the same way that you and I do. It has no individual mind, and thus no individual taste. It’s a flawed exercise to aggregate our choices and deduce that there’s some underlying machinery guiding us toward a mathematically optimal outcome. It’s even improper to view the individual in such a sterile way. Human experience is messier and more profound than that. We have natural desires but the freedom to rebel against them, to shape ourselves, to flourish, to make tradeoffs, to seize upon emergent phenomena, to change our minds. And even if we were presented with a utopia that satisfied all of our natural urges (or a work of art that perfectly met the hazy criteria), we would destroy it to prove our agency, just as Solzhenitsyn predicts in Notes from Underground.
However, I want to be clear that I am by no means suggesting that one should stumble around aimlessly, accepting whatever algorithmically-produced stuff happens to be in your path. Too many diabolical actors have ensured that such “content” will not enrich your life but merely their wallets. I’m suggesting the opposite: show some initiative, regularly add new flavors to your palate, do a little bit of legwork in the library, and consider why certain things appeal to you. Neither blindly accept the lowest common denominator junk food nor thoughtlessly assume the stances of the intelligentsia.
The best way I’ve found to do this is to work off of what you already know and like. To use an example from my own life: I was given a copy of Moon as a birthday present because I was fond of juvenile science-fiction books as a middle-schooler. I loved it, so I began seeking recommendations for similar movies. That led me to (Paul Schrader official silver level canon entry) 2001: A Space Odyssey, which led me to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, which led me to Stanisław Lem’s book.
I think this approach, coupled with an earnest effort to study the history of your favorite mediums, genres, and subcultures—in other words, actually strive to understand why given works are heralded, even if you ultimately disagree with their reputations—will lead to a suitably refined personal taste. From this increasingly knowledgeable position you’ll be able to articulate your preferences, explain why you disagree with popular consensus on this or that, become more discerning in your choices, see the bountiful connections between various works, and make thoughtful recommendations to others.
If you plan to try your own hand at making art, understanding what makes you tick is immensely helpful. Your self-curated canon will provide you with an endless wellspring of inspiration, a folder full of proven standards to help you cut through your creative blocks. It should be brimming with the art that taught you how the creative process works: archetypes, narrative structures, character development, aesthetics, framing, humor, plot twists, guitar tones, time signatures, wordplay, voice effects, cover art—whatever works you would strive to be mentioned alongside in your own creative pursuits. Further, being familiar with your chosen niche and its seminal works will allow you to break new ground in it.
Ultimately, the deliberate investigation and refinement of your own sensibilities is an act of self discovery; a process that gives us a glimpse, however ephemeral, into the mysterious black box that is the human mind.