Gotham Diary:
Known Unknowns
When I was young, I didn’t understand inertia, the juggernaut tendency of things to go on as they are. Most young people have no desire to reckon with inertia, but I wasn’t one of them; I’d have been relieved to know how powerful it is. Now that I do understand it, it’s my only hope for the future of civil society. The other difference between then and now is that the world was so much less self-conscious fifty years ago. Attention is being paid, and in spades, these days — but to what? I’m astonished and appalled to see how many bright young people still believe that the contemporary corporation, no matter what its line, can be meaningfully checked by law. But I don’t shout about it too loudly, because I wouldn’t like to encourage the idea that corporations are bad and must themselves be outlawed. Nothing is so simple, one way or the other.
For the next few days days, maybe longer, smart people are going to betray themselves by talking about Errol Morris’s new suite of entries at Opinionator. This time, his topic is “unknown unknowns” — the things that people not only don’t know about but aren’t aware of not knowing. Mr Morris’s example is the melting point of beryllium: he doesn’t know what it is, but he knows that. Many people don’t know about beryllium or even melting points. What, for smart people like Mr Morris, Jason Kottke (who picked up the first entry), and me, constitute the unknown unknowns? It seems to me that Errol Morris has bumped into a perfect description of the learned mind: one that’s aware of the unknowns. The smartest person is the one who can demonstrate that he or she knows less than anybody else, simply by rattling off a list of known unknowns.
Right there, you can see why I’m pinning my hopes on inertia to prevent a general psychosis, as bright people everywhere completely rejigger their idea of what it means to know about the world, effectively repolarizing it: it’s not what you know, but what you know you don’t know. Crazy!
The other day, I linked to a very long discussion at The House Next Door, about the merits of two classic films about the agony of ageing, Sunset Boulevard and All About Eve. Given the drift of their discussion — they preferred Wilder to Mankiewicz — I was not surprised that neither of them had felt obliged (or cautioned) to look into the identity of Sarah Siddons, after whom the theatrical society so prominent in the movie’s framing device is named. If they had, then they might have had an idea of who is represented in the picture on the wall that seems to have puzzled them. The Wikipedia entry for Sarah Siddons would have shown them: Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse. In that case, their conversation would not have been saddled with this wrongfooted rambling:
It’s entirely possible, of course, that the painting is quite famous. I freely admit that my knowledge of that art form is limited. Furthermore, I recognized Toulouse-Lautrec’s Aristide Bruant dans son cabaret hanging in Margo’s living room (hence, she likes famous art). So perhaps you know exactly what that slow zoom reveals, and maybe I should, too, and maybe that’s why neither of the two commentary tracks on my DVD makes any mention of the zoom or the painting. Then again, unless the painting is as recognizable as Mona Lisa, I find the haste with which Mankiewicz cuts away from the painting, after going through the effort to (a) hang it there and (b) zoom in on it, to be baffling. Giving Mankiewicz the benefit of the doubt—and thanks to my close examination of the painting on my computer—I’ll assume that the painting symbolizes Karen’s place between an angel she sees (Eve) and a kind of demon she doesn’t (Eve again). Still, I think it’s telling that one of Mankiewicz’s few attempts at cinematic storytelling is essentially mumbled.
The painting may not be as well known as Mona Lisa, but it was certainly familiar to the sophisticated members of the audience to whom All About Eve is pitched. The people who, afterward, would have been able to explain to anyone not only the identity of the painting but its bearing on the drama. Who was Sarah Siddons? What is the Tragic Muse? Why not a comic muse? Tastes change, certainly, it’s perhaps unlikely that today’s sophisticated viewers (under forty) will be familiar with this painting. Jason Bellamy is aware of that. His known unknowns include the identity of this painting, which might be “quite famous.” It’s his unknown unknowns that bother me: he doesn’t seem to know that the name of the Sarah Siddons Society might mean something in a movie about actresses. When I was in school, we were taught to treat such crumbs of information as clues, because, in a successful work of art, every detail was made to tell.
Then along came the booming racket of mass culture, which is interesting only to the extent that sophisticated youngsters have ironized it. (Even then, not so much; there’s rueful note of “you had to be there” to the satire). I am not going to unpack Joseph Mankiewicz’s references, scattered there and there, to a great Eighteenth-Century actress (the first century in which there were great actresses). There is nothing occult about them, really, once you stop to think and tease things out. Just for starters, the painting underlines the tension between an actor’s private and professional lives, a tension so sprung on what seemed to simple minds to be lying and deception that actors were denied Christian burials until fairly modern times. This tension electrifies every moment of All About Eve. Surely the great satisfaction of the movie’s climax (set in New Haven) is the discovery that Eve Harrington has been even more deformed by it than has Margo Channing. Â
Once upon a time, it would have been depressing to learn to learn that, in effect, you didn’t know anything. After all that schooling! It wasn’t easy to find things out, and it was rarely interesting. Today, however, that’s less true — less true than it was yesterday, and a lot less true that it was before the Internet was developed. What may keep us from completely losing our minds, as we tune in to a world of known unknowns, is the search engine, which has already acquired a formidable inertia of its own.