The Complexo Manifesto

A spectre is haunting American culture: the spectre of simple thinking posing as complexity. All the powers of the old cultural, political and mass media establishments have entered into a holy alliance to advance the cause of this spectre: Hollywood and the White House, the New York Times and reality TV, fundamentalists and fashionistas. No Child Left Behind and infomercials have rendered us unable to see beyond anything more complex than black and white. Ignorance is no longer something to be ashamed of; it's worn proudly, as a badge of authenticity.

The time has come, therefore, to fight back. It's time to revel again in the joys of subtlety, to love and embrace the gray, to focus on the journey rather than the destination, to love questions even more than answers, to carry opposing ideals in our heads without losing our minds, to hate the war and support the troops, to reaffirm that a vote for Kerry was not a vote for al-Qaeda, and to remember, in the words of the immortal philosopher George Lucas, that only a Sith thinks in absolutes. Towards this end, I present a first draft of
The Complexo Manifesto.

A work of art should be considered complex if it...

1. treats grown-up issues in a multifaceted way
2. suggests a variety of interpretations, all of which may be supported by the "text" or "subtext" of the particular piece in question
3. shows, rather than tells
4. witholds unnecessary and gratuitous graphic visual detail in an effort to engage the observer's imagination
5. like a great painting (see my boy Turner above), suggests an entire universe in a few strokes
6. features characters whose tone shifts from one shade of gray to another instead of from black to white or vice-versa
7. is Manichean in the pure sense of the word. "Manichean" has come to be a synonym for absolutism or extremism; historically, the Manichean ideal was much closer to the concept of yin and yang, of good and evil being mirror images of one another. (See Dan Skinner's excellent piece on the subject at http://http://hnn.us/articles/7202.html.) Just compare some of Hitchcock's villains (Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train, James Mason in North by Northwest) to the standard, caricatured black-hat action hero baddies for an idea of what I mean).
8. inspires you to think, rather than telling you what to think
9. reflects the real world, but also hints at something more universal and transcendent.
10. walks the fine line between wimpy moral relativism and Whitman's ideal of being large and containing multitudes.

A work of art is not necessarily complex just because it has many characters, multiple plotlines and/or characters who change.

This is not to say that all films need to aspire to complexity. If you go to see Mission Impossible III or some other SBU (Sh*t Blowin' Up) film and expect something complex, you are indeed bound to be disappointed. Furthermore, films that might be labeled complex are not inherently superior to an SBU film whose aim is strictly to entertain. We simply must try to reassert some standards in our critical approach to films that the Roger Eberts of the world would label with such adjectives as "complex." Grown-ups of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but those mind-forged manacles posing as charm bracelets.