Real as real can be

This week, I had the privilege of getting to sit down and read Henrik Ibsen’s play “Ghosts.” What I thought was going to be a lascivious romp about syphilis, adultery and the sinful life of artists left me somewhat disappointed. As the father of realism, Ibsen’s words were unfamiliar to me. I found it hard to relate to the ideas presented in the play. It was as if I was detached from the text; the overall construction of the work seemed elusive and, well, unreal. Then I remembered that “Ghosts” was written in 1881. Of course I can’t relate to the idea that I might inadvertently sleep with my sister one day, because nowadays infidelity isn’t covered up as much. Often we find that we cannot accept the ideas that texts claiming to be realistic present to us, but that is because we don’t realize that our reality has changed. We have to remember that at the time, Ibsen’s plays were so shocking because they represented the secret lives of fictional characters that audiences, unappreciatively, saw in themselves. \nNowadays, it isn’t so shocking to see a man cheat on his wife in film or television drama. We have reached a point of extracting reality to its tiniest grain and putting it into art. Genres such as photorealism, which involves the artist painting a replica of a photograph and making it seem indistinguishable from its original, are proof that we are striving to represent ourselves as realistically as possible. Our films, music and photography have stripped down the matted gloss of Romanticism and now represent life in its originality honestly and free of interpretation. \nTake, for example, the film “American Graffiti.” This classic, coming-of-age movie tells a story that is very near and dear to all of us at IU: leaving for college. Outside of this idea, the film depicts the heart of suburban American life realistically, through its cars, its girls and its burger joints. Universal Studios, however, came up with a list of about 70 alternate titles for the film in disapproval of the simplistic name. I ask you, would that movie be the same if it were titled, “Last Night to Make Out,” “No More Cotton Candy,” or “Wake Me Up, I’m Getting Older”? \nIbsen might seem ridiculous to us now, this is true. But without his efforts in torturing the reality of our situations from his writing, we would be nowhere as a culture. Nothing is more entertaining than the truth to us, and without artists fighting for the cause of depicting reality, we would not be able to continue progress on that reality.