Art Beyond the Honesty Cage: A Few Thoughts for Lomez

What constitutes "right-wing art” — which is, by the way, labeling we’re grafting onto this thing after the fact, so it’s actually a very flimsy labeling, but what these pieces of work are doing is telling the truth about the world in a way that is not compromised by artistic or ideological preferences about how these events and these characters and these people, what society wishes were true about these people. My thing is that if you are telling the truth about the world, then you are going to make right-wing art. In short: Is it good? Is it honest? If yes, then right. - @L0m3z, What is “Right wing” art, anyway?

In 1964, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky published the novel Hard to Be a God, which was later adapted into a black-and-white film by Aleksei German and released to critical acclaim in 2013. Hard to Be a God, both the book and film, follow Anton, also known as Don Rumata of Estor, an undercover operative from future Earth sent to the alien planet of Arkanar. In the novel, he is on a mission to observe; in the film, he strains to spark a renaissance.

In the film, the humans of Arkanar are stuck in the late Middle Ages. What we see of Arkanar is beyond disturbing. The people are covered in grime, mud, and blood. Life is unimaginably cruel. Slaves are chained from the age of three. Furnaces roar with cages suspended over them, awaiting human fuel. This is a world where it is better never to have been born, and being born condemns you to a life of terror and pain. The film calls to mind other great works of apocalyptic cinema, such as Threads or When the Wind Blows. But nothing is exactly the same—nothing is as soulless and disturbing and emphatically hopeless as German’s masterpiece.

Don Rumata tries to save intellectuals to advance society, and in doing so brings himself into conflict with the unpitiable factions of the Blacks and the Greys. The Greys, led by Don Reba, exploit poverty and ignorance to maintain their power over the pig-like swarms of humans that scavenge the streets of Arkanar. For the Greys, intellectuals are a practical impediment to absolute power. The Blacks actively hunt intellectuals; they are not motivated by power but by a genuine hatred of critical thought and intelligence. They are fanatics, arising from the throngs of cattle, wielding brittle iron and dull blades to keep themselves in the familiar mud. Slowly, the Greys are being replaced by the Blacks. Don Rumata inhabits a planet of savages who have trapped themselves forever in a cage of their own making, too ignorant even to notice or comprehend it. In the film, unlike the book, he effectively abandons his mission—a more terrible curse, in a way, than the ignorance itself. One can only imagine the gleaming cities and starships of the far future that he once knew and will never see again, as the world descends into an age of rape and chains, where mud and shit are the sun and moon, and whispered bright ideas cannot even be heresy, because none can even think.

The central theme of Hard to Be a God is timeless, capturing the dilemma of the “progressor” or enlightened observer who cannot intervene. This is a dilemma every parent knows: when they watch their child struggle to perform a task, they know they cannot do it for them. One watches the child fail and fall, hoping for a spark of realization to cross their face, for the seemingly impossible to become stupidly simple. But what if they never do? It’s Hard to Be a God, first, because true godhood would require absolute detachment—feeling only pity, never rage, never personal involvement, never the urge to act decisively against evil or to proactively teach. And second, what if you could teach, but they still could not learn? This is Don Rumata’s dilemma: he cannot teach, but if he could, they could not learn.

Hard to Be a God is a beautiful, artistic exploration of these questions. And it is a dishonest political film based on a dishonest political book.

Highly Respected Dissidents

Written in the aftermath of the Manege Affair—when Nikita Khrushchev visited a 1962 exhibition of Moscow artists and erupted against surrealist, pornographic, and abstract works he deemed artistically incorrect in the USSR—Hard to Be a God arrived on the literary scene as a controversial, critical work parodying the state’s crackdown on intellectuals and artists. Its most fervent critics were loyal Soviet artists who detected fascist and abstract themes in its science fiction. Despite accusations of countersignaling Soviet socialism and straying beyond politically and artistically correct lines, the Strugatsky brothers remained “safe” to publish. Their writing, though critical of the Soviet system, was permitted because their novels—though critical of communism—always attacked Tsarist feudalism or the old Stalinist regime more sharply, allowing plausible redirection of criticism toward defunct powers rather than those actually in charge. In other works, such as Roadside Picnic (which inspired the popular S.T.A.L.K.E.R. franchise), doom stays sufficiently abstract to sidestep controversy.

And yet there are silly-obvious political allusions. The villain of Hard to Be a God, Don Reba, was originally named Rebia—a none-too-subtle play on Beria (nodding to Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s NKVD chief and pedophile during World War II). George Lucas famously pulled a similar trick with Nute Gunray (Newt Gingrich) in The Phantom Menace. As a nod to Beria, this cast the villain as the old Soviet elite—safe to criticize—while the actually existing Soviet elite would brook no such attacks. We should not mistake Hard to Be a God for anti-communist art. In fact, it was quite accommodating of the artistic and political constraints on literature at the time. This work, now hailed as “dissident,” is only dissident in retrospect. From a socialist viewpoint, Don Rumata stands in for the “true communists” of the USSR, whose critique was that Soviet society wasn’t communist enough, not enlightened enough. If only the Blacks and Greys would get out of the way, and the damn peasants would listen, paradise was possible!

For these reasons, the Strugatsky brothers—unlike Mikhail Bulgakov, author of The Master and Margarita—were safe to enjoy for most of their careers. In their “dissident” art, they offered apologia for true believers. They attacked safe targets of the old regime, like Beria, and not the actual gatekeepers in state media who sought to censor their work. They avoided Bulgakov’s mistake of openly supporting the White Russians and celebrating Christianity. Had the Soviet Union not fallen, the Strugatskys would still have been successful artists. The Master and Margarita, though far more critical of the Soviet system, was heavily restricted in circulation and adaptation because its themes were expressly Christian. Had the Soviet Union never collapsed, Bulgakov would still be remembered as a dissident. Bulgakov sought to capture artistic truth, but his work is no more or less artistic than that of the Strugatsky brothers.

All this is to say: Hard to Be a God—one of the great works of Soviet dissident literature and post-Soviet film—is not dissident at all, and from a certain point of view was accommodationist satire. It is a satire and critique of the Soviet system; nonetheless, it was published because, buried beneath the satire, lay an apologia for Soviet dreams of paradise. In two important ways—with its critique of progress and its anti-Soviet satirical elements—it is a plausibly “right-leaning” work of art. At the same time, its apologia, its orientation toward ethical constraints, and its accommodation of socialist art’s politically correct targets make it plausibly “left-leaning.” It communicates truths and lies and was written with political intent.

Because the Soviet Union collapsed, we now focus on the dissident elements of Hard to Be a God; if the Soviet Union had survived, we might have emphasized the elements of intellectual apologia. This stands in stark contrast to The Master and Margarita, which, in any reality, would be understood as a right-leaning critique and a genuine work of dissident art. What separates Hard to Be a God from The Master and Margarita is not a monopoly on truth, but rather that one is intentionally obscure about its political orientation, while the other is explicitly right-leaning.

Hard to Be a God told the truth about the life of the mind in the Soviet Union. Truth is neither politically neutral nor monopolized: Hard to Be a God tells truths that resonate with the right. The Strugatskys were navigating censorship; yet their “truth” was partial, accommodatist, and hopeful in a way that feels left-leaning in intent.

Lomez’s formula—good art is honest art, honest art is right-wing art—does not hold up as a reliable way to understand what makes art right-leaning. So, what does?

Can we have an interesting conversation about a work’s right-leaning messages or themes? Is the content resonant with right-leaning concerns—hierarchy, human limits, good and evil, skepticism of utopia, cultural belonging—even if it contains contradictions, accommodations, or outright lies? If the artist leans right, or the work speaks meaningfully to those who do, then yes.

Politics and Lies are Central to All Art

Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints is a work of art. It is also plainly political, explicitly critiquing both the right and the left. My favorite lines from the work expressly discuss the nature of the left and right:

This is what the Left has never understood, and why it is capable of nothing more than hate-filled mockery. When it spits on the flag, pisses on the eternal flame, jeers as the old farts in berets march past – to cite just some of the more obvious examples – it does so in the most dreadfully serious way, like “dumbasses,” the Left might itself say, were it capable of self-critique. The true Right is not serious. This is why the Left hates it, rather like a hangman must hate a victim who laughs and jokes on his way to the gallows. The Left is a conflagration that devours and consumes in deadly earnest. All appearances notwithstanding, its parties are as grim as one of those parades of puppets in Nuremberg or Beijing. The Right is a flickering flame that gaily dances, a jack-o’-lantern in the gloomy forest reduced to ashes.

Raspail is forthright: he is of the right and against the left. How does this compare to Lomez’s notion that applying an ideological label to art is a fundamental category error?

In other words, politics and art are NOT the same thing. There is a feedback loop, yes, but politics does not circumscribe art. Art is not contained within its boundaries, or not totally, and so to apply ideological labels to art is a fundamental category error that got us into this problem in the first place.

The Master and Margarita is less explicit about its politics than The Camp of the Saints, but it is firmly sympathetic to the White Russians. Hard to Be a God is a multidimensional work in both literary and cinematic forms, threading right- and left-leaning political themes. In each work, thematic and artistic elements transcend politics, straying into religion, philosophy, and the deeper dimensions of human experience. And yet, two of these three works are clearly of the right. They are not on the right because of “truth” but because of their political orientation. Yet, they stand the test of time because of excellent artistic technique. They are beautiful, and obviously political.

Defining “art of the right” as truthful art risks narcissism; indeed, it is a losing formula. There are left-wing works that are truthful too, even modern ones: Nomadland has left-leaning themes, and is truthful art. Many popular shows, like Mad Men, owe their popularity precisely to exploring the drama and nature of lies and fictions—yet Mad Men carries unmistakably right-leaning themes, as does The Sopranos. To define right-leaning art as “truthful” is to bastardize the actually-existing art of the right, and to painfully circumscribe, even castrate, our ability to discuss and understand art and popular media. It is self-serving and counterproductive to act as if right-leaning art is uniquely truthful.

Anime is wildly popular on the right, yet much of it is simply fun, salacious, and perverted—a happy escape from the stifling puritanism of left-wing, asexual storytelling. Right-leaning artists tell lies, illustrate manga, produce scripts for television shows, edit films and short videos—and often their aim is not verisimilitude. Though they may sometimes be more willing to engage with reality than left-wing artists, they are just as often more creative and more fantastical.

There is beautiful, political art that lies. How could there not be? Politics is who gets what; art is simply the way we express ideas with care and beauty in mediums (though many will take issue with this definition). There are beautiful visions of who should get what, of what should belong to whom, of whose lands are whose, of which ideas best organize society, and countless cases of people being dishonest about the ideas they hold. Art and politics and lies are inseparable, as inseparable as the tides and the moon and the howl of the wolf.

The lesson of Hard to Be a God is that explicitly political art can be beautiful, multidimensional, and contradictory. It can lie there and be honest here; it can be of the left and the right. Good art can be political; it can also be dishonest. The problem with the dissident right is not that art is treated as political, or that artists incorporate political messages, but perhaps that they are simply not telling political stories in a compelling, multidimensional way. This is a completely different problem from setting out to tell a political story.

One can watch Hard to Be a God without any knowledge of Reba and Beria or of Soviet artistic politics in the 1960s and still appreciate the film. It is not so much that the art is put ahead of the politics; rather, the politics are incorporated carefully, with whimsy and spite, into the art. There is an element of play in the film that gives the political satire confidence—a confidence that belies the secondary message of Soviet apologia—yet never impedes a viewer’s enjoyment.

What is required to improve dissident artistic production now is not less politics, but more layers, depth, and meaning. More lies. Often, right-leaning art is one-dimensional, focused on a single message or vision. Consider a Jon McNaughton painting, and contrast it with a Norman Rockwell painting.

One is self-consciously romantic and beautiful, the other painfully literal. Or consider God’s Not Dead and Hard to Be a God. In both the McNaughton painting and God’s Not Dead, elements must be added—the flower growing, the soaring music—to compensate for the lack of effortless, obvious meaning. This betrays a lack of artistic ability, manifesting as heavy-handedness. The political themes are not incorporated well. That is to say, the message is so obvious, so poorly integrated, the technique is so lacking, that the art fails as art. It does communicate “truth”; it displays it front and center. In this sense, these examples of right-wing art do not fail for a lack of truth (Muslims fathers do abuse their convert daughters and Trump does represent the planting of new seeds to many) but from an imperfect artistic execution.

The “truth” of these works is front and center. The truth is political. The problem is not that the truth is political (as it is for many great works of art) but rather that the art is simply bad. The art suffers from a lack of beautiful lies. It is too honest and earnest, and therefore is flat and one-dimensional. There is nothing to discover or discuss. It is art that tells when it is trying to show. This is a problem of technique, not of political orientation, and a critical missing technique is the ability to tell beautiful, artful lies, which is how we embed the “tell” in the “show.” This ending scene in Hard to Be a God is much less truthful than the scene from God’s Not Dead, and that is why it succeeds.

Honesty is a Harmful Fetish

Right-wing art is not necessarily honest art; it is merely right-wing. The right does not have an artistic monopoly on truth. The right also does not have total freedom from sensitivity readers and censors. Raspail himself was mature enough to understand that he should make a few edits here and there to improve his work, and mature enough to lie without undermining the reader’s trust, which allowed his art to become more enduring. Had he stuck to “truth” without compromise, the book would have fared worse. So, he compromised, for the sake of a higher truth, he lied. The primary axis separating right-leaning art from left-leaning art is not truth, but the art’s political orientation. And that is enough.

We do not need to contort ourselves to make David Lynch into a right-wing artist, as Lomez does. Lynch has left-leaning, right-leaning, and transcendent elements. His art is decidedly not of the right. It is a lie to call Lynch a right-wing artist, unlike calling Raspail a writer of the right. We do not need to wage a cultural war to trick people into thinking artists who are not of the right are of the right; we should instead uplift and celebrate all talented artists, but especially those who are genuinely of the right. Lynch loves a bygone America and subverts it just as much; he voted for Reagan, but Bernie, too.

We must be honest about an artist’s political affiliations. At the same time, we should support those artists who are on the right, who are pushing the boundaries of AI art and memetic humour, who incorporate whimsy, play, and the jack-o-lantern’s cackle into their work.

Art can be too easily destroyed by a dedication to truth. It can become a cage that prevents the artist from earnestly engaging the full range of their imagination and creativity.

Verisimilitude has a place in the gallery, but I want to see Monet.

Do you like this painting for its truthfulness, beauty, playfulness, or lightness? Which of these words do you associate with the “right”? Is it good that’s the word you’d choose?

I strongly disagree with Lomez that “...the whole concept of [political label] art is a category error.” There is explicitly right-leaning art that is wonderful and beautiful, just as there is beautiful left-leaning political art and art with elements of both the left and the right and neither. The category is not the error; rather, it is simply one among others. The much bigger error is the notion that art must be truthful or apolitical in purpose or intent. Right-leaning art should aim for an honest, truthful depiction of the world. It should also embrace contradiction, dishonesty, and allow for play, spite, and whimsy. It is a category error to describe Monet as a left- or right-leaning artist; it is not a category error to describe Raspail as one. It is a category error to describe Lynch as right-leaning, but it is not an error to say his work has interesting themes that resonate with the right. Placing art above political labels is unrealistic, equally unrealistic as equating art with truth.

The problem with right-wing art is that right-wing artists allow their sense of “the truth” to undercut the complexity, depth, and multidimensional beauty of their work. They stand in their own way. Lomez’s definition of right-leaning art as “truthful” art exacerbates this trend: artists flock to the truth, and leave all the pleasant, beautiful lies to the left. The truth is so important, so vital, one can begin to think they can leave play, whimsy, lies, spite, fantasy, sex, romance, and most importantly, excellent technique, to the left. The problem is not that people are putting politics before the art; the problem is that people are telling only the truth.

The final revelation is that Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art. But of this I think I have spoken at sufficient length.