Is “NYPD Blue” art or just entertainment?
Return to this long standing issue of mine as to the difference between art and entertainment. Literature that is artistic in its product whatever its intent presents itself as a self contained fictional sphere which can be found to be coherent and vivid when it deploys plot, imagery, characterization and those other elements of story. You know “Hamlet” is art because you care about penetrating Hamlet’s character as he resides in the very credible atmosphere of Denmark. Literature can be found in the canon of work from the Iliad to Thomas Mann that are assigned to students, recent works not yet judged to have met that standard, though I think Ishiguro is probably a worthy advocate who has not yet been anointed at a Cooperstown because anointing a member of the canon is a matter of critical consensus rather than even having won a Nobel Prize in literature, which was awarded to Ishiguru. Some contestants, over time, fade in their grasp of having created an artful sphere of their own, and that is true with Steinbeck and O’Hara. We can think of those two and others as falling just short of making literature however commendable were their efforts. The question is what are the qualities of the literature itself that commend a work to be considered literature rather than an entertainment which provides a passtime for engaging a reverie, like most westerns or mysteries, these using the devices of literature but not accomplished enough for a reader to become resident in its work. Critics discuss whether some writers have come close but not quite there, as is the case with Conan Doyle or Mrs. Gaitskill, honorable attempts at literature, and even praise Agatha Christie for her plotting while admitting weaknesses in characterization that limit a reader’s full emotional and intellectual involvement. My own purpose is to find the qualities that make a work literature or not rather than think approbation a matter of taste or a reflection from outside the work, such as the social background of the reader that make a reader like rural or urban settings. Literature is to be treated as an objective matter rather than a matter of taste, the experience of art an exquisite accomplishment of the spirit rather than a bauble to be put in a china shop so as to remind people of what is already familiar.
A method for deciding whether a work of literary art is to be seen as excellent or just pedestrian is to look at whether it meets muster or falls short in one of the elements that make up stories. I once concluded that Wilkie Collins fell short, however credible and entertaining but not part of the English pantheon of novelists because his work was short on character. Although Collins was rich in style and setting and plot and was distinctive in that he was an atheist rather than one of those treacly Christians like Eliot and Dickens, and despite the fact that the intricacies of the characters in “The Woman in White” are very well developed, that is not the case in “Armadale”, what I presume to have been intended by Collins as his masterpiece, has a heroine, Miss Gwilt, who is stereotypically exaggerated rather than fully drawn as is, let us say, in James’ “Portrait of a Lady” or any number of Austen and Dickens characters. A novel with so simplified a heroine is a fatal flaw, though reconsideration may lead to an altered judgment about this litmus test of quality.
It is even more difficult to point to literary masterpieces when considering a new or popular art. Remember that Dr Johnson and as late as Matthew Arnold did not deal with the novel as an art form, though it is a credit to William Hazlitt, just a generation after Johnson, to recognize the comic novel as a version of comic theater and also affiliated with the comic drawings of Hogarth.The novel as an art form is not well recognized by critics until the turn into the twentieth century, particularly by George Woodberry, who recognized Austen and Dickens as part of the canon. It took a similar bit of temerity for critics of early television to think of any of them as artistic and long lasting. “The Honeymooners” was offered as a lonely example of popular art becoming literature. I would add, in the intervening years, that “The West Wing”, “The Sopranos” and “Band of Brothers” accomplished art however much these had to bend to the exigencies of commercial television by repeating themes, trimming or changing plot lines, and simplifying messages, as when “The West Wing” has to praise female staffers for being female rather than just being what they are.
The network crime series of the Nineties, ”NYPD Blue” comes close to being literature. Its disqualifying fault is not a matter of character. To the contrary, so many of the characters are so deeply textured and distinct, full of conflicting feelings, and the actors so artful, that it is difficult to believe that the actors are impersonating roles rather than just embodying their spirits. It is like when John Carre said that he had difficulty recognizing Smiley, his own creation, as anything other than Alec Guinness. Dennis Franz fully embodies the role of Andy Sipowicz, the troubled lead detective, full of anger, racial feeling, booze, and other malign characteristics but at the same time devoted to morality and his wife. A complex and memorable character. The setting of the series is also excellent. Its opening montage is with the seedy streets of Chinatown and Little Italy and their surroundings in lower Manhattan. Interiors for the episodes are the dim and dirty hallways of local apartment buildings, the elaborate uptown apartments noted as that of a different class of people in that most of the locals, both cops and criminals, range from impoverished to people holding down a living or trying to battle their own demons, everyone in that world just hanging on, a step away from disaster. Indeed, that is a visualization of a major theme of the series,that life is just hanging on, and the next moment a person will be shot or crack from their strains.That is the human condition and to encompass that the series invents a patois of expressions which indicate resignation and having to deal with things far more eloquent than the patois of the also quasi elevated talk by David Runyon, as found in “Guys and Dolls”. That cut of people is universalized, as are those in “The ThreePenny Opera”.The denizens, from hoodlums, known as “skels”, and up to the middle class detectives, use radages to convey their common condition. One moral message is “Don't buy trouble”, which means don’t anticipate disaster because it will paralyze a person even if, as has been revealed, disasters and frailties break out all the time. Also, the detectives say to the hoodlums while in interrogation “Get ahead of this”, which means confess so that a D.A. will look more favorably upon the culprit rather than be confronted with all the forensic evidence that will be adduced against you. Like many other cop shows, it reminds a viewer to stay mum and get a lawyer because the detectives are not your friends.
The flaw in the “NYPD Blue” effort to accomplish literature is in the plotting, however well done are individual scenes and patches of dialogue. The continuous plot does not hold together. Romances are terminated just to get new actresses into the picture, maybe because their personality ratings were not as high as the producers thought they should be. The lead star, the actor David Caruso, has to be eliminated on a pretext because he wanted too much of a raise. This is the life of soap operas, not art.
Look at the strengths and weaknesses of the finale episode of the third season of “NYPD Blue”. It begins with a nice bit of dialogue to deal with the rehabilitation of Sipowicz after he had gone on a bender because of his son having been killed in a robbery. He meets with a Greek Orthodox priest who will confer baptism on Ipkowitz’s baby son and Sipowicz apologizes for having offended the priest at a previous occasion when Sipowicz was overwhelmed with his grief. The priest puts that aside and wonders about the importance of baptism to him and in a later scene while the ceremony in a majestic church setting takes place, Sipowicz crosses himself, which indicates that he has come back to religion. That is contrary to what Sipowicz has ardently stated just a few episodes before where he says that his experiences of what awful things he has seen as a policeman make him trust to believe only in his wife. Is the earlier episode to be erased? There is nothing to show his conversion and so it can be chalked up as a convenience whereby an episode can show some piety rather than religious questioning resolved. High art exhibits transitions rather than just declares them or in this case disregards the past. “War and Peace” shows how Pierre evolves past becoming just a drunken libertine. And then there is the question of why Sipowicz’s son was killed in the first place. It seems arbitrary and so an explanation is outside the frame of the story. It is a plot device to allow some episodes about Sipowicz going back to the bottle and then recovering from it, a suggestion that the series has used up its themes and so is recycling them, which is apt to happen after a few years into a television series. A problem of artistic artiface rather than the internality of the story and the world within it that has been created. Let Sipowicz suffer, which his actor, Dennis Franz, does so well.
That episode has a number of set pieces which provide the tone of the distinctive enterprise. There are detectives with drawn guns and a swat team breaking into an apartment of possibly dangerous people and quickly suppressing them. There is an interview room in the seedy police station where detectives are able to get some hoodlums to confess rather than get lawyers by manhandling them, verbally tricking them and assuring that they will get a better deal if they confess, one brother incriminating another into a long sentence so as to show filial loyalty more important than self interest, and so even a hoodlum to have some moral stature, as pathetic and evil as his life may have been, everyone subject to their own twisted psyches. People, both perps and police, are just a step away from self destruction. This episode might have been considered the end of the series, not sure of renewal, in that it ended the presence of numerous characters. The men and women in the police precinct have separated or paired off. The good hearted young detective Martinez breaks up with her fellow detective because once they started as a couple, this long delayed and anticipated, because she was pushy and jealous, though you would think he would hang in there during a period of adjustment, given his feelings for her, but the plot had to move on, for reasons only the producers can fathom, not the exigencies of the plot. Sipowicz stays with his assistant DA wife and child, and one female police detective becomes ever more comfortable with his male detective on the same squad even though she had also struggled with booze, no one exempt from flaws, which is a basic theme of the series, though by and large, women who are not hookers are nicer people than men are.
An alternative hypothesis about the relation of art to entertainment is that there is no clear line between the two, literature not coming to the top, like cream separating from milk. Rather, there is a continuum from schlock up to diverting to almost quite there to fully accomplished art. The level would depend on the mastery more or less of the various aspects of literature, such as style, plot and character. Every work can be metered on a dashboard of variables just as an auto dashboard reads out speed, amount of gasoline and so on, each independent of the other but all put together to make a functioning or barely functioning machine. Then people can say, as some critics do, not to judge literature as art but just treat it as the expression of whatever people find informative and affecting, such as memoirs about people who migrated from their own country. But that is contrary to the notion that some literature is universal, speaks to the human condition and reads and educates us rather than confirming our social environment rather than the world established by the work of literature. That latter sense is in keeping with Matthew Arnold’s view that literature is the substitute for religion in that its stars light the sky.
But you can’t eliminate from literature the attribute of quality which allows some to be considered part of the canon. Without quality, there is anarchy, reading lists to include any memoir or novel of your ethnic group that catches your fancy. That is to avoid the experience and training which makes literary studies into a discipline, which is to have learned library of work that sets standards for how subtle and complicated are plots and characters so that they can be regularly referred to so as to explain what happens in the real world; men and women nearly as complicated as Elizabeth and Darcy, borrowed children as dangerous as Fanny Price. People, I dare say, can get along with their lives without the implantation of the literary canon. They can study STEM or not go beyond high school. But accessing vicarious experience as profound rather than a pastime is another way in which gto exist and to flourish by testing reality against fiction, and I have done that since very early on.