Art and Prejudice

Last weekend I watched Tom Ford's A Single Man. The movie is a masterpiece and even more fascinating when you consider the fact that it comes from a first-time Director who is already a big name in the world of fashion design and therefore presumably expends a lot of his creative energy in that profession.

Based on a Christopher Isherwood book, A Single Man to me was about how loneliness and fulfillment are two sides of that essential coin of existence: love.

Beyond the theme, what bowled me speechless was how A Single Man handles it's context. The central situation is a 20 year old live-in relationship between two men broken by the sudden death of one of them
in a road accident. The movie gazes at the gay context unflinchingly and still performs a miracle.

Let me expalin. I am, I must confess, essentially uncomfortable around gays and any gay context. I am, of course, as adept as the next 'liberal', in disguising this discomfort in my social stance. But in my private moments, and movie watching is a private act, I flinch away from gays and gay contexts. The miracle of A Single Man was that for those 90 odd minutes it freed me of my prejudice!

The art of Tom Ford and Colin Firth, the leading man, enabled and uplifted me to go beyond the cage of my "learned matrix" to participate in the essential and single consciousness that runs through all of us. That
is the function of high art. To free us for some exhilarating moments from learning and prejudices into the wide open spaces of pure consciousness.

In fact to many a practioner of art there is no meaning to life other han the pursuit of these moments of freedom. Like my friend Salim Ghouse, the theatre personality and movie actor, says in reaction to some of my frequent and contorted searching for meaning in science, philosophy and spirituality, "the rest
is a meaningless void'. An extreme view perhaps but then to produce art one must start with prejudice.