In 1972, Frank Frazetta painted the artwork below. It was for a book called The Silver Warriors.
The bears have no harnesses. They could not pull the sled.
HarnessGate became a minor scandal, and in an 1977 Esquire Frazetta defended his role in perpetuating this atrocity. “Harness? Ha! Who needs a harness. This is emotion; those bears are comin’ at you, you don’t have time to see a harness. I paint feelings! I thought of the harness, but it’d make a ridiculous clutter.”
There are three arguments here:
- Harnesses are visually complicated and their presence might distract or confuse the viewer
- The picture captures the emotional thrust of being charged at by a sled drawn by bears (an event we surely all relate to): you wouldn’t notice the harnesses in real life, so he didn’t draw them.
- The picture is fundamentally unrealistic anyway. Adding harnesses would be like plugging a hole in a dike made entirely of water.
The first argument is interesting: an admission that art has to be legible. All other considerations—realism, logic—fall before the requirement that the audience understand the piece. The second argument is also interesting—what’s the point of view when we look at a painting? Is it our own, or is it a person within the world of the painting? Are we standing inside the image, or outside it? In Kurosawa’s acclaimed jidaigeki masterpiece Rashomon, each of the four witnesses face the camera while they give testimony. We don’t hear from the court…because we are the court. We (the viewer) are the ones giving judgment. This is a startlingly effective trick: you feel almost forced to watch the movie closely, because a guilty man might walk free if you don’t. Christian art heavily uses this trick: we are Pilate: we are the Roman centurions, we are Peter the denier, we are the thief on the cross who mocks him. We are The Guilty.
But then there’s the third argument: it doesn’t matter.
The image is full of unrealistic details. Why is the warrior using dangerous, untrainable animals to pull a sled in the first place? How does he stop these solitary apex predators from fighting each other? Why is he wearing such useless armor in the cold?
The answer is always the same: even if Frazetta came up logical answers for those questions (maybe they’re genetically engineered bears?), the fact that you’re asking them means the picture has failed. Either Frazetta has not engaged you, or you are a bad-on-purpose critic: a Cinema Sins type who counts “logical errors” and “plot holes”. Either way, there’s no point in bothering with the image after that.
But this is complicated by the fact that parts of the painting is realistic. Gravity exists. The man is having to grip the sled so he doesn’t get thrown off. How do we explain that? If some of the picture is realistic, shouldn’t it all be?
For me, the dividing line is intentionality.
Frazetta is able to defend his missing harness. He didn’t just forget to draw it. He made a conscious decision to not include it.
My view, when people complain about unrealism in fiction, they are really complaining about the author being sloppy. Our time is valuable. We want to feel like we’re reading a work by someone who cares. Frazetta was not sloppy.
Here is something Adam Cadre wrote:
I’m reminded of John Byrne complaining when Marvel declared, for the sake of realism, that dragons in the Marvel Universe communicated via telepathy rather than speech, “Cuz, you know, a 200 foot long telepathic dragon is so much more realistic than a 200 foot long talking dragon.” There is a school of thought that argues that you’re better off embracing a wild, impossible setting for stories like these, because the closer you get to the world outside your window, the more inherently ridiculous a billionaire ninja wearing pointy ears is going to seem. But, well, that’s not the school of thought I belong to. I say telepathic dragons are more realistic than dragons that speak English. So there.
The difference is that the dragons speaking English is pure plot convenience. The author is too lazy to come up a plausible reason for how they communicate despite having radically different larynxes and voiceboxes, etc. Even a fig leaf of telepathic powers is an improvement, because it shows the author put some thought into their fictional world. There is a world of difference between playing a “blue note” on mistake, vs doing it on purpose.
No Comments »
Comments are moderated and may take up to 24 hours to appear.
No comments yet.