Black & White

I love black-and-white movies. In fact, I prefer them. The movies are a dream and color is too realistic, creates too little separation between the screen and the world. Besides, black and white just looks better. For every Terrence Malick vista, there are dozens of electric black-and-white movies from even average cinematographers. Black and white looks like velvet, it looks like brilliance, it looks like permanence. "[Most people] like color and think a black-and-white film is missing something," writes Roger Ebert. "Try this. If you have wedding photographs of your parents and grandparents, chances are your parents are in color and your grandparents are in black and white. Put the two photographs side by side and consider them honestly. Your grandparents look timeless. Your parents look goofy."

Shortly after college, when my taste level was settling into place, I attempted to create a top 100 list of the greatest movies, a sort of personal pantheon. I dusted off the notebook where I created this list and while some of entries would change if I felt inclined to waste time in this way now, it's still an accurate document of what I consider the top fo the very top. 55 of those movies are in black and white, remarkable considering that since 1960, the virtual midpoint of movie history, that type of filmmaking has effectively disappeared (to be fair, there are a few movies on that list, like Schindler's List and Manhattan, made well after color became the way of things). If I were asked to list the 10 best movies I've ever seen, seven of them are in black and white. Like 12% of people, my dreams have no color. Perhaps I want my waking dreams to reflect the ones that come at night.

In things that actually matter, however, black and white is a nightmare. We live in a complex world, filled with complex people, emotions and truths. This is a beautiful thing. A wonderful thing. A thing that makes it worth staying curious until the day you die. It's so complex, the most interesting parts can't be figured out. They can't be made black and white. Unfortunately, those most interesting parts are the parts that affect us the most and they are the parts that an increasing amount of people want desperately to simplify. Simplicity is a powerful thing. Simplicity is attractive, it feels good, it gives us something that is all too rare—certainty. It's why my son can hum Baby Shark but not the Siegfried's Funeral March. However, no one would argue that the former is better than the latter. When applied to things that are undeniably complex, simplicity, and the certainty it causes, creates partisans, demagogues and extremists.

This is why conspiracy theories are so attractive, they simplify the complex. International defense agreements are complicated and entail understanding sophisticated legal, financial and cultural institutions. Isn't it easier to just believe that Germany is screwing us? A refugee crisis requires knowledge of border and immigration policies and a certain amount of empathy for people whose culture is foreign. That George Soros is shifting the electorates of multiple nations with an army of undocumented foot soldiers is very easy to understand. Why suffer the doubt and frustration caused by a pandemic of a novel virus of which little is known and new details dictate a changing public policy when you can sit on the belief that Dr. Anthony Fauci knows how to cure it but won't because he loves the limelight? This sort of certainty in such allegedly self-evident truths gives believers the cover to act in terrible but justified (to themselves, anyway) ways. If the other side isn't a center left party but an intricate pedophile ring that is controlling the world, you have a moral obligation to give no quarter in your fight against them, don't you? The same goes for those warring against fascist, racists who are an election away from making The Handmaid's Tale a reality. It feels good to understand that all the evil in the world is in your opponents and all the goodness resides in you and your allies. It's clean, it's ordered, it's simple.

And, of course, it's not true. When you see the world in black and white you become capable of villainizing your neighbor, dismissing the truth and relegating entire groups for disdain or worse. Whole sub-genres of science fiction have been dedicated to the horror of an advanced computing system that comes to the same black and white conclusion that Stalin did in the 1950s. "Death solves all problems," he said. "No man, no problem.” Why invoke an authoritarian in a newsletter you probably thought was going to be about Citizen Kane or something? Because black-and-white thinking is the very underpinning of authoritarianism, which is not left wing or right wing, but appeals to any person who rejects complexity.

When the world is black and white, you can change the meaning of words to reflect whatever simple belief you want to stick on a bumper sticker or internet meme, cleaning even the most complicated concepts of any annoying nuance. All cops can become bastards, speech can become violence (actually, just about anything short of actual violence can become violence) and abortion can become murder. Enemies can be created from anyone as long as they belong to the opposing group (or even within the good group, if you are a Deep State adherent). Never praise an opponent even if they do something you like, never apologize for a partisan even if they do something you don't. In politics, observers used to talk about "calling balls and strikes." Too often, a strike is simply anything the other side throws.

Far too often, this simplification in thought is done in the name of religious faith. I can't help but find this paradoxical seeing as faith as I understand it has at least as much to do with doubt as it does with certainty. Catholics talk about the "mystery of faith," an understanding that the nature of God, the same nature that many are so sure they comprehend, is complex beyond our understanding. The Bible itself is as complex document, full of stories that seem simple but teach impossibly difficult human lessons. Black-and-white thinking allows you to forgo all that and invent your own catechism, usually consisting of punishing those you don't agree with. Since Nietzsche declared that "God is dead," he has often been misunderstood to crow about the superfluousness of religion. What he is saying is that meaning that can be created by anyone doesn't mean anything at all.

Of course, I am guilty of this. Never think that I am a perfect practitioner of what I preach. It feels good to separate yourself from an offending group, to paint certain people a certain way, it's natural to want the world to be simpler than it is and I fall prey to it more often than I should (even earlier, my invocation of my Catholicism subtly intimated that we have it figured out better than them when it must be said that the "mystery of faith" and its invitation for wise doubt is somewhat undercut by the doctrine of "everything the man in the big hat says is true.") Still, on my best days I try to question any certainty I hold. I work hard to investigate my beliefs. I strive to encourage my doubts. "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts," declared Bertrand Russell. If I'm certain of anything, it's that I'm not yet wise, and I may never be, but I do try to avoid thinking of the world as made up of good and bad people. To bring things back to color, I try to think of the world as made up of black and white rhinos. Because the thing about black and white rhinos is that they are the same color. Look it up.