The Muse and the Murderer: Art School Confidential

You really captured my otherness.
--Sophia Myles, Art School Confidential (2006)

I must admit that I really like this quote. It comes from the original screenplay for the 2006 film Art School Confidential yet it never appears in the actual movie, director Terry Zwigoff instead choosing to go with a less verbal approach.

For that matter, I also like this quote:

You know, nobody ever gives the model any credit, but in a way, they're just as important as the artist. It's really much more of a collaboration than people think.
--Max Minghella, Art School Confidential (2006)

However, I can see why Zwigoff also left that quote out of the actual movie.

That said, there was not much else to say about this movie. On one hand, it had some amusing visuals in the opening segment as well as a great parody of the nude scene from Titanic. On the other hand, it seemed to spend a lot of time beating what most people outside the artistic community -- and no doubt, many within it --would consider to be a dead horse. After all, it was not like the pompousness of modern artists has never been ridiculed in pop culture before.

Anyway, just because many real-life artists have a well-deserved reputation for being arrogant and pretentious does not mean that it seems very sporting to devote a whole movie to pointing that out. Especially when we live in a country when all too many artists are stranded in obscurity.

If we lived in a country where artists had more power and more prestige, then they would be more of a valid target. But unfortunately, we don't.

The movie itself was best appreciated as a character study. The protagonist was a young art student (played by Max Minghella) who wished to become a famous artist, only to become derailed on his journey when he developed a crush on a beautiful artist's model (played by Sophia Myles). There was a brief subplot involving a series of murders involving local residents but Zwigoff seemed to be not as interested in the resolution of that subplot as he was in showing repeated images of ridiculous artwork. He did manage to include a few nice scenes as well -- for example, the way the artist's model winced when kissed by an ex-lover said more about the character than a more vocal reaction would have -- and it was also nice to see Anjelica Huston appear once briefly as a sympathetic art teacher even though she was not given a lot to do.

Ironically, the movie's climax made our hero look less sympathetic than he was at the beginning of the movie. On one hand, he was accused of a crime of which he was obviously innocent. On the other hand, it seemed obvious that the artist in question was guilty of an even bigger crime for which he was never punished. And of course, said crime went unmentioned at the movie's end even though it led to a loss of life. Of course, it could be argued that the artist's crime was unintentional and that it ultimately punished a murderer who might have otherwise got away scotfree. But I suspect the filmmaker would rather have us concentrate on his film's final image -- one that is ultimately more attractive than the moral issues one might otherwise think about.