30s | she/he | vidder & writer | my works | always in my Black Sails & Disco Elysium era | currently mostly Thai QL | intermittent ecological ramblings
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While this scene makes it extremely clear that the people in power don't feel threatened by Dan's art, I don't think this is a statement of his murals' failings. For me, it is to be interpreted more broadly as being about the limits of art as a tool for protest.
For one thing, UNAR is known enough that Namo can give a little exposé about his work off the top of her head, but also when Yok tries to track him down via his latest mural, there's already a small group of people admiring it (and keep in mind that Yok rushed to the scene).
Now, it is possible that those people only connect with this piece on an aesthetic level, and not at all politically. But we do know someone who connects with it on a political level! I'm talking about Yok, of course.
In fact, he connects with it in such a brutal and intimate way that he disregard every warning signs, convinced that he knows the real, true Dan emprisoned behind the uniform - when the reality isn't nearly as simple. (yes, Yok is dickmatized, but he saw Dan's mural before he saw anything else of the man. It's the political art that makes him throw all caution to the wind first, and I simply don't think he would have fallen that hard and that fast if he had met Dan in another context. He calls Dan's art honest!)
This is at the heart of many of their conversations: how come you can make this art, and still be a cop? How is the contradiction not eating you from the inside?, wether explicitely:
or implicitely:
Yok is constantly engaging Dan in maieutic dialogues (let the cop give birth to the artist? hm. not sure I like that image) to get him to solve that contradition by quitting the force. It is very naive (Officer Dan Danai is just as much the "real" Dan as UNAR is - in many ways the two cannot be separated) but - mostly because Yok is one of the narrative's special little guys* - not entirely unfounded: the contradiction is eating at Dan. He does end up quitting.
(Important to me also that Yok always gets the last word in their arguments: no wonder he's so sure he can fix him!)
All this to say: I think we lose a huge chunk of their dynamic if we interpret UNAR's art as entirely ineffective in a political sense. Which brings me back to that one scene:
I think it loses its impact if we interpret it as Dan, specifically, being a bad political artist. For its whole run time, the show grapples with the question of just how much art can do politically, and in this scene it lays out the most resigned side of the debate. Not only protest art can't change anything, but engaging in it gives people the illusion of having pushed for meaningful political change, when they've done absolutely nothing. It's the show at its most hopeless and self-deprecating! But it is also the story's darkest hour, and I'm not sure how uncritically we should receive what the man in white is saying.
After all, if political art could never be a threat to power, what would be the use of censorship? For example, I find significant that this scene visually alludes to Buddhism, when this religion (the only one pushed forward by the Thai Constitution, afaik) is conspicuously absent from the rest of the show
and when, while I can't speak for Thailand, the corruption of some buddhist monks and their ties to oppressive governments is a hot button topic in some South-East Asian countries. Visually, I also find this accumulation of traditional-looking riches (compared to the more modern look of Tod's fancy penthouse), very interesting. It brings to my mind Thai nobility and royalty, and is again the closest the show gets to mentioning them, unless we extrapolate from the lecture on impunity that serves to introduce Sean's backstory.
Maybe Not Me has nothing to say on those subjects, maybe it had to be very mindful of what it said: I don't know. Maybe the show would have been exactly the same without lèse-majesté laws! And maybe the man in white is right to feel entirely unthreatened by political art.
But is being a direct threat to power the only value political art can have? In the end, and to borrow heavily from a discussion with @peanutbutterangelic, I think Not Me's stance on art comes down to this: art connects us. It might even (slowly, in small ways) be able to change us, or comfort us while we go through the painful but necesary process of change. But it cannot act for us. If we want a different world, we have to act.
So on the subject "if political art was never a threat, what would be the use of censorship?" I obviously don't have a perfect answer but what I do have is a 2020 "public dialogue" from the university of Chicago on the subject of "censorship and information control during information revolutions". which obviously tends to have more examples of the imperial core but involves several historians especially during the first sessions, and I think you would find the second session, censorship's historical consequences, particularly interesting in regards to "well, what is the goal of government censorship anyway", as it moves away from the mere question of art and recontextualizes what censorship does to the flow of information in general.
It might be a little of a moot point to make because obviously in this scene Dan isn't being punished for his art but precisely for not sticking to it, and censorship was never in question here, but like. To me this scene is a sort of didactic course into le nouvel esprit du capitalisme, in which modern societies have the ability to absorb their own criticism because they have a hand on the flow of information and as long as art flows through those channels, it does not have a disruptive capacity no matter the message or the effectiveness of its execution.
I'm bringing this up because I think one overlooked aspect of Dan's art is that technically it is using an illegal channel of information. Some of his stuff is easily available in town but we have at least one example of a breaking-and-entering going on, that it would have been very interesting to examine for how unsafe it is capable of making someone feel, had it not immediately been one-upped by, you know, a much more radical version of the same crime. "This art piece comes to you whether you want it or not" holds political power no matter how radical the piece in question is. But. At the same time. It is very marginal in the first sense of the word. It isn't disrupting the mainstream. And so, we circle back on that consequences of censorship and whether censorship is here to erase any sort of dissident message, or to simply create an atmosphere where the only way for Dan to make his art is to break the law, and his only way to "safely" break the law is to also be an enforcer of the state. Absorbed into, etc.
Pulling more at the threads of art as political action vs. connection (vs. more?) that I've been thinking on since I finished:
I want to preface this by saying that I do read the show as essentially saying political art is toothless in terms of direct action, though not useless overall. For me the two scenes that cement these ideas about its toothlessness are the one you presented with Dan and the elitist in the white shirt, and Yok asking Namo if art can truly awaken people after, well, everything with Dan. The constant tension between Dan's place in the political system and his activist art comes to a head for me here - even though Dan does change his heart by the end, the show answers Yok's inquiry more in the personal, with Namo responding that it helped her through heartbreak. In fact Not Me shows Namo, Sean, and (to an extent) Yok using art to get over personal heartbreak in a successful manner more so than as a political act.
For all the art we see in the show (Eugene's dancing, Namo's graffiti, Dan's murals, Yok's portraits), the show never shows art itself as a consciousness-raising effort (even though that's what I believe art can be a useful tool for); all of our artists are already political minded, even UNAR/Dan. The only person we see on screen undergo consciousness raising is White, and he does this through a combination of direct action and his discussions with Gram; even Dan, I would argue, changes at the end not because of any of his art but because of the (many) things he'd done. Now, the show does believe in the power of social media as a tool for political power, and Dan (to complete his mirror of White) is a known political artist via his social media, and it seems his reputation comes from a combination of the art and the art's social media presence than just what the art says, even if Yok - who is already a politically minded artist - gets excited by it. I won't harp on the BLM mention in Not Me for too long, but one of the big failures of that movement that black activists talk about even now is that the lesson many white Americans took away was to read the right books or watch more diverse shows, rather than get involved directly in anti-racist, anti-police, anti-carceral, etc. work. Art can be useful for knowledge, but eventually the actual work needs to happen.
I agree with everything riotbrrrd said about capitalism absorbing dissent and I think it's relevant to the university aspect of the show. Somewhat of a sidebar, but the most direct art we see (to my memory) is the spoken word poem/rap that accompanies Eugene's first art performance (I believe it's when we first see her in the show). Yet it's not lost on me that a lot of the art (Eugene & Yok's specifically) is tied to the university system, which itself is another system that once upon a time could directly challenge political power and has since been completely absorbed into a toothless branch of dissent (caveat that I am speaking from a history w Western colleges). Student protest at universities is a common way for students to get politically minded, but to an extent - something like Eugene's dance or Yok's portraits can be accepted, but we see that direct protest against the head of the school by Black & Sean is much more harshly treated. The fact that Tawi gets invited to the university as an honored alumni guest speaker is one of the ways that universities buy into these capitalist systems and, as said above, controls the flow of information for its students.
The last thing I want to bring up is Dan's art still having a sense of illegality to it by breaking and entering, because in regards to muralism and graffiti, which Namo and Dan do, I can't argue that it has no direct political purpose. Going to dox myself here, but Los Angeles is a mural- and graffiti-heavy city, and there is a strong connection between graffiti and the disruption of public vs. private land. Why should empty private buildings stay empty due to ownership? Why does private enterprise get to force certain building & artistic designs in our neighborhoods, but these can't be reclaimed? (I think often of LA's graffiti towers; most people view the graffiti as an embarrassment to the city, while I think of it as a public reminder and reclamation of space from a business that imposed these unfinished skyscrapers on the skyline. To each their own.) When Namo shows Sean the empty building, she also has an appreciation for the style and durability of the building in a way that a capitalist would not. But on the note of trespassing, Dan sneaking into Tawi's forest house would only have had an impact once Dan posted the mural online, going back to the usefulness of social media; if the house hadn't been burned, Tawi could and would have easily ignored the mural. It's not wasted effort, but it does feel marginal to me in the end. Even when Namo informs Yok at the end of the series that she's going to transition to activist art, I'm still not sure how to take that after the show had us follow Dan's attempt at political art being so defanged by the elite. A lot of Eugene & Namo's art is seen at the protests, but by that point, the political action has already begun - it feels like the show agrees that art and political action go hand in hand, but that art as political action is fruitless.
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Ok, Have you in real life ever seen a bathroom that had its light switch Outside of the bathroom. Not like one of those fancy giant bathrooms where the toilet is in its own little room, but a normal sized bathroom where you could be in there doing your thing and someone Outside could just turn the light off on you?
This is so normal to me
Yeah but it's weird
Maybe? normal though.
Maybe? weird though.
No but I'm pro this being a thing
no and what the fuck why would that be a thing
Other
Button.
Remaining time: 6 hours 47 minutes
In Real life. not in a videogame or movie because I've Only seen it in videogames and a friend has spotted it in a movie.
I tell a woman with a 9 to 5 office job about the slightly niche speculative fiction novel I just finished and she goes "Oh, that's...interesting. I hadn't heard of that."
I tell a grungy chick I met at a dive bar about the same book and she kinda scoffs and goes "Okay" like I said my favorite show is Sesame Street
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While this scene makes it extremely clear that the people in power don't feel threatened by Dan's art, I don't think this is a statement of his murals' failings. For me, it is to be interpreted more broadly as being about the limits of art as a tool for protest.
For one thing, UNAR is known enough that Namo can give a little exposé about his work off the top of her head, but also when Yok tries to track him down via his latest mural, there's already a small group of people admiring it (and keep in mind that Yok rushed to the scene).
Now, it is possible that those people only connect with this piece on an aesthetic level, and not at all politically. But we do know someone who connects with it on a political level! I'm talking about Yok, of course.
In fact, he connects with it in such a brutal and intimate way that he disregard every warning signs, convinced that he knows the real, true Dan emprisoned behind the uniform - when the reality isn't nearly as simple. (yes, Yok is dickmatized, but he saw Dan's mural before he saw anything else of the man. It's the political art that makes him throw all caution to the wind first, and I simply don't think he would have fallen that hard and that fast if he had met Dan in another context. He calls Dan's art honest!)
This is at the heart of many of their conversations: how come you can make this art, and still be a cop? How is the contradiction not eating you from the inside?, wether explicitely:
or implicitely:
Yok is constantly engaging Dan in maieutic dialogues (let the cop give birth to the artist? hm. not sure I like that image) to get him to solve that contradition by quitting the force. It is very naive (Officer Dan Danai is just as much the "real" Dan as UNAR is - in many ways the two cannot be separated) but - mostly because Yok is one of the narrative's special little guys* - not entirely unfounded: the contradiction is eating at Dan. He does end up quitting.
(Important to me also that Yok always gets the last word in their arguments: no wonder he's so sure he can fix him!)
All this to say: I think we lose a huge chunk of their dynamic if we interpret UNAR's art as entirely ineffective in a political sense. Which brings me back to that one scene:
I think it loses its impact if we interpret it as Dan, specifically, being a bad political artist. For its whole run time, the show grapples with the question of just how much art can do politically, and in this scene it lays out the most resigned side of the debate. Not only protest art can't change anything, but engaging in it gives people the illusion of having pushed for meaningful political change, when they've done absolutely nothing. It's the show at its most hopeless and self-deprecating! But it is also the story's darkest hour, and I'm not sure how uncritically we should receive what the man in white is saying.
After all, if political art could never be a threat to power, what would be the use of censorship? For example, I find significant that this scene visually alludes to Buddhism, when this religion (the only one pushed forward by the Thai Constitution, afaik) is conspicuously absent from the rest of the show
and when, while I can't speak for Thailand, the corruption of some buddhist monks and their ties to oppressive governments is a hot button topic in some South-East Asian countries. Visually, I also find this accumulation of traditional-looking riches (compared to the more modern look of Tod's fancy penthouse), very interesting. It brings to my mind Thai nobility and royalty, and is again the closest the show gets to mentioning them, unless we extrapolate from the lecture on impunity that serves to introduce Sean's backstory.
Maybe Not Me has nothing to say on those subjects, maybe it had to be very mindful of what it said: I don't know. Maybe the show would have been exactly the same without lèse-majesté laws! And maybe the man in white is right to feel entirely unthreatened by political art.
But is being a direct threat to power the only value political art can have? In the end, and to borrow heavily from a discussion with @peanutbutterangelic, I think Not Me's stance on art comes down to this: art connects us. It might even (slowly, in small ways) be able to change us, or comfort us while we go through the painful but necesary process of change. But it cannot act for us. If we want a different world, we have to act.
So on the subject "if political art was never a threat, what would be the use of censorship?" I obviously don't have a perfect answer but what I do have is a 2020 "public dialogue" from the university of Chicago on the subject of "censorship and information control during information revolutions". which obviously tends to have more examples of the imperial core but involves several historians especially during the first sessions, and I think you would find the second session, censorship's historical consequences, particularly interesting in regards to "well, what is the goal of government censorship anyway", as it moves away from the mere question of art and recontextualizes what censorship does to the flow of information in general.
It might be a little of a moot point to make because obviously in this scene Dan isn't being punished for his art but precisely for not sticking to it, and censorship was never in question here, but like. To me this scene is a sort of didactic course into le nouvel esprit du capitalisme, in which modern societies have the ability to absorb their own criticism because they have a hand on the flow of information and as long as art flows through those channels, it does not have a disruptive capacity no matter the message or the effectiveness of its execution.
I'm bringing this up because I think one overlooked aspect of Dan's art is that technically it is using an illegal channel of information. Some of his stuff is easily available in town but we have at least one example of a breaking-and-entering going on, that it would have been very interesting to examine for how unsafe it is capable of making someone feel, had it not immediately been one-upped by, you know, a much more radical version of the same crime. "This art piece comes to you whether you want it or not" holds political power no matter how radical the piece in question is. But. At the same time. It is very marginal in the first sense of the word. It isn't disrupting the mainstream. And so, we circle back on that consequences of censorship and whether censorship is here to erase any sort of dissident message, or to simply create an atmosphere where the only way for Dan to make his art is to break the law, and his only way to "safely" break the law is to also be an enforcer of the state. Absorbed into, etc.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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i hate gay television because theyll always have the main character cheat on the most beautiful girl in the world with the most mid man ever. this is how you know sexuality isnt a choice!
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