Art’s Role in Finding Truth
Wilfred Owen’s war poems, Chinatown, and how art challenges the stories we asked to accept.
Deep Life Reflections | Essay 68 | James Gibb
Art can expose the stories power depends on: glory, justice, order, and inevitability.
Can art tell the truth?
I think it can. I don’t think I’m alone in that conclusion. Art reveals subtle truths about power, suffering, beauty, cruelty, courage, and human nature. A poem, a painting, a film, a piece of music is the result of an individual: their vision, judgement, responsibility, and creativity. If art were only a matter of taste, it would have little resonance beyond personal preference. But the best art does more than please or disturb us. Michelangelo’s Pietà, Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, and Coppola’s The Godfather are works created by a singular vision, not by consensus. The artist chooses where to look and what truths to show the world.
There are many subjects the artist can turn to for their creative fuel. One is war.
War has irreversibly shaped the life and work of many artists. Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso both had their art influenced by their experiences in the First World War and Spanish Civil War. Wilfred Owen, an English poet and soldier, is another example from history. His traumatic experiences in the First World War made him one of the most significant war poets of his time.
Drawn to poetry at a young age and inspired by the Romantic poets like John Keats, Owen’s early work was largely unremarkable. However, his enlistment in the British Army in 1915 and subsequent deployment to the Western Front exposed him to the brutal realities of war, which deeply influenced his poetry. The gruesome experiences of trench warfare became the essence of his poetic expression.
“Red lips are not so red as the stained stones kissed by the English dead.”
Most of Owen’s significant work was written between August 1917 and September 1918, during his time in the trenches. Deep in the belly of suffering, destruction, and death, Owen found the words to record the senselessness of war, and its complete absence of gallantry or glory. His poetry is vivid, direct, and compassionate to the common soldier. It is also notable for its irony.
His first collection, simply titled Poems, was published in 1920, followed by an expanded edition, The Poems of Wilfred Owen, in 1931. In the preface to his collection, Owen wrote:
“This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, or anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.”
One of Owen’s most powerful poems, ‘Dulce et Decorum est,’ contrasts the glorified image of war. The title, a Latin phrase from the Roman poet Horace, means “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” The poem, through its anonymous speaker, describes the gruesome effects of a gas attack:
“In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.”
Owen’s speaker concludes that anyone who sees the realities of war for themselves would not repeat the empty platitudes of patriotic sacrifice.
Wilfred Owen was killed in action on November 4, 1918, just one week before the war’s end. He was 25. Through his work, published posthumously, Owen countered the glorified narrative of dying for one’s country. He wrote:
“All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.”
The European battlefields of Wilfred Owen are a world away from the film noir of Roman Polanski’s Los Angeles, the setting for his masterpiece, Chinatown. But both are built on stories that begin to rot when investigated further.
Chinatown (1974). Directed by Roman Polanski
“Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.”
Chinatown, starring Jack Nicholson, recently celebrated its 50th anniversary. In 1974, the film received 11 Oscar nominations and people still recognise it as a landmark achievement in cinema. It’s not only a great noir detective story, but also one of the most perfectly constructed films of all time. It’s a complex story of personal and political corruption, involving murder, stolen water rights, and incest. It’s set in the golden hue of 1930s Los Angeles, a small city in a large desert, populated by big characters and even bigger lies.
Nicholson stars as private detective J.J. Gittes, hired to expose a high-profile businessman whose wife suspects him of infidelity. However, from this rather straightforward premise, Gittes finds himself quickly out of his depth, stumbling into the dangerous boreholes of money, power, and corruption. Gittes just wants to get to the bottom of things. He’s tired of the lies people spout.
Screenwriter Robert Towne, who died earlier this week, aged 89, was interested in exploring moral decay and the futility of seeking justice in a corrupt system. He used the real case of the California water rights scandal to examine the recurring themes of deception and inevitability, captured in the famous line: “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.”
The film’s warning about unaccountable power impacting our lives in ways we cannot comprehend closely mirrored the political sentiments of the early 1970s (Chinatown was released during the final act of the Watergate scandal). That warning is still relevant today, especially in our current ‘post-truth’ era, where misinformation and manipulation often obscure reality.
The film’s ending is notoriously bleak, perhaps understandable given Polanski made the film just five years after his wife, Sharon Tate, was murdered by the Manson Family. The film presents a fatalistic, even tragic nature of America and indeed of human nature. It suggests the rules of the game are written in a cryptic language, making everyone feel like an outsider and, ultimately, a victim.
The crimes in Chinatown include incest and murder, but the biggest crime is against the city’s own future, perpetrated by men who understand that controlling the water means controlling the wealth. At one point, Gittes asks millionaire Noah Cross why he needs more money:
“What can you buy that you can’t already afford?”
Cross replies: “The future, Mr. Gittes, the future.”
It seems we are still in Chinatown.
We may never have left it.
The poems of Wilfred Owen counter traditional notions of the glory of sacrifice in war, while Chinatown portrays the shattering of one’s understanding of justice and morality through the corruption of money and power. Both are examples of using art to dismantle these deceptive stories.
The writer Yuval Noah Harari argues that humans have always lived in an age of post-truth. Post-truth is usually defined as a situation where people are more likely to accept an argument based on their emotions and beliefs, rather than one based on evidence or facts. History, according to Harari, has shown us that propaganda and disinformation are nothing new. In fact, we are naturally drawn to stories that resonate with our preexisting beliefs and emotions. Because humans have a unique ability to create, spread, and convince others to believe fictional stories, this lineage can be traced all the way back to ancient times.
Harari writes:
“As a species, humans prefer power to truth. We spend far more time and effort trying to control the world than on trying to understand it—and even when we try to understand it, we usually do so in the hope that understanding the world will make it easier to control it.”
“One of the greatest fictions of all is to deny the complexity of the world and think in terms of pristine purity versus satanic evil. No politician tells the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but some politicians are still far better than others. It is the responsibility of all of us to invest time and effort in uncovering our biases and in verifying our sources of information.”
The importance of critical thinking, truthful representation in the media, and a well-informed public are vital pillars in challenging false narratives and promoting a deeper understanding of our complex world as best we can.
Albert Einstein once said, “Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.”
We might therefore refuse the story that asks too little of the truth. Art helps us do that because it remains one of the few places where an individual can still look directly, speak freely, write honestly, and yes, warn.
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