Then again, we need artists to help us understand ourselves. To my mind, we can't solve gun violence without the arts, without offering avenues for expression and the recounting of stories of personal pain and transformation.
Maybe Lee's movie will do this and it will be good in the long term for the city. There is a chance. The problem, though, is that he is doing this self-examination without being part of the local self, and, more important, he is doing it in public. Like a movie review that closes down the box-office, public self-examination has economic consequences that lead to social consequences. Do you walk around the office recounting your faults?
That's why everyone is tied in knots over a movie — that may well turn out to be a minor blip, I know, but that still somehow has caught us all in one of the great civic dilemmas: how to market yourself and also examine yourself honestly.
If you skip the former, you got more trouble. If you skip the latter, the trouble never goes away. It takes real courage to search for the truth and hang the consequences, and a realization that you may also do harm to the very city you love.
Necessary harm? Aye, there's the rub.
In a studio in Wicker Park the other night, the question was asked, "If Chicago looked in the mirror, what would it see?" The artists in the performance piece "Crime Scene: The Next Chapter" were asking Chicagoans to self-examine, to ask what we and our ancestors all did to cause all the bodies on the pavement and the blood in the emergency rooms. I remember thinking that the piece only was effective because it felt like a closed room.
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