Les Mis -- Emotional Pornography?

First of all: Les Mis may have been my favorite movie of 2012. If I had to order the Big Three from December it would probably go:

1. Les Miserables
2. Django Unchained
3. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

…whether that ordering reflects my actual feelings or is merely the reverse order in which I saw the films is worthy of legitimate speculation.

Anticipation was high for the film adaptation of the musical adaptation of Victor Hugo’s examination of 19th-century France. The cast featured stage veterans (Eddie Redmayne, Samantha Banks) and film stars (Anne Hathaway, Russell Crowe) as well as the great Aussie who lives in both worlds: Hugh Jackman. But the marriage of musical and movie is a different breed altogether; neither wholly musical nor wholly movie.  The result was delightful.

The casting was inspired. Crowe’s performance was the low point.  As Javert he was lukewarm; not up to the caliber established by Jackman (Valjean) and Hathaway (Fantine). His castmates set the emotional bar to unheard of heights. More than ever, the episodic nature of this musical was emphasized. Years passed between scenes and songs, pausing only a moment to zoom in on the individual crucibles of characters, who sometimes had only five to ten minutes to relate the tragedy that was the pinnacle of their lives.  Absolutely, the character of Valjean was a tethering point whose unique journey from parole to paradise acted as the central impetus of the story; however, characters like Eponine and even Fantine were largely ignored save for crucial moments folded into Valjean’s biography.

But what moments they were!

A quick matching game:

Survivor's Guilt	Eponine
Marriage to Tim Burton	Cosette
Inferiority Complex	Javert
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder	Jean Valjean
Unrequited Love	Mdme Thenardier
Absent Parent/Oppressive Parent	Marius

Some of these are a bit of a stretch and are unfairly reduced – but so is the entire novel! Of course I can hardly condemn the manufacturers of movie or musical; some books are too cumbersome to neatly fit into two, three, or even four hours (read: LotR).

However, one consequence of this necessary pruning is that it becomes emotional pornography, plain and simple.

I Googled emotional pornography to ensure that I wasn’t talking out of my ass. I, of course, discovered that I was. So I should clarify a quick definition of what emotional porn is to me. Its any form with the seemingly singular intent to ply an audience to a state of empathy with a character.

But isn’t that art? In its entirety? To implore an audience to connect so closely with a cast to feel their loss and their triumph.

I would counter with the question, isn’t that pornography, in all its graphic splendor? Both emotional and "traditional" porn introduce a variety of stimuli to evoke a specific reaction from an audience. It allows the audience to feel sexual or emotional arousal without investment in an actual situation where they are confronted by actual sex or actual emotion.

I don’t think my argument can be so easily dismissed as being overly reductive, assuming everything down so far to its component parts that Gershwin is no better than Green Day and Mom's home-cooking no better than McDonalds. Instead, I think art – and I grimace and brace myself against all due consternation incited by using such a broad term – appropriates this idea of emotional excitement and uses it as a vehicle to examine a greater point.

Emotion is a medium. Otherwise art becomes a scientific investigation connecting stimuli to reaction, and no more.

And that’s what I experienced while watching Les Mis – and quite possibly to other audience members as well. Victor Hugo’s commentary on the social injustice rampant in France at the time was overwhelmed by music, spectacle, and tragedy. The focus of the direction seemed to be to leave its audience as a quivering mass of sadness (read: Karen, my sister), with the setting of France as a background for this goal, rather than a unique setting recipient of condemnation.

When I left the theater I intended to return: because I wanted to feel that way again. I don’t think I’ve cried so violently in a movie since Leo popsicled in the Atlantic. And it was that specific sense of emotional fulfillment/exhaustion that calls me back, a feeling junkie, looking for another quick cry.