Art & Creativity Quote by Wim Wenders

Wenders is diagnosing a kind of grace that looks, from the outside, dangerously like surrender. The line hinges on that slippery “maybe”: he’s not declaring music as salvation so much as testing a suspicion about how art rewires survival. “Function like that” is tellingly mechanical, as if endurance is a system people learn to run. Then he pivots into moral pressure points - “misery, hardship or injustice” - and refuses the comforting escalation into heroism. They “never complain,” which can read as stoic dignity or as a learned silence forced by circumstance.

As a director who’s spent a career filming drift, dislocation, and Americans mythologized from a European distance, Wenders often treats music as both atmosphere and infrastructure: the thing that holds a scene together when language fails. Here music becomes a tool that turns chaos into rhythm, a way of taking “everything as it comes” without being shattered by it. That’s admiration, but it’s also unease. If music helps people metabolize injustice without protest, is it consolation or anesthesia?

The subtext is about the politics of coping. Wenders isn’t romanticizing poverty; he’s interrogating the aesthetic that makes suffering look bearable, even beautiful. By framing the question as “enables,” he hints at dependency: when life is structurally unfair, art can keep you moving, but it can also make the unacceptable feel survivable - and therefore, perversely, sustainable.