Politics & Power Quote by Douglas Sirk

Sirk is naming the polite fraud at the heart of “good taste”: a culture that worships style while treating the everyday as beneath notice. “There arose a belief” reads like a diagnosis of an era, not a personal gripe. He’s talking about a midcentury consensus - especially in bourgeois, postwar life - that art should be elevated, tasteful, and sealed off from the messy ordinariness where power actually operates. Style becomes a kind of social credential. Banality, meanwhile, gets miscast as mere emptiness instead of the very texture of lived experience.

The provocation is his pivot to politics. If politics are “not worthy of art,” it’s not because politics are too trivial; it’s because acknowledging them would puncture the fantasy that private life is apolitical. That belief protects comfort. It also narrows what art is allowed to do: no critique, no class friction, no institutions, just décor and feeling. Sirk’s irony is that the so-called banal - the living room, the gossip, the suburban ritual, the melodramatic “small” emotions - is where ideology hides in plain sight.

Context matters: Sirk made glossy Hollywood melodramas that were often dismissed as “women’s pictures,” pure surface, pure sentiment. He weaponized that surface. The saturated colors, mirror-like compositions, and impeccable mise-en-scene don’t flee banality; they frame it as evidence. His intent is slyly argumentative: if a culture insists politics can’t be art, then art can smuggle politics through the very forms that culture labels harmless.