"When I'm asked who my audience is, I say someone with an open mind, which is not a vacant one and sometimes a liberal mind is not the same thing as an open one"
About this Quote
Solondz draws a neat little trapdoor under the polite question every artist gets: Who is this for? His answer refuses demographic flattery and replaces it with a standard most audiences hate being held to. An "open mind" sounds like a compliment until he tightens the screw: openness is not vacancy. He's not asking for passive tolerance, the kind that treats art like wallpaper or a virtue-signaling exercise in being "nonjudgmental". He's asking for active attention, the willingness to sit with discomfort without switching off your critical faculties.
The sharpest barb is aimed at a familiar cultural shortcut: equating "liberal" with "open". Solondz isn't doing partisan punditry; he's diagnosing a social reflex in art consumption. Plenty of people who pride themselves on progressive taste still want their transgressions curated, their provocations legible, their moral equations solved in advance. In other words: they'll accept taboo as long as it arrives pre-sanitized, with the right politics and the right tone.
This lands with extra bite in the context of Solondz's filmography, where empathy and cringe share the same frame and no character is offered as a clean vessel for identification. He's warning you up front that his work won't reward the "good person" audience posture. The intent is both defensive and mischievous: a boundary-setting move that doubles as a dare. If you come looking for comfort, you'll call it cruelty. If you come willing to think, you'll recognize the point.
The sharpest barb is aimed at a familiar cultural shortcut: equating "liberal" with "open". Solondz isn't doing partisan punditry; he's diagnosing a social reflex in art consumption. Plenty of people who pride themselves on progressive taste still want their transgressions curated, their provocations legible, their moral equations solved in advance. In other words: they'll accept taboo as long as it arrives pre-sanitized, with the right politics and the right tone.
This lands with extra bite in the context of Solondz's filmography, where empathy and cringe share the same frame and no character is offered as a clean vessel for identification. He's warning you up front that his work won't reward the "good person" audience posture. The intent is both defensive and mischievous: a boundary-setting move that doubles as a dare. If you come looking for comfort, you'll call it cruelty. If you come willing to think, you'll recognize the point.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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