What is the business of artists? Are we brilliant creators, fashioning the world into our own mad fantasies or are we discoverers, research scientists of pre-existing aesthetic patterns? And what does this have to do with the Wizard of Oz?

I was watching the final showing of the final film in San Francisco's International Film Festival, to which I had vowed greater attention this year. Takushi Tsubokawa's "Aria" begins with the methodical tuning of a piano by protagonist Ota. My mind drifts to the mathematical nature of music and, as Ota tests and corrects octave intervals, I think of how a note an octave higher than another vibrates at precisely double its frequency.

Having spent the previous week in Mexico reading (among other things) "Society of the Spectacle", my mind is steeled against attempts to assert any unexamined narratives into my head. I am delighted with "Aria", as it seems to speak an entirely different visual language than the ultraslick MTV style pervading our media. Shots are framed with excessive white space (a head and shoulders against a bleak sky, for instance) and prolonged to the point where I become aware that a less elegant movie would've cut long ago. The characters—a piano-tuner, an antiques dealer, a puppeteer, a high school principal, and more—are eccentric without being caricatures and resist any taxonomy I try to impose upon them. I become hopeful that an escape from the Spectacle is possible.

We are lucky that the director is available to speak with us afterward. He takes questions from the audience, via an interpreter who does his best to translate both Japanese to English and ethereal director-speak to something comprehensible. He does a good job until someone asks about the "Wizard of Oz" nature of the film. It hadn't occurred to me before the question but all the elements are there: characters leaving home in search of fulfillment, a brightly colored path (albeit red trellis instead of yellow brick), a wizard telling them to go home instead of solving their problems but then having a change of heart and helping them on their way, even the song "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" is included (though played on a musical saw).

"Yes, someone asked about that in Korea, too," the interpreter offers. "All I can say is that it's a coincidence. I haven't seen that film in thirty years, but I guess I need to again. And that's the only song the actor knew how to play on the musical saw."

Walking out of the theater, I'm reminded of Spider Robinson's "Melancholy Elephants", as it was recently featured on Boing Boing. The story, which I'll let you read on your own, posits that we artists are not creators but discoverers. Beautiful music exists in some universal form and we, as artists, merely stumble upon it. Art, then, is an applied science—the application of fundamental wisdom (like the Golden Ratio) to express aspects of the human condition. As such, the raw materials of art (be they characters or chord progressions) are as finite as the raw materials for any other industry.

Takushi Tsubokawa says that he wrote "Aria" the last time he was in San Francisco. He didn't know any English and felt very alone, spending most of his time at the beach. In contrast, Frank Baum (author of the Wizard of Oz) cites Lewis Carrol's "Alice in Wonderland" as a major influence. From drastically different methodologies, such similarities yet surface. Is it possible that life is and has always been the same old story rehashed over and over using different languages of varying quality? That The Spectacle is not a bourgeois plot, but merely a manifestation of the plot? That "all the world's a stage"?

"Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily/Life is but a dream."