"To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme"

“It’s the cortisone,” says the doomed hero of Jafar Panahi’s Crimson Gold, to explain his lumbering bearlike body. This could be a memento of a wartime injury, for he is an army veteran, and “the medication slows him down,” according to his pickpocket colleague. When a robbery goes wrong near the beginning of the film, we see his death but rather than acting as a plot spoiler, this deepens the subsequent flashbacks, where he lives like the walking dead. As played by real-life paranoid schizophrenic Hossein Emadeddin, this pizza deliveryman, zooming his motorocycle around the traffic-clogged highways of Teheran at night, is a great creation. Perhaps it’s his puffy face and the dark shadows under his eyes, or maybe it’s his Thorazine shuffle and inability to summon any affect, but — consonant with Iranian film’s aesthetic of shunning emotional indulgence — his lack of emotive response (and Panahi’s impassive camera) forces us to dig below the surface to x-ray his actions and words. Funny when he pragmatically distributes unused pizza to some cops, humane when advising a 15-year-old soldier that he’s too young for the army, and patient when he politely asks his desperately chattering fiancée to “ Please stop talking,” he seems neither saintly nor childlike, and the director resists turning him into a clinical case. With no dramatic underlining to push our responses, the impact of each daily humiliation accumulates in our minds as we measure the man’s vulnerability. Dogged by social invisibility, he feels insulted at a jewelry store by the patrician owner (“He didn’t even look at us”), and he stands next to a wealthy playboy who tells his telephone caller “there’s no one here.” The creator of The White Balloon and The Circle, Panahi was famously arrested by American officials last year and held in chains for 16 hours at JFK Airport in New York for resisting Immigration personnel’s demands that he get a transit visa merely to change planes. Nor has he flourished in Iran, where homegrown cultural tyrants have banned this film, no suprise given its portrayal of repressive entrapment by police. Secretly staking out forbidden parties with young people, the police are shown wielding their power with irrational authoritarian aggression, arresting men and women as they leave, as well as parents arriving to pick up their children. The humanism of the torn-from-the-headlines script by Abbas Kiarostami, the director’s mentor, makes its point when the hero asks the young soldier what he does for fun: nervously looking around, the boy replies without irony, “What’s fun?” Lying in darkness in his modest room, his beefy torso overflowing his modest bed, the proletarian hero can only brood while outside another police raid rounds up more people who protest their innocence. What a contrast to the palatial penthouse duplex that he visits, with its fountains and pool, grand piano and balcony, a showcase of the glaring economic disparities within the Iranian theocracy. As the playboy freshly back from the U.S. keeps repeating, “This is a city of lunatics!”

Otherwise yes, i suppose so. Robert Burton's 'Anatomy of Melancholy' might have some relevance here, though i can't quite figure out what

As opposed to addressing yourself to something unimportant that doesn't affect a lot of people deeply?

The sentiment is trivially true, surely!

(not the country, unfunny posters no ahoy!)

What about proust and the minutae of his life?

What about Michael Jackson and his pet rat?

But mighty subjects aren't mentioned in the quote -- which is about books. There's nothing preventing you from applying it to art in general, but it wouldn't be much of an argument against Melville, either.

This is so untrue that I think it reflects badly on the mighty statement.

"If you passed the exam, you got to go to a good school, and if you failed you went to a bad school" and just before I got to the unfairness of the system, Alice (4) chipped in "Yes, and if you were happy, you went to a happy school, and if you were sad.." ... .. .