When Snobs Go Populist
A recent New York Times book review really rubbed me the wrong way. It's one thing to disagree with the content or analysis. But it's quite another thing to veil base condescension in an appeal to populism or authority. I'm not sure what else you could call Clive James' recent review of American Movie Critics, a collection of film reviews from the past century edited by Phillip Lopate.
It is surprising that the editors of the New York Times saw fit to waste as many column inches as they did on James' review, pompously titled "How to Write about Film." They might have followed it with another piece called "How NOT to Write about Books about Film." James seems more intent on showing us both his superior appreciation of film and his superior linguistic aptitude, and the book under consideration receives very little consideration. The volume becomes vehicle, and James disjointedly tells how we should think and write about movies.
The reviewer seems to prefer that we not think--especially if we don't think like him, and he veils his conceit in a sort of cinematic populism. He quips, "In our appreciation of the arts, does a theory give us more to think about, or less? To me, the answer looks like less, but it could be that I just don't like it when a critic's hulking voice gets in the way of the projector beam and tries to convince me that what I am looking at makes its real sense only as part of a bigger pattern of thought, that pattern being available form the critic's mind at the price of decoding his prose."
At first glance, this position is reasonable. Rather than forcing a film into the artificial constraints of "critical theory," why not evaluate a film on its success in telling a story? Often, such theories do little to help readers decide whether or not they want to spend $12.00 to see a movie, though theories do much to help young graduate students find dissertation topics. I entirely agree that most movies tell stories and serve primarily to entertain. I agree with James that when watching The Hunt for Red October, "not even Sean Conery's shtrangely shibilant Shcottish ackshent as the commander of a Shoviet shubmarine" prevents me from losing myself in the film. A film appreciation teacher I had in high school said that the true test of a film is whether or not you feel completely transported into another world, whether or not you disappear for two hours into the filmmaker's parallel dimension.
But to say that popular appeal supercedes all other considerations is to deny cinema a higher call to artistic expression. Certainly, expression must still adhere to certain aesthetic cinematographic conventions, but conventions can be manipulated, even distorted, to great effect in order that the filmmaker convey an unexpected vision. Indeed, that vision--what James calls a "unifying theory"--may be so unnerving and discomforting that the film may never be popularly accessible. But artists have long since struggled with the balance between public opinion and "art for art's sake."
This discussion is not new, and we could extend it to any field of artistic endeavor. In literature, James Joyce and William Faulkner would have been given the axe early on had their publishers followed James' principle. For how many people can just pick up Ulysses or The Sound and the Fury and give them a quick read? The world would certainly be all the poorer if the Mississippi town of Oxford's only literary claim to fame was John Grisham--an author whose books have probably lapped Faulkner's novels in sales by some exponential factor.
Painters are no different. Since the last half of the 19th Century, artists have struggled to find new ways of expressing their creative vision. In many cases, the progression of their work is very closely tied to concrete theories. Without this creative freedom, our perception of reality would be limited to a very staid and boring realism. We wouldn't have Monet's impressionistic treatment of the cathedral in various hues and shades, nor would we have Picasso's bold inventions. Are these works always popular? Of course not. To this day I have fierce arguments with my Russian friends about modern art. They are all steeped in the Russian realist classics and cannot understand the appeal of Kandinsky or Miro. I can appreciate the technical mastery of picture-perfect landscapes or stilllife paintings, but I can't say that they transform my perception. They are showing me the world as we see it with our eyes and, therefore, are existing preconceptions. Art for art's sake serves to alter our perception, to make us see something deeper and, perhaps, more threatening in the world around us. Realism appeals to the senses because it is comforting, but wisdom does not arise from comfort, and we do not grow when we feel at ease. Who really wants to live in a saccharine, Thomas Kinkade world, blankly staring at a visual opiate for the masses?
Society, on the whole, makes room for writers to experiment and for painters to push the boundaries. Critics put these developments into a context that help us get beyond the first conceptual hurdles so that we can appreciate the new worldview that the artist is providing us. Why would we expect anything different for filmmakers? Tarkovsky or Fellini may not be immediately accessible to the average moviegoer, but that does not mean that we should dismiss their films. Nothing worthwhile is easy; the same is true with some of the most ambitious and revolutionary films.
At some points in his review, I felt like William F. Buckley, Jr., was condescending to explain to me all my intellectual frailties. James, for example, sees fit to demonstrate his superior appreciation of the English language in evaluating a sentence by the critic Otis Ferguson: "Look at the perfect placement of that word 'violence,' for example. It's not enough to have the vocabulary. You have to have the sensory equipment." My goodness! Perhaps James should hide the Vaseline, get a Kleenex and put away his sensory equipment, because I'm not sure what to make of this manner of pedantic onanism.
James lifts the veil entirely by the end of his review and reveals his total conceit. First, in commenting on Munich, he notes that "several quite good critics in various parts of the world knew there was something seriously wrong with Steven Spielberg's 'Munich,' but they didn't know how to take it down." Never fear! Where those "quite good critics" failed, James comes to rescue, saying that the the movie was "written by people who don't know half enough about politics." Actually, after seeing the movie and then reading the original book, I concluded that the screenplay was just poorly written. But James, contrary to his criticism of critics, wants to unify his commentary under--surprise, surprise--a theory. For him this unifying principle is "what makes the movie isn't just who directed it, or who's in it, it's how it relates to the real world."
To prove his point, he throws down his final snooty gauntlet, lest we still suspected him of being a populist in wolf's clothing. He concludes with a snip about the German film Downfall, which portrays the final days in Hitler's bunker. I thought the film to be quite good and quite even-keeled, given the subject matter. Silly me! James informs me "if you know too much about the movies but not enough about the world, you won't be able to see that 'Downfall' is dangerously sentimental." Then he concludes: "but to know why that is so, you have to have read a few books."
And so, there we have it: Clive James knows more about movies and history than I do. Because I found Downfall to be a fine treatment of a difficult subject, I must be an ignorant buffoon. I'm sorry, but as a queer Jew, I'm the last person to feel sentimental about Adolph Hitler or the Nazi regime--never mind the dozens of books on the Nazism that I HAVE read and never mind my sitting through a two-hour video interview with Hitler's secretary.
James grand finale returns to his pseudo-populist cry: "No matter how many movies you have seen, they won't give you the truth of the matter, because it can't be shown as action. To know what can't be shown by the gag writers, however, you have to know about a world beyond the movies. But the best critics do, as this book proves; because when we say that the nontheorists are the better writers, that's what we mean. That extra edge that a good writer has is a knowledge of the world, transmuted into a style."
What comment can I add to that other than that 1) James obviously has his overarching theories and 2) what he really means is that a good writer should have James' understanding of the world.
At the end of the day, I do not advocate overt snobbism in the place of James' veiled sort. If there's enough room in the small town of Oxford, Mississippi, for both Faulkner and Grisham, there should be enough room in the film world for both X-Men and Satyricon. For me, a weekend watching Bond reruns on TBS is time well spent, but so is an evening at the art house watching some pomo experiment.
Tags: film, New York Times, Clive James, Munich, Downfall, criticism, critics, Phillip Lapote, American Movie Critics
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I agree with you about the grating tone and sense of self-importance at work in James’ article, but I think he does make a few valid points.
What I think James is really trying to say is that the intellectual appreciation we have for certain films upon later reflection is not necessarily more valid than the sheer, stupid joy we feel when experiencing a film for the first time. One of my old screenwriting professors used to say that there should be no distinction between “art” and “entertainment”; that, on some level, all art should be entertaining. I tend to agree. This is particular true of the narrative arts. My own feeling is that – upon a first viewing – we should first and foremost be engaged primally by a film, and that any intellectual analysis should come later. I would never presume to say that this is how it should be for all viewers – we are all different people, and we all go to movies or read books or watch plays for different reasons – but that is how it is for me. If I’m watching a movie for the first time and I can see the “ideas” at work, then it fails for me. I just want to live in it for a while before I think too much about it.
But where James goes awry – and he does – is by dismissing theory outright, suggesting somehow that it is inherently false. It can be, usually when one tries to impose one's own views upon a work without sufficiently examining the work itself. But James doesn’t acknowledge that there are multiple levels upon which a work of art (or entertainment) can be appreciated, and that the same film can be viewed in a myriad of ways.
A good example is “Night of the Living Dead,” my favorite movie of all time. Countless articles have been written about how the film is an allegory of 1960s civil unrest in America – the Vietnam war, the Civil Rights struggle, the threat of annihilation by the atom bomb, etc. – and that is all good and valid. None of that occurred to me until about the fourth or fifth time I had seen it (granted, I first saw it when I was about 13), and none of those things are at the heart of what I love about the film today: the odd but believable characters, the weird logic of the world and the situation, the intractable tension between the “hero” Ben and the “villain” Mr. Cooper, how the zombies are really just the catalyst for the intensely personal dramas inside the farmhouse, and how -- at the end -- Mr. Cooper is proved right. That’s the stuff of imagination and storytelling, and it doesn't come from theory.
What’s more, none of these things occurred to the filmmakers at the time of its making. I happen to know one of the producers a little bit, and he’s admitted to me that “Night of the Living Dead” was made mainly for fun and for money, and that they never really thought it would be anything more than a drive-in film and hopefully a stepping-stone to do other things. And the casting of Duane Jones, an African American, as Ben was a complete accident, and had nothing to do with the original conception of the character. And yet, when you watch the film today, all those elements and themes are there if you want them. The movie has become a classic in its own right precisely because there is more to it than meets the eye.
As an aspiring screenwriter, this holds true for me in my own work. I rarely know what a script is “about” until my third or fourth draft, and then the discovery of its “meaning” is usually a surprise. That is part of the joy of writing: how accidental and subconscious those things tend to be. I have written my own zombie movie and at this point I still don’t know for sure what it's “about,” but various readers have pointed themes out to me that seem completely natural and true, even if they weren’t exactly intended on any sort of intellectual level. That, to me, is bliss. It is thrilling when my work starts talking back to me with a voice of its own.
I used to love my film theory classes, because they encouraged me to look at films in new ways, to rediscover them almost as if seeing them for the first time. I didn’t know the first time I saw “On The Waterfront” that it was “about” the Hollywood blacklist. When I realized that, the film became something new. Similarly, one of my best ever film studies professors at BU, Roy Grundmann, presented us with a queer analysis of “Rebel Without a Cause” where we were encouraged to look at the James Dean character as the classic “femme fatale” and the Sal Mineo character as the Humphrey Bogart-esque protagonist. That made me appreciate the film – which I must admit I had never really liked before that – in a whole new way.
Of course, none of these theories are “correct.” “On the Waterfront” is no more about the blacklist than “The Magnificent Seven” is about American imperialism in Latin America. Except, they are. What’s great about film theory – or literary theory, or art criticism in general – when applied thoughtfully and without didacticism is that it allows works to exist on separate – and often contradictory – levels simultaneously, and therefore become more than the sum of their parts.
James’ tone and reverse snobbery are fairly exemplary of many film professors and students I’ve known over the last few years, guys who subscribe to this sort of blind populism as a kind of willful defiance against some vague and unseen authority figure. It’s like punk rock, but not as fun or interesting. These people don’t like theory because they don’t like being told how to evaluate a film, but they don’t realize that they aren’t being “told” anything; they are only being exposed to new possibilities.
Posted by: Scotty Milder | June 9, 2006 05:31 PM