Some Came Running

I believe in criticism

So for some reason or other the "film criticism, que-est-ce-que c'est" question is heating up again, in venues far and wide. First it's the topic of discussion between the ever-insouciant David Carr and my screening-room buddy A.O. Scott at the New York Times' new kinda-video-podcast series "The Sweet Spot," which kind of proceeds from Carr's misapprehension that the function of criticism is buzzkill. Mr. Scott strives mightily to correct Carr's misapprehension, to very little avail, if the cutaways to Carr squinting in apparent disbelief are to be believed. "You're just defending your posse," the intelligent but querelous Carr parries, and it's a measure of how much film critics in particular are disrespected that Carr seems so much more willing to buy Roberta Smith's rationale for the existence of criticism rather than Scott's. Never mind that seven minutes and change is hardly sufficient time to really begin to address the question of what criticism actually IS, its ideal form, its history, how it both interesects with and differs from the practice of "reviewing" and so on. 

The video spurred some social-media rumination from the ever laid-back and relaxed and terse movie blogger and entertainment journalist watchdog David Poland, who, on discovering a further rumination from my friendly acquaintance Michelle Dean, which quoted the infamous "Don't be critics, you people, I beg you" screed from Saint Dave Eggers, jumped on that shit like he'd just dug up a new Dead Sea Scroll (the Eggers piece in question is over a decade old, but no matter), and wrote up this commendation of it. Which in turn led to a really quite fascinating and ongoing comments thread which features, among other things, a lively exchange in which writer and scripter Drew McWeeney presses Poland to name the movie he actually worked on that apparently gives him, David Poland, the Sacred Dave Eggers Dispensation To Write Movie Criticism Because He's Actually Worked On A Movie. (In case you'd like more than just an inference, by the way, I'll come right out and say it: I have a lot of friends and colleagues in common with Eggers, etcetera, but I think that riff about critics and criticism is one of the bigger barrels of horseshit I've ever fallen face-first into, and it's pretty damn hippy-dippy horseshit at that. Examination and or analysis, which I figure to be the two key features of real criticism, do not amount to the same thing as sticking a pin through a butterfly's innards. Of course examination and or analysis don't really figure in a lot of stuff calling itself criticism these days, but that's hardly the point. The assertion that the critical impulse derives from the worst part of the self is itself absolutely despicable and nothing but a glob of Egger's own phlegmy resentment, of what I have no idea I'm sure.)

What comes out most plainly in this particular wash (and what a messy wash it is) is Poland's own aiding and abetting of an old myth about critics, that is, those who can't do, criticise. And, more specifically in this field, that every film critic is somehow a failed filmmaker. Poland actually comes out and admits that he "ended up in journalism and criticism, which I never wanted." He hastens to add "but I loved the idea of what would become The Hot Button." Yeah, me too. While Poland's admissions are apt to confirm the prejudices of critic-haters everywhere, I should like to say that, speaking strictly for myself, I did not enter criticism as a failed filmmaker. 

Or did I? See this post for some background. And savor again the immortal line "There's nothing wrong with getting a hard-on in a movie theater." (And, if you're wondering how Danny Amis is doing, well, he's better these days; see here.) The Beach Movie experience was instructive, but did it sour me off the film business? I can't say it did; a move to L.A. was something I never considered, then or ever after. Before it, and after it, I was an avid reader of criticism and a spotty writer of material that I thought aspired to criticism. My heroes were Lester Bangs (whose band I saw a few times at CBGB; one of said bands had Billy Ficca on drums; Billy now plays in Gods and Monsters with my great friend Gary Lucas), James Wolcott, and Robert Christgau, among others. While I dicked around with making music in the late '70s/early '80s (and am currently dicking around with music again, and with the same group of dicks, or at least some of them), my biggest ambition at that time, I'm not kidding, was to write about rock and roll, in the Village Voice, and have Robert Christgau as my editor. And in 1984, at 24 years of age, I fulfilled that ambition. I wrote about the album The Naked Shakespeare, by Peter Blegvad (whose now-adult daughter, Kaye, a wonderful artist in her own right, who was not yet a gleam in Peter's eye when Shakespeare was made,I'm having coffee with tomorrow); a record Bob Christgau didn't like too much but which I had hectored him into allowing me to review over a correspondance beginning in the summer of 1983. Having thus acheived my ambition, I somehow had to fill out the rest of my professional life. Sigh. I did a lot of work as an editor, but criticism was something I always held as sacred even as I never really believed I was practicing it. To be entirely honest with you, I think in all the years I've been publishing, there's maybe two dozen pieces of mine that I could point to and say, "Yes, this is actual criticism." (One of those pieces is in this upcoming book.) I don't think reviewing and criticism are incompatible; indeed, they can't be. But reviewing, or deadline criticism if you want to call it that, has its own set of demands and stresses. To me, "real" criticism needs temporal and mental space to clear the field for a thorough examination OR, to go back to Eggers' imagery, to follow the "butterfly" on the path it takes. Or the work in question's pattern of reverberation if you will. This is not a realm where reviewing necessarily has the ABILITY to go. 

But I love criticism, always have, and I love it as it was practiced by Baudelaire and I love it as it was practiced by David Foster Wallace and, well, and so on. I love it as it was practiced by Nick Tosches, even when he was writing about albums he never even listened to. I often tell people that I would have been happy to have aged into the Stanley Kaufmann of Premiere, had the magazine lasted. I am in complete concurrence with Manny Farber: "I can't imagine a more perfect art form, a more perfect career than criticism. I can't imagine anything more valuable to do, and I've always felt that way." SO in case you wonder why I tend to take the pulings and mewlings of pseud jagoff opinion-mongerers calling themselves "critics" so personal-like, well, it isn't JUST because I'm a reactive sorehead lunatic. 

The current logistical irony is that, in the contemporary environment, I'm compelled to explore making a living in other forms of writing. One of which, as it happens, is....well, I imagine you can guess.

UPDATE: David Poland is, as you'll see in comments below, not thrilled with my characterization of him. Seriously, while I admit that I'm quite prone to going overboard when making sport of other writers, the point of this piece was not meant to be "David Poland's an asshole," or any such thing, and I regret having given the impression, if I did. I have my differences with Poland on a lot of things, including modes of expression, but I'm not in a position to make real judgments on the guy, and I do believe that if nothing else that his heart is in the right place, integrity wise. But as another man once said in a not-entirely dissimilar context, these are the jokes, people.  

Samuel L. Jackson, meet Paul Fussell

 

I have dealt with the actions of Victor Gollancz and the Wharton School and Richard Nixon because, although lots of time and space separates them, their behavior when faced with unpleasant facts and honest talk they don't like strikes me as so instructively typical of a modern moral insensitivity among otherwise quite sophisticated people. I have authors especially in mind, those authors who, not liking the reviews their books receive, feel obliged to insist publicly that the comment of the reviewer is, variously, unfair, perverse, stupid, irresponsible, or otherwise not at all what it should be—that is, laudatory.

I have descanted on the subject before, [...] and indeed the topic has been a favorite ever since encountering Samuel Johnson's classic observation, in his Life of Pope, addressed to softies who might think the bad writers ridiculed in The Dunciad somehow unfairly maligned: "An author places himself uncalled before the tribunal of criticism," says Johnson, "and solicits fame at the hazard of disgrace." Or as E.M. Forster puts it: "Some reviews give pain. This is regrettable, but no author has the right to whine. He was not obliged to be an author. He invited publicity, and he must take the publicity that comes along." 

Serious writers of all kinds—classic, romantic, ironic, even sentimental—understand the principle, and they understand it because you can't be a serious writer without deep moral awareness, even if you never let it show. Here's some perhaps unexpected wisdom from Edna St. Vincent Millay: "A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down...If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book, nothing can help him." 

John Keats is exemplary because he cared more for his work than for his publicity. When an acquaintance defended him from some bad reviews, he argued that defense was unnecessary and told him, "Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic of his own works. Note the distinctly postmodern ring to that. Today it is the fantasy of celebrity, hardly the love of beauty, that seems to propel most aspirant writers—a term now all but equivalent to "novelists." Thus, unfavorable notices of their work offend deeply because they seem to proclaim their ineptitude to a wide paying audience, and it's a rare second- or third-rate writer who can resist immediately whipping off a letter to the review journal protesting the response his work has occasioned. Such a letter I have called an A.B.M., or Author's Big Mistake, since its effect is simply to reveal to an amused audience how deeply the author's feelings have been lacerated by the criticism he himself has so sedulously, solicited. If the bad review has made him look like a ninny, his letter of outrage makes him look like an ass. What, then, is the author's appropriate recourse? SIlence. Getting busy on the next book immediately, and resolving this time to be as little elated by public praise as downcast by public blame. 

—Paul Fussell, " 'A Power Of Facing Unpleasant Facts'," in Thank God For The Atom Bomb And Other Essays, Summit, 1988

Whose "Woods" these are

I enjoyed the tricksy Cabin In The Woods (featuring Kristen Connolly, Jesse Williams, and a one-way mirror, all seen above) a whole lot more than poor cranky Rex Reed did, as my review for MSN Movies attests. But I'll defend the poor fellow's right to bitch about his unpleasant direct experience of it...well, not to the death, but, you know. Somewhat. Did anyone out there think he'd actually enjoy the thing? Anyway, as I've said elsewhere, had Kim Jong-Il had been made a fifth as upset by Rex's notorious Old Boy review as Team Cabin has been made by this, we might all be dead now. Even though I thought Cabin okay, the stuck-pig howls of uniformity-craving fan types over Reed's factually inaccurate (but not semiotically off-base, finally) negativity make me laugh. Cause I'm a sadist, I guess. Mister Wells' dis over at Hollywood Elsewhere doesn't even get the semiotics right, deigning to take the movie seriously. Kind of. It really is amusing when hate-everything-Jeff gets his panties in a bunch over the genre kids, and their chilly emotion-denying nihilism, man. He's like Quincy in that punk-rock-killers episode or something. 

Less edifying fodder for discussions cinematic or semiotic, alas, is Lockout, reviewed here. 

Literary interlude

Literary men now routinely tell their readers about their divorces. In newspapers. In columns in newspapers. Special columns devoted to the personal papers of literary men. One literary man who reviews books wrote, in reviewing a study of Ruskin, that he had never read a book by Ruskin but that the study confirmed him in his belief that he didn't want to read a book by Ruskin. This man very often writes about his family life. 

Is he a fool? No. Absolutely not. He is doing what is appropriate. He is following a sound instinct. Instinct is so important. You have to go with the gut feeling. The gut feeling is that nothing could matter less than Ruskin. The guy feeling is that there isn't any grid to support Ruskin. The two grids left are the grid of enormous success—the grid of two hundred million—and the tiny, tiny baby grid of you and me and baby and baby's problems and my problems and your problems and can we keep even this little baby grid together?

And comfort? What is comfort? It's focus. You bring this grid together with that grid, you get the images to overlap, and suddenly things have a bit of focus, as in a certain sort of 35mm camera. What shall we bring together? The two grids. You and me and baby and baby's problem breathing and the grid of two hundred million. It is such a comfort. So it is a comfort when the literary man who knows no Ruskin tells us how it feels in his marriage when a friend brings home a pretty young girl. And it is a comfort when a comedienne whom we know, whom we love, whom we've known for years and years, whom we've loved for years and years, tells us that there has been a drug problem in her family. Suddenly, the grids merge. You and me and baby and drugs together on the grid of two hundred million. It's so intimate. It's like waking up with a friend. But just for a minute. 

—George W.S. Trow, Within The Context of No Context, 1981, Little, Brown. Originally published in The New Yorker;  republished by Atlantic Monthly Press in 1997, with introductory essay "Collapsing Dominant"

From hunger

I suppose I owe Steven Soderbergh a drink, or a bottle, or a fancy foreign-region Blu-ray disc or something. For a variety of reasons I am, as it happens, personally enjoined from writing about much of anything he does. It's arguably a "stretch" for me to extend this rule to cover works on which he did some second-unit shooting as a favor to a director who's a friend of his, but, yeah, that's how I got to "pass" on The Hunger Games, the new Gary-Ross-directed picture adapted from some kinda young adult novel that's not only very popular but also something of a cultural phenom, or something. 

"You know everything about movies." People have been telling me that for as long as I can remember. It's intended as a compliment, I know, but I'll cringe when I hear it, because the fact of the matter is I know practically NOTHING about movies, I know practically nothing about anything, really. Obviously what little I do know serves in the function of making me at least a somewhat coherent reviewer/maybe-critic, but, you know, seriously, people. And I find that as I get older my favorite viewing experiences in cinema are of things that at least in part remind me of what I don't know. I know, or at least I intuit, that Aleksei Guerman's 1998 Khrustalyov, My Car! is, in the phrase of a friend of mine, one of the great films. The ways in which I can tell you why are limited, and my grasp of the film's subject matter and historical period is more limited still, but I do know that when watching it on a big screen (as I did for the third time last week) I am in the presence of an artistic power greater than myself, and I am grateful for that. Similarly, a picture such as Zulawski's 1977/1988 On The Silver Globe, while largely what you might call batshit crazy and in most ways not nearly as, um, coherent an aesthetic experience as the Guerman masterpiece, knocked me for a loop not just on account of its Zulawskian eccentricity (imagine Zulawski's better-known Possession crossed with The Mole People and you have a very small sliver of an idea of the nature of the material spun out for almost three hours here) but the extent of missing—alien, if you will—context that I wasn't getting. 

This is a long-winded way of getting to my point, which is that the acceptance that you know nothing can lead to further acceptance of the fact that you're never going to know everything, which doesn't mean you can give up but maybe means that you can relax a little bit. And the acceptance that you're never going to know everything leads to the acceptance of the fact that you're not obliged to have an opinion about everything. 

I feel rather fortunate, I must say, that I'm not required to have an opinion on The Hunger Games, and am gratified that the state of my mental health is such that I don't even feel a slight tug of compulsion to have an opinion about it. People are still stroking their chins about the difference between the state of "criticism" back in the day versus now-in-the-world-of-the-Jetsons or whatever. I suppose one salient difference has to do with the way that the so-called "cultural conversation" (and good God how I gag on that thoroughly fucking insipid phrase) has spread into so many aspects of our being that there's this outstanding illusion/delusion among media professionals and amateurs that their "take" is ALWAYS required. Of course I understand that in saying that I have nothing to say about The Hunger Games I am in some way saying something about it, but I'm not saying THAT much about it, man, although I am curious as to why people's hairstyles in these dystopian allegories are always something out of some Forbidden Zone version of Versailles or something...)

One weird thing I've noticed in seeing EVERYBODY ELSE weigh in on the object is that nobody seems particularly interested in treating it as a discrete piece AT ALL. It's like the starting point is "teen phenom" which is then followed by some sort of disclosure of the reviewer's relation to the phenom. There's the "Yeah I read Young Adult genre fiction and what of it?" defensive posture, or there's the "Ever since Potter there's no stigma attached to reading Young Adult genre fiction, so it's all good" shrug. (This latter posture sets up some good stuff. The DEEP DISAPPOINTMENT implied in the Always Very Concerned About Things Melissa Anderson's observation "The novelist [...] is apparently fine with the contradiction" is kind of poignantly hilarious.) None of this is as amusing as the "I'm too old for this shit" pose adopted by, among others, sworn enemies Jeffrey Wells and David Poland. Wells admits that he walked out of a Hunger Games screening early on to "kick out" some "pent-up energy" (the image of Jack Nicholson punching the air while walking down a corridor in the Overlook Hotel springs to mind), and then came back in to watch the remainder. Wells then rhetorically asks, "can I load up the shotgun and spray indiscriminate buckshot?" Having killed the horse, we can predict with confidence that he'll continue to beat it indefinitely. (Sure enough, his very next post is one in which it is revealed that he hated Hunger Games so much that it inspired him to look up the Wikipedia page on Battle Royale.)

Poland, ever the embodiment of a particular you-guys-just-don't-GET-it-do-you wannabe gravitas, goes for a more "O tempora, o mores" approach in his notice, actually leading off with the "What do you think the Devil is going to look like...?" speech from Broadcast News. And it gets more exciting from there. So while one sector of critics uses a relation to/familiarity with the source material as a jumping-off point, these guys are convinced that the most truly germane thing about the movie is their alienation from it, and by extension the source material. I know that Robert Warshow commended a criticism based on the "direct experience" of the writer but I daresay this is taking things into a more solipsistic direction than he meant. (And while of course I'm not on balance a big believer in this sentiment, the sentence "Ingrid, it's only a movie" does also come to mind, I must admit.)

From my position of relative disinterest what I see happening is less a "cultural conversation" than a kind of marking of territory. Less of an interest in actually talking about what's on the screen than in what your position about what's on the screen is saying, or is going to say, about you. It reminds me, in a not entirely indirect way, of what Robert Christgau wrote about Randy Newman's 1979 album Born Again: "[R]ather than making you think about homophobes and heavy-metal toughs and me-decade assholes the way he once made you think about rednecks and slave traders and high school belles, he makes you think about how he feels about them. Which just isn't as interesting."

That's a pretty far-out lingo you're talking, but I think I can infra dig where you're coming from

I consider it slightly odd that a film website as august as Moving Image Source would devote so much space to a consideration of Ross Douthat, a young triple-dealing conservative shill whose only lasting contribution to cultural and political discourse is the coinage of the phrase "chunky Reese Witherspoon." But MIS contributor Tom McCormack has given the matter of Douthat some thought, and while he drops a few howlers along the way ("Douthat has an impressive knowledge of American cinema that stretches all the way back to the 1970s," holy shit!), he winds up making the case he wants to make, so good for him. And his final point, which is that Douthat is, well, a triple-dealing conservative shill who's so full of shit that he can commend the depiction of the cardboard commies in Red Dawn and then turn around and tsk-tsk the terribly nuance-lacking portrait of Spanish fascism in Pan's Labyrinth is, while hardly surprising, or anything but self-evident, correct. And if you think Douthat's bad in this category, try reading the guy on birth control some time. 

Anyway, the passage in McCormack's piece that gave me somewhat more considerable pause was this one: "Douthat's most significant talent, though, isn't verbal dexterity but his ability to draw out a movie's underlying ideology. This is a rare gambit among journalist film critics. With the exception of Armond White and J. Hoberman, most film critics consider it oddly infra dig to mention politics too directly, as if doing so might sully their prose with the grime of cultural studies departments."

Well. Given that Douthat's movie-reviewing largely occurs in National Review, and that "Hollyweird Is Leftist" is pretty much an article of faith in those parts, the tenor of his readings hardly surprises. And I don't think I'm giving anything away by saying that from what I can glean, many if not most of the other film critics working professionally today locate their politics somewhere to the left of Douthat's. But I rather doubt that they don't mention politics too directly because they consider it beneath their dignity. I think they avoid it largely because it's boring. Or, rather, because it would be boring, or it would get boring. 

Before I explain why, let me first look at the two other critics McCormack cites. J. Hoberman is, of course, a critic I revere and a human bring I admire. His particular approach draws on ideological investigation, a breadth of aesthetic knowledge, a playful enthusiasm for making disparate connections, and a wry, engaged sense of humor; he weaves all these elements together with a genuine sophistication. While he deeply deplores genuine cruelty, he would never stoop to the genuinely naive fake outrage that Douthat whips out when considering the Hostel films. As for White, he is easily disposed of; his politics and his readings of film politics are incoherent, dribblingly neurotic bordering on the lunatic; just another channel for his never-ending stream of personal resentments. 

To my mind the greatest politically-inclined critic was the late Robin Wood, who was unstinting and unsparing in pointing out how not only movies but movie critics were in some sense enslaved to the dominant ideology. The fulminations of the Big Hollywood idiots notwithstanding, almost 100 percent of mainstream film product does, in some crucial respect, if not serve, than at least pay fealty to the dominant ideology. Most professional film critics are employed by companies/institutions whose very existence is, in some way, reliant on the upholding of the dominant ideology. I understand that there's at least one juicy academic paper to be written on the new film Wanderlust, to which I link to my review below. The movie genially lampoons communal life without any thought-out examination of the actual reasons why it might be "better" than the urban rat race its characters are trying to escape from. Its resolution involves a kind of balancing act between two "competing" modes of life that in actuality cannot exist in tandem. It's a fairy tale.

I didn't get into this too thoroughly in my review not because I thought it would be "infra dig" for me to do so. It was because, first off, I don't have unlimited space; second off, or close to first off, having seen the film on a Tuesday evening and needing to file in order for the review to post on a Thursday, I didn't have time to work out my observations about this into a satisfactorily cogent form. And third off, for the purposes of both the audience I'm addressing and my making a living, the observation is kind of beside the point. I don't wanna go "we are all prostitutes" on y'all, because that's not what I believe, but I do believe that I'm working in a system that's in a sense the definition of the dominant ideology. The dominant ideology is our water, so to speak. Douthat, whose conservatism is at odds not just with the post-modern but the modern, can choose to ignore the fact that a particular wrinkle in the dominant ideology of late capitalism is precisely what enables the deviations from conservatism that he finds so objectionable; this is one of the ways he gets to be triple-dealing. For those of us on a different end of the spectrum, digging too deep into the dominant ideology would get pretty damn tedious. I try to imagine what my life would be like if I spent it, say, pointing out how hetero-normative almost EVERYTHING was. You see what I'm saying. And the other reason is, of course, that there's a limit to how much I'm REALLY interested in rocking the boat. Douthat can "rock" the boat all he wants; his masters/allies own it, after all. 

Plus ça boring

"Teachers of Literature are apt to think up such problems as 'What is the author's purpose' or still worse 'What is the guy trying to say?'"—Vladimir Nabokov, "On a Book Entitled Lolita," 1957

"Spielberg’s movies are undeniably powerful. His films function as supreme audience entertainments, almost by definition. But when I revisited them, I wanted to find their ideas: What, after all these features, has Spielberg really said?"—Bill Wyman, "I Watched Every Spielberg Movie," Slate, January 30, 2012

For "Shame"

In my first piece for The A/V Club, a "For Our Consideration" late-game defense of Steve McQueen's film about addiction. Comments over there are already getting, um, exciting, so add yours there, or keep it here if you prefer. Thanks for reading. 

Theory, heresy, coffee-table anomie

 

You will search Kael’s collected work in vain for a theory, a system, or even a consistent set of principles.—A.O. Scott, “Mad About Her: Pauline Kael, Loved and Loathed” (with Manohla Dargis), The New York Times, October 14, 2011

 

Kael’s attraction to the art of the mass audience—the audience that includes our family and our neighbors—is about as far as you can get from Sontag’s prostration before the exalted and the disaffection from the mass audience it entails. Kael was wary of anything as humorless as exaltation. She was wary of anyone who took himself too seriously—such as Sontag’s adored Bresson, whom she charged with “inhuman pride.”—Craig Seligman, Sontag and Kael: Opposites Attract Me, Counterpoint, 2004

 

Bloggers and the writers who turn out well-crafted pieces on their own Web sites are free to write what they want. The best of them, such as Dennis Cozzalio at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule or Kim Morgan at Sunset Gun or Farran Nehme Smith at The Self-Styled Siren, give public voice to the way movies function as private obsession. Their film knowledge is broad and deep, but they wear that knowledge lightly. They understand that the true appreciation of any art begins in pleasure (and not in the “work” of watching movies). To read them is to read people grounded in the sensual response to movies, in what the presence or look of a certain star, or the way a shot is lit stirs in them. —Charles Taylor, “The Problem With Film Criticism,” Dissent, Fall 2011 (available on the internet to subscribers only)

 

Reading long, detailed arguments about a difference of millimeters in the aspect ratio of a new Blu-Ray disc, the only shrinking millimeters I’m aware of are those of my open eyes narrowing.— Taylor, Dissent

 

When the writer Dan Kois advanced the heretical notion in the New York Times that he couldn’t pretend to enjoy movies he found boring, the reaction he got made it seem as if he had said movies could never deviate from convention and audiences should never try anything new. The film historian David Bordwell even used the word “philistinism.”—Taylor, Dissent

 

In college, a friend demanded to know what kind of idiot I was that I hadn’t yet watched Tarkovsky’s “Solaris.” “It’s so boring,” he said with evident awe. “You have to watch it, but you won’t get it.”

He was right: I had to watch it, and I didn’t get it. I had to watch it — on a laserdisc in the university library — because the intimation that there was a film that connoisseurs knew that I’d never heard of was too much to bear. I didn’t get it because its mesmerizing pace was so far removed from my cinematic metabolism that several times during its 165 minutes, I awoke in a panic, only to find that the same thing was happening onscreen as was happening when I closed my eyes. (Seas roiling; Russians brooding.) After I left the library, my friend asked me what I thought. “That was amazing,” I said. When he asked me what part I liked the best, I picked the five-minute sequence of a car driving down a highway, because it seemed the most boring. He nodded his approval. —Dan Kois, “Eating Your Cultural Vegetables,” The New York Times Magazine, April 29, 2011

 

The reaction to Kois was a sustained example of bullying masked as erudition.—Taylor, Dissent

 

What is interesting is the impression of a giddy, widespread abdiction of all time-consuming enterprises, from building an argument to watching a movie, and the accompanying implication that anything beyond an immediate gut-level response is suspect. Sometimes the abdication and the uses to which it is put are “market driven,” sometimes angst-ridden, sometimes politically cunning, and sometimes, as in Kois’s case, gleefully nonchalant. “My taste stubbornly remains my taste,” writes Kois as a summary statement: this is not film criticism, but rather its gleeful renunciation.—Kent Jones, “That was SO THEN, This is TOTALLY NOW,” Film Comment, September/October 2011 (Print only)

 

[Branded To Kill is] also a movie of rain and shadows, and Mr. Suzuki’s use of angular, minimalist 20th-century-modern interiors to convey blankness and isolation makes you wonder why anyone ever consented to be bored by Michelangelo Antonioni’s coffee-table anomie. —Charles Taylor, “New DVDs To Warm Your Toes By,” The New York Times, October 28, 2011

 

 

Images from Blow-Up (with Jeff Beck, 1966), Zabriskie Point (with Daria Halprin, 1970), The Passenger (with Maria Schneider, 1975) and Identification of a Woman (1982), directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.

The "Salò" imperative, such as it is

So Slate has started a "culture blog," called "Browbeat," get it?, and it seems pretty much as delightful as you'd expect. And yesterday over at said blog David Haglund put up a brief post with the headline "Must Film Buffs Watch the Revolting Salò?" which is really a pretty interesting hed by my lights, because every word in it except maybe 'film" and "the" represents a category error. This whole notion of film "buff"-dom, and/or cinephilia, as a kind of contest; I never got it. No one individual knows the entirety of film history; no one has seen everything; no one can speak with authority on every film, every filmmaker. Enthusiasts are enthusiasts, and yes, "professional" critics ought to have seen more, and processed more, than laymen or enthusiasts or what have you. The notion that you're going to get thrown out of some club if you don't "subject" yourself to film X seems entirely ridiculous. And while I'd be the first to argue, very strongly, that a wide viewing background and some substantial historical context is essential not just to persuasive and engaging critical writing but also to critical thinking itself, even the most learned and erudite will find themselves in a position when they're obliged to bluff, punt, or just pass on the subject. 

This might seem an especially inapt way to put it, but I personally don't give a shit whether you've seen Salò or not. I've seen it, I may watch it again now that it's out on Blu-ray (once my PS3 is replaced), but your having seen it is not the linchpin on which I'm going to base my assessment of either your cinephilia or your critical intelligence. I bring it up because I find (and you may be surprised to discover this) the whole perspective of the discussion to be kind of dispiriting; this whole sense of Salò as a kind of totem of all that is reprehensible in cinematic imagery and hence reducible to a parlor game acid test, the art-film equivalent of The Human Centipede, for the adults in the room. Except discussing it on that particular level simply is not adult (I know, I know, I'm turning into Lee Siegel, right?) and while Haglund quoted mostly smart people in his piece, only Scott Tobias of The A/V Club is quoted in such a way as to even suggest that Salò has any kind of cultural specificity outside of its status as some kind of coffee-table gross-out object. (I know that Richard Brody certainly apprehends the film in a culturally specific way, too, but the quotes from him in Haglund's piece are on the more general side.) For many reasons it's a shame that Salò, a deliberately unreasonable cinematic disgorgement of despair, was Pier Paolo Pasolini's final film; it gives it the aura of a testament that it was likely not intended to be. I wrote about the film myself for what was then known as The Auteurs' Notebook, and concluded, "as an examination of any facet of fascism in particular, or power relations in general, Salò is a welter of incoherence." I said "welter," and I meant "welter," and if I watch Salò again, it will be to reexamine my own assessment of it, not for the sake of testing my tolerance for unpleasant imagery. Again: Cinephilia is not a game of "Guts," for fuck's sake. Criticism even less so. 

And yes, it is snicker-worthy that in the "Browbeat" post, Dan Kois, who essentially made his name by saying, "Nyah, nyah, Solaris is a bore that only stupid collegiate posers fall for" chimes in that "yes, a serious cinephile ought to see [Salò]." It's almost as if the guy is pulling a gigantic practical joke or something.