Peter Biskind's Film Criticism and the Cult of Roots

I have had many, many occasions to remark the extreme illiteracy of a very high proportion of those journalists, and even academics, in a position to write professionally of politics--their ignorance of the relevant philosophy and history, their sloppiness in such basic matters as definitions, and much, much else that leaves the vast body of their work nearly worthless even at the time of writing, and apt to be of even less interest than that five minutes later (with this the more pronounced the closer we get to the mainstream). However, ever since first encountering his work I have considered Peter Biskind a very honorable exception to that, the more impressive because he hails from the milieu of the arts and humanities rather than the social sciences, for in books such as Seeing is Believing he displayed a very clear grasp of the major tendencies in American political life at mid-century, the spectrum they comprised, and the ways in which these views manifested themselves in film at the time that for me still holds up many, many years after the first encounter for all our differences of vantage point, emphasis, terminology. (Where he writes "liberal" or "corporate liberal" I write "centrist," and emphasize not the liberalism but the conservatism, or "conservative liberalism," of that centrist, but all the same it seems clear to me that he grasps the essentials of the concept.)

As might be expected given the solidity of his grasp of those essentials in an age of muddle is the distinction he made between "liberal" (i.e. centrist) filmmaking, and "conservative" filmmaking, regarding attitudes toward the "ethnic neighborhood" and the community existing in it as against American society at large in films like The Godfather. Writing of their respective understandings of the world Biskind argued that the liberal tended to see such communities as stifling and backward places, to see the positive outcome for a character as movement out of them into the mainstream with its freedoms and opportunities and comparative enlightenment, and the conservative to favor the smaller, more local, community, the organic ties of blood and language and faith with its apparent safety against the uncertainties and dangers, moral as well as physical, of that wider world. Thus did Biskind have much to say of the conservatism of The Godfather in such matters as Amerigo Bonasera's anguished turn from the society that had failed him to Don Corleone--a reading which surprised me when I first encountered it, associating the film as I did with New Hollywood leftishness. Still, even as I now incline to a reading of that scene in socioeconomic, class, terms Biskind's argument seems to me entirely valid--and his observations actually of more interest now than then precisely because what seemed so obvious to a Biskind is rather less so to the great majority of our commentariat today in this era in which the cult of "roots" is so hegemonic.

Little remembered as it now is, partly because so many whose opinions count want it little remembered, in that period in which Biskind had first been thinking about all this, to go by Michael Lind's schema in The Next American Nation, America had only recently transitioned out of its view of itself as an Anglo-Saxon Protestant country, into a view of itself as a "Euro-America" of broadly European origin in which the "White ethnic" was simply "White" for practical purposes, and especially in the wake of the civil rights movement Euro-America fast turning into a "Multicultural America" where people of all races could say "I, too, am America." Amid all of that it would seem every group had its conflicts between its universalists and its particularists, not just the historically dominant groups but also those more marginalized ones struggling to overcome official, legally instituted discrimination--varying according to the conditions, the experiences, of those groups, but all the same, broadly evident. (Indeed, Susan Glenn has written of a "Cold War" between universalists and particularists in one of these cases.)

From a later standpoint it would seem that the particularists won the war, decisively, and that in line with the rule that "the victors write the history books" did just that. In doing so they chose to write the universalists out of the history altogether, to present the relevant history as a journey toward a people history had not always treated well embracing and taking pride in their distinctiveness, their roots, and cleaving to that as they refuse "assimilation," and this a beautiful thing and the only thing, the contrary views, the rancor, the anxieties of the earlier period dropped down the Memory Hole (such that one searches in vain for a properly grounded and truly comprehensive history of this conflict, its sources, its course, its meaning).

Few seem to realize that, in line with just who it is that has traditionally stressed "difference" and tradition and heritage, and how little even the ABCs of political philosophy are understood today, that this triumph of "roots" was one more dimension of the triumph of the right that has dominated just about every dimension of political life in America, the Western world, and everywhere else this past half century.