Of Awkwardness and Gracelessness

It seems to me at least plausible that, as Adam Kotsko has suggested, a heightened awkwardness has become characteristic of contemporary life. However, it also seems to me that it would not matter so much were it not for what has also been characteristic of contemporary life--the absence of social graces. If we saw more of those we would probably suffer less from awkwardness, because awkwardness would not be so ruthlessly punished--while there would probably be less awkwardness simply because a critical mass of the population might have come to sufficient agreement about the rules of social interaction to make social life a bit more bearable than it is now.

What Are Social Graces?

I recently found it surprisingly difficult to find a convenient definition of "social graces" online to which to refer in this item. The search engine I used instead kept referring me simply to various definitions of "grace," often religious ones, and most of them quite far removed from what I was seeking.

Still, if convenient definitions were difficult to find online I do not think it would be seen as too disputable were I to say (in line with the best of those definitions I was able to find) that "social graces" are a matter of the skills requisite for dealing successfully with others in "polite society." However, what really distinguishes social graces from mere display of "politeness" or "etiquette" is that they are not a matter of simple correctness according to well-defined rules, but a matter of how one acts when the rules are not so clear, or when others do not adhere perfectly to those rules because social graces come down to that ability to smooth social interaction, make it bearable and even pleasing, in part by enabling others to feel at ease. This requires an alertness, a consideration, a creativity not reducible to such matters as the proper forms of greeting or which fork to use with which dish. Indeed, it requires tolerance for others' foibles--letting things go, and holding things back.

That a simple explanation of all this was elusive online seems to me highly symbolic of our situation today in regard to such graces. After all, just how much of such graces do you see, and expect to see? Ours, after all, is a culture which exalts self-assertion at its most idiotic, and those engaging in it most freely, thinking such a lack of consideration for others as proof of one's own strength, as such "strength" seems to be what people of low and conventional mind desire to possess above all else in an era in which the "apologists and admirers of injustice, misery and brutality" supply the conventional wisdom, and make of the bully and the troll, the braggart and the swaggerer, and all the others of their disgusting ilk, not the despised social outcasts they deserve to be, but the culture heroes of the day.1

Thus does the public watch "reality" shows in which vulgarian mediocrities who got every conceivable break yet attribute their billions solely to their own utterly unevidentiated "genius" pour contumely on aspirants to "success" before the eyes of the whole world, as all concerned think the revolting demeanor of "the panelists" is yet further proof of their "genius." Thus do they think the "freedom of speech" is no more and no less than the right of the powerful to punch down at the helpless without anyone punching back at them (the "unbound but protected" victimizing those in the other category). Thus do they salivate at any excuse to "cancel" somebody, indeed claim that their acting on their bigoted vindictiveness is some social duty. And so on and so forth, ad infinitum and ad nauseam.

At the same time those others who do not behave in these ways, and indeed find them objectionable, are surrounded by so much of this behavior that they are apt to have precious little consideration or tolerance to spare for anything but coping with it. They would be gracious if they could--but the mental and emotional resources that would enable them to let things go and hold things back have in all too many cases been used up, even overtaxed, in the course of their just getting through the day.

In a culture like that the existence of social graces is apt to seem like the existence of the Loch Ness monster. We have a fuzzy photo from 1934 that we are told captured it on film. Some people say they have seen it with their own eyes. A percentage of those surveyed think it exists on the basis of such "evidence." However, in the end its existence is far from well-confirmed, and reason abounds for skepticism about whether there ever was anything to be photographed or seen in the first place.

1. The quote's from William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair, to whose credit the remark was not intended to be complimentary.

Upton Sinclair on America's Private Schools

Today the pseudo-libertarian prejudice that is the basis of the country's conventional wisdom holds the private to be superior to the public in efficiency, to the point of always holding out the promise of superior service at lower cost, even as the investors on whose behalf the enterprise is ultimately run make a bundle. That prejudice extends to the public's view of the schools, with private schooling assumed to be superior to public--the more in as private schooling is so much associated with an overglamorized elite, and the conventionally-minded prone to attribute the careers that their alumni enjoy after graduation have not to the class privilege of which those graduates are the beneficiaries (as with the doors open to them because of the families they were born into), but "education" in the narrower sense of what their time there was supposed to have done for their minds.

Interestingly in the volume of his Dead Hand books devoted to what we would today call the K-12 levels of the country's education system Upton Sinclair showed himself to be under no illusions of that sort. If the country's public schools were highly variable in quality, and the overall standard depressingly low, it was the case that the private schools were likewise highly variable in quality, with even elite schools far from what they ought to have been, and for reasons equally reflective of the society that produced them. The schools' purpose, after all, was to take off the hands of rich parents the burden of raising their own children, and train them not for later study or a life of work but membership in the privileged stratum that is often a training in inanity and irrelevancy (Sinclair citing, among much else, his own wife's Fifth Avenue finishing school), while along with poverty and deprivation wealth and privilege pose their own obstacles to learning--for no one has less reason to worry about preparing for a future than those whose futures are already set, or has more access to alternative activities that would be more fun than hitting the books, or more likely to see the teacher as a servant and social inferior with all the respect a spoiled brat is likely to accord such.

Indeed, in the course of his book Sinclair cites a survey of those who had distinguished themselves in a Harvard class in various ways, which showed that while the privately educated students dominated athletics and extracurriculars, they did not claim a disproportionate share of the academic honors, the public school graduates (admittedly, apt to have had the best educations that the country's very unequal public schools could offer) holding their own perfectly well here.

I do not know that a similar survey would produce a similar result today--but even if it would not I also know no reason to think the situation in the country as a whole is terribly different from what Sinclair reported, even as a large part of the public believes otherwise, and the media we have ceaselessly encourages them in what is almost certainly a delusion.

Film Criticism Has Become Film Claquing--Take it From Armond White

Back in that burst of interest in Pauline Kael's life and legacy circa 2011 Armond White published a piece in the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) considering the same subject. Just like Frank Rich's piece (which Mr. White references, not altogether favorably) it contrasted the kind of criticism she produced, and the critical world of which she was a part, with the world that has existed since.

As he observes, more recent "publications like . . .Movieline, and Entertainment Weekly," whose coverage of Hollywood he describes as "hand-in-glove with Hollywood in terms of what is and is not worth praise and attention," produced "a gushy, starstruck culture where hype and reviewing are inseparable" (emphasis added); where, as he quotes Kael saying, the "tendency," all too convenient for Hollywood Suits who "want [reviewing] to be an extension of their advertising departments" pushing their product on "moviegoers" ideally "uninformed and without memory, so they can be happy consumers," has become "to write appreciatively at the highest possible pitch, as if" the sole values were "peaks," and anything a reviewer "like[d] becomes a new peak." In the process audiences came to take for granted such things as "front-page raves for summer blockbusters," to the extent that the writers are actually talking about the content of movies at all (as against box office grosses and awards show prospects). Indeed, it has all gone so far that everyone seems to be not just surprised of but suspicious of and even intolerant of whatever is at odds with the "consensus" all too easily readable in the figures churned out by the review aggregators (which show an upward trend in the average score for films, and where single film franchises like Top Gun can sometimes show the shocking change in standards over the decades). Indeed, it is the case that such dismiss those who depart from the consensus with such terms as "gadfly," "curmudgeon," "contrarian," that treat the more independent-minded critic as simply being disagreeable rather than having anything interesting to say.

All too true, I think, though I do take issue with the author of that piece on at least two points. The first is his view that "[a]udiences these days seem to want to be validated in their own opinions, and take personal offense to critics who do not oblige," implying that audiences were more broad-minded in the past and have fallen away from that, a thing he asserts but does not actually support--and which seems to me the more problematic because it is all too easy for someone writing in the pages of a publication like the CJR to punch down at the "ordinary" moviegoer that way.

The second is Mr. White's claim that the "groveling" we see in the coverage of film "does not occur in coverage of music, the fine arts, or architecture," though I suspect it is just as bad in at least the first two of those areas. We would not be arguing about the influence of poptimism in music and the degeneration of music criticism into "lifestyle reporting" were it otherwise in music. Nor would the art world produce such obscenities as Salvatore Garau's "immaterial sculpture"--the sale of which literal nothing is a slap in the face of every artist, or even would-be artist, who ever did one second's worth of work to create a piece of art, and completely inconceivable were "fine art criticism" not so obscenely degenerate. Indeed, considering all that it seems possible that the situation may be even worse in music and the fine arts than it is in film--while in not saying the same of architecture I refrain only because I do not know the journalism of that field well enough to feel comfortable venturing a proper opinion.

Film Critics After the "Age of Movies"

Recently considering how film criticism has changed since the "Age of Movies" I remarked, along with the diminished centrality of film in contemporary culture, and of the "theatrical experience" in our enjoyment of movies, two major factors--the maturity, or decadence, of the cinematic form, and the changes in politics in our times, with all they meant for battles of ideas of all kinds.

However, besides that there is the matter of the critics themselves and how they stand in relation to the cinematic past. Those critics of that past generation at the center of the comment here--those of Andrew Sarris' and Pauline Kael's generation--experienced the Golden Age of film in their youth (in the theater, of course), drinking it up so that it seeped into their very bones. Indeed, they were still fairly young when the studio system was falling apart, when world cinema had its post-war bloom with figures like Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa, were only middle-aged when the New Hollywood emerged, and still writing when it came to an end.

By contrast those reviewing professionally today come from a generation largely born after the Age of Movies--the generation of MTV and the video arcade, if not the generation of Netflix and TikTok on their smart phone; the generations which in their film viewing came of age after the blockbuster as we know it ascended to dominance, to which the criticisms of Pauline Kael of Raiders of the Lost Ark seem antediluvian if not incomprehensible, what she thought unfortunate taken by them quite in stride as an ideal (a Steven Spielberg followed by a Michael Bay). The classics of American and world cinema were not something they grew up on, but something they picked up deliberately and perhaps academically, the more dutiful perhaps respecting them for their historical significance more than loving them for what they are--and the less dutiful not having much of them at all.

The result is that they suffer no great dissonances when they claque for crappy indies and Big Dumb Blockbusters as though they were Heart-Breaking Works of Staggering Genius.

Film Criticism After the "Age of Movies"

Recently looking back on the career of Pauline Kael, and the kind of cultural standing that a film critic could have back in the "Age of Movies," I was struck again by how much it was a matter not just of the standing of a critic but of critics.

Why is that? It seems to me that there is more to this than the reduced centrality of film in pop culture, or the ways in which it was possible then in a way that it was not later, more culturally fragmented, era, to speak of publications and writers that "everyone" read, important as that was. It also mattered that film was a younger medium than it is today--and that really serious film criticism was also younger, younger and fresher, so that there was more chance for newness, for surprises, for people to see and hear things they had not seen and heard before, and be really affected by them. Indeed, the interest of the major critics of that day was partly a matter of their having different, dueling, ideas about what film was, and what it could and should do, and how we could appreciate it. One may regard the auteurism of Andrew Sarris and the anti-auteurism of Kael as a tempest in a teacup--and with considerable justification (as Frank Rich put it, Kael could be quite the auteurist herself)--but it was still something to talk about, without anything close to a parallel today.

Meanwhile, if Sarris and Kael (both of whom were "cultural Cold Warriors") indulged in the hypocrisy that they were anti-ideological (there is no such thing, in art or anywhere else), others did not, and, for all the limitations of, for example, the "New Hollywood" at its most daring, they passionately espoused and fought for their ideas, and this enlivened and enriched both the works and the broader scene in a way that gave even these that much more to write about.

Again, we live in a very different world that way.

Thus have we ended up with our current crop of film critics, who, honorable (usually non-mainstream) exceptions apart, give us little but claquing for mostly crappy would-be blockbusters, and the "culture war" as what passes for intellectual content, as we can see in both the rising average scores awarded a far from rising quality of filmmaking as shown by Rotten Tomatoes, and the oceans of ink spilled over that tempest in a teacup that is the culture war, like the meaning of Greta Gerwig's cheap piece of culture war-stoking Barbie last summer.

That is no basis for any great standing as a cultural authority.

The Romance of the Theatrical Experience

In this era in which historically-minded observers regard the "Age of Movies" as behind us we often speak of the "romance" of the theatrical experience as having shaped how we once enjoyed movies, and as doing so much less today.

In what did the specialness of that theatrical experience consist, especially in that earlier age?

One key element was that audiovisual media was a rarity in that time. In the Golden Age of Cinema we had radio, but TV for the most part was a little-used novelty. To enjoy sound and picture together was thus a rare treat, enjoyed on average once every couple of weeks, as part of a crowd seated in a great hall in a movie "palace" where, with the lights turned down all attention was fixated on the flickering image on the giant screen at the front of the chamber. That combination of a sense of special event, group experience, lavish surroundings, the darkness focusing attention on that image up front gave it all a dream-like or hypnotic quality.

The elements did not all come together in that way every time. Even when they did they did not suffice to save a bad movie. But all the same, it was a distinct experience, one which people got enough out of that they did it again and again, spending far more money on trips to the movie house than they do today--while when people were really and truly affected and moved by what was on the screen it made that much more of an impression on them. And when they experienced genuine cinematic greatness movies really were magic.

We do not have that today, cannot, because of the ubiquity of audiovisual media that makes anything we want to see so conveniently available everywhere, and usually enjoyed in a less focused, "magical" way, perhaps distractedly as we sit on a commuter train or bus. Even when we go to the theater the multiplex is not the old movie house, while the crowd we are with will not turn off their damn phones during the show they paid twenty dollars a ticket plus concessions and other expenses for, and what we are most likely to come to the theater for is bombast intended to shock the nerves rather than spellbind the consciousness. (Thus do movies remain part of our lives--all as the Age of Movies is past.)

As one sympathetic to the romantic view of the old theatrical experience I do not deny that we have lost something in this. But I also think that very few of us would go back to that older world, any more than most would elect to dispense with the other conveniences the last eighty years of technological change have afforded us.

Frank Rich Remembers Pauline Kael--and the Bygone Age of Movies

In his introduction to the collection of Pauline Kael's writing The Age of Movies Sanford Schwartz wrote of Kael as "undoubtedly the most fervently read American critic of any art" in her heyday, and her departure from her job at the New Yorker a national news story--a claim Frank Rich in his piece looking back on Kael in 2011 assures us is "not hyperbole," and explains why it is not so, even as it can seem that way. Rich certainly is not oblivious to the ways in which Kael, a complex, problematic personality who damaged her own legacy in ways that have him characterizing her story as the "cautionary tale" of the self-destruction of a critic by "corruption, self-parody, first-person megalomania" (evident in, for instance, her attack on Orson Welles' contributions to Citizen Kane), there were bigger issues at work in the decline of Kael's standing that left her comparatively obscure at the time of her death than the personal flaws of one individual.

As Rich observes, by the end of the century movies were already less central to contemporary culture than they were in the 1970s--because audiovisual media broadly exploded, because pop culture fragmented so that any one movie was that much less likely to be an event, because as the New Hollywood gave way to the age of the "high concept" blockbuster movies changed so that there was less for a critic like Kael to say about them that could give intelligent readers very much to think about and get excited about and argue about with each other. (I, for one, find much of value in her review of Raiders of the Lost Ark--but I also know that once one has said all that there is just not much more to say about movies of the type, one reason, I suppose, why David Walsh and his colleagues are such irregular reviewers of major theatrical releases.)

It also followed logically that with film less central in contemporary culture, so were film critics--the more in as interest in the professional critics then throve on the existence of a whole layer of critics arguing their different ideas not just about particular movies but cinema as a whole in the review pages. (Kael's rivalry with Andrew Sarris over at The Village Voice certainly a significant part of what had so many movie buffs rushing to read her reviews once upon a time.)

I am broadly in agreement with Rich here--that the kind of niche Pauline Kael occupied at her height simply disappeared, had disappeared in 2001, and has only become less plausible since. After all, if Kael thought the blockbuster had already conquered at the beginning of the 1980s, what would she, or any like-minded critic, have had to say of the state of the movies in 2019? Or 2024, in which Hollywood is fighting so ferociously to sustain the faltering blockbuster model?

With people paying less attention to film, and to film criticism, the legacy of a single past critic is that much less likely to command attention--and indeed Rich points out how these days it is only those in "cineaste circles and film-studies academia" who still read Kael. Is that fair? Rich's aforementioned piece ran in the New York Times--but I doubt I would ever have run across it had I not taken an interest in film history, and seen Peter Biskind explained her significance (and Sarris') in the world of post-war American cinema.

The Artist Starving in the Garret

As John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in Economics and the Public Purpose people of conventional mind tell artists that true art being appreciated by the few, "success" injurious to the true artist, and that they ought to not hope for worldly success, contenting themselves with being "unworldly and monkish figure[s]." Galbraith, of course, is sufficiently intelligent and honest (it was possible for an Establishment figure to be that back then) that this is an essentially dishonest and self-serving view promulgated by an elite uninterested in lending artists any support whatsoever--but all the same, just as with the other self-serving stupidities of the powerful the view has been so pervasive as to form what Professor Galbraith called "conventional wisdom," giving us the image of the artist starving in a garret for the sake of creation.

One irony of the situation is that the artist may be even more averse to poverty than others, not less--and, as Henri Murger explained in his most famous book, only "walking the paths of Bohemia" in the hope of reaching someplace better, suffering poverty now in the hope of opulence later. (It's not the journey but the destination that counts, especially as the journey offers little but insecurity and hardship.) This is likely even more the case in the age of mass media shoving images of opulence in one's face all the time, and a cult of celebrity telling everyone "You can do it too!"--all as that thought is perhaps the sole comfort making bearable the extreme inequality with which they live, with the taboo against admitting it only underlining how much this is the case.

Gambling on Celebrity

Recently considering the matter of the pursuit of the longshot of celebrity--the immense time and effort and often money people pour into it, with almost no chance of realizing the goal--the question "Why do they do it?" inevitably comes up.

The obvious answer--which Upton Sinclair already gave in 1927's Money Writes!--has been that the rewards are immense, the alternatives profoundly unattractive (life as a "nobody" instead of a "somebody"), and that society relentlessly encourages the public to not count the one-in-a-million odds and instead believe that they are that one in the million that will win this "winner take all" game.

Still, it seems there is something more to be said of the last part of that, the persuasion that they will surely be the exception, with all its profound unreason, enjoining the public to set aside the depressing rational calculation and its implications in favor of "faith," all while vehemently insisting that a lack of "faith"--a lack of readiness to believe in those things running contrary to the evidence of the senses and the conclusions one derives from them using reason, and in which Authority tells them to believe for its convenience--is not just the mark of a superficial mind failing to apprehend "higher" and greater realities, but a grave "character flaw" dooming the sufferer to misery in this world as well as in the next. (Thus does our crappy popular fiction so often depict atheists, rationalists and other "faithless" persons as miserable people and show them up as wrong in the end.)

Do not think, goes the teaching, believe--for knowledge will serve you less well than belief, so much so that one may say that ignorance is strength.

By any chance, do you remember which society encouraged that particular outlook?