While drafting a post about Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here I repeatedly got the title wrong, writing It Didn't Happen Here instead.
This is because there is another book by that very title, cowritten by star of the mid-century centrist intellectual ferment Seymour Martin Lipset (with Gary Wolfe Marks).
His book, the title of which played off of the title of Lewis' classic, addressed not the failure of European-style fascism to take root in America, but the failure of socialist movements to make much headway in the country. In doing so Lewis' choice of title can seem misleading, promising to address one topic but addressing another--but from the standpoint of the horseshoe theory-minded center, which pretends that the "extremists" of the right and left are essentially alike, the implicit equivalence is a natural thing to claim, all as, of course, the left and not the right is what really keeps the centrist awake at night, as they remind every intelligent observer of the political scene all the time.
Monday, November 4, 2024
Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here, and Nathanael West's A Cool Million in 2024
In his biography of Sinclair Lewis Richard Lingeman argues that Lewis, like many of America's other literary greats of the early twentieth century, was a victim of the "cultural" Cold War, which in line with the Anti-Communism elevated to national religion status at the time denigrated any literature that admitted that there was such a thing as society and wrote about it with open eyes, while exalting literature that did the opposite in the process. (It seems entirely symbolic that the clinically insane, wrong-about-pretty-much-everything CIA functionary James Jesus Angleton was deeply into Modernism, and an admirer and friend of Ezra Pound.)
Lingeman also suggested that these many decades later, in a less overheated atmosphere, Lewis' reputation might enjoy something of a revival.
So far as I can tell no such thing has happened--in part because the atmosphere never became less overheated, the cultural Cold War's victory reflected not in that it ended with the completion of its ostensible job of defeating the Soviet Union and the movements with which it was associated, but in that it became so entrenched for so long that no one even noticed it anymore as it went on doing its job of fighting off dissents that neither began nor ended with the Russian Revolution and the state it created. The critical standards of the twentieth century remain the critical standards of the twenty-first century in a society that, as Philip Cunliffe put it in his remarkable counterfactual history Lenin Lives!, has been organized around the defeat of the left, the Cold War never ended on this level or any other--as we are endlessly reminded by those who scream "Marxist!" as an epithet, usually incorrectly for lack of actual Marxists to condemn or even remind them what Marxism actually looks like (Did they even remember that Marx guy? Or Lenin?), and the supposedly horseshoe theory-abiding center continues to punch relentlessly at an ultra-marginalized left that has always been and very much remains its real target while coddling an ever-more powerful right.
Indeed, if Lewis' book about a fascist takeover of America, It Can't Happen Here (1935), has got a bit of attention in recent years--the book, which seems to have become a bestseller for a while, and a stage play based on it--it does not seem to have revived interest in his broader body of work. Or for that matter, in the other writers who similarly essayed the theme of a fascist takeover of the country, as Nathanael West did a year earlier than Sinclair in his novel A Cool Million (1934). An adaptation of Voltaire's Candide to Depression-era America, with the creed of Horatio Alger aspirationalism standing in for old Pangloss' optimism, it is relevant that as hapless Lemuel Pitkin has his misadventures across a supposed Land of Opportunity, in the background a sleazy ex-president of the United States/criminal businessman is, in the name of all those received values, leading a fascist movement with the intent of making himself an American dictator. In contrast with Candide, where at the end of all the horrors they suffer the protagonist and his friends at least find a bit of peace by the shores of Marmara at tale's end, Pitkin's destruction is complete--and America's, for said ex-president has indeed realized his object of making himself America's Fuhrer.
Searching news stories of the past decade I came up with only a single mention of the book in a piece in Vulture way back in 2016. To the credit of its author Christopher Gilson and his editors the piece "gets it right," but it says a lot that no one else with a platform at all comparable gave it such attention at the time, or has given it such public mention in the many years since. This would seem an indication of West's star having sunk even lower than Lewis' over the years, in spite of his having had a bit of help from Hollywood (the 1975 cinematic adaptation of his other book, Day of the Locust, having at least a semi-classic status, while the name with which it furnished a young Matt Groening has of course been immortalized). However, much else may be at issue here as well--not least the greater harshness of the satire, evident in the way that if Lewis' book at least saw America in the end save itself from the dictatorship of Berzelius Windrip, there is no such redemption for the country in West's novel, closing as it does on the aforementioned unhappy note.
Lingeman also suggested that these many decades later, in a less overheated atmosphere, Lewis' reputation might enjoy something of a revival.
So far as I can tell no such thing has happened--in part because the atmosphere never became less overheated, the cultural Cold War's victory reflected not in that it ended with the completion of its ostensible job of defeating the Soviet Union and the movements with which it was associated, but in that it became so entrenched for so long that no one even noticed it anymore as it went on doing its job of fighting off dissents that neither began nor ended with the Russian Revolution and the state it created. The critical standards of the twentieth century remain the critical standards of the twenty-first century in a society that, as Philip Cunliffe put it in his remarkable counterfactual history Lenin Lives!, has been organized around the defeat of the left, the Cold War never ended on this level or any other--as we are endlessly reminded by those who scream "Marxist!" as an epithet, usually incorrectly for lack of actual Marxists to condemn or even remind them what Marxism actually looks like (Did they even remember that Marx guy? Or Lenin?), and the supposedly horseshoe theory-abiding center continues to punch relentlessly at an ultra-marginalized left that has always been and very much remains its real target while coddling an ever-more powerful right.
Indeed, if Lewis' book about a fascist takeover of America, It Can't Happen Here (1935), has got a bit of attention in recent years--the book, which seems to have become a bestseller for a while, and a stage play based on it--it does not seem to have revived interest in his broader body of work. Or for that matter, in the other writers who similarly essayed the theme of a fascist takeover of the country, as Nathanael West did a year earlier than Sinclair in his novel A Cool Million (1934). An adaptation of Voltaire's Candide to Depression-era America, with the creed of Horatio Alger aspirationalism standing in for old Pangloss' optimism, it is relevant that as hapless Lemuel Pitkin has his misadventures across a supposed Land of Opportunity, in the background a sleazy ex-president of the United States/criminal businessman is, in the name of all those received values, leading a fascist movement with the intent of making himself an American dictator. In contrast with Candide, where at the end of all the horrors they suffer the protagonist and his friends at least find a bit of peace by the shores of Marmara at tale's end, Pitkin's destruction is complete--and America's, for said ex-president has indeed realized his object of making himself America's Fuhrer.
Searching news stories of the past decade I came up with only a single mention of the book in a piece in Vulture way back in 2016. To the credit of its author Christopher Gilson and his editors the piece "gets it right," but it says a lot that no one else with a platform at all comparable gave it such attention at the time, or has given it such public mention in the many years since. This would seem an indication of West's star having sunk even lower than Lewis' over the years, in spite of his having had a bit of help from Hollywood (the 1975 cinematic adaptation of his other book, Day of the Locust, having at least a semi-classic status, while the name with which it furnished a young Matt Groening has of course been immortalized). However, much else may be at issue here as well--not least the greater harshness of the satire, evident in the way that if Lewis' book at least saw America in the end save itself from the dictatorship of Berzelius Windrip, there is no such redemption for the country in West's novel, closing as it does on the aforementioned unhappy note.
The Courtiers and the Peasants
Journalists, like the artists they so often resemble in many ways, and are often aspiring to be, are a highly impressionable bunch particularly susceptible to being in awe of those who have wealth and power. Thus when they, for example, refer to some Global Fortune 500 CEO as a "Sun King" or somesuch, they do so not with the irony of the wise at the pretensions of a figure all too apt to be revealed as a fool, fraud and criminal, or a democratic disgust at elite vaingloriousness, but the awe of courtiers contesting for the honor of holding the Sun King's chamber pot (if not rendering more intimate service still) in the belief that the King really is God's appointed on Earth, that their proximity to such glory makes them glorious--and the combination of cynical awareness that sucking up to such gets one ahead with the complete lack of dignity that permits them to go about the task wholeheartedly.
However, the general public does not necessarily share the artist's sentiments, or have much respect for those who do hold them--perhaps the more in as they have so often been led to believe that the journalist is a Tribune of the People, rather than a Courtier to the Kings making their lives miserable, and feel continually betrayed in the process.
However, the general public does not necessarily share the artist's sentiments, or have much respect for those who do hold them--perhaps the more in as they have so often been led to believe that the journalist is a Tribune of the People, rather than a Courtier to the Kings making their lives miserable, and feel continually betrayed in the process.
Artists Aren't the Only Ones Who Are Impressionable
In discussing the propensity of artists for glorifying the powerful Upton Sinclair refers to--besides the hard realities of economic and political power that dictate the terms of worldly "success" for the artist--the mentality that makes so many artists glorify the powerful so very willingly, and in particular the impressionability that is part of the package. That impressionability, which necessarily includes a susceptibility to being impressed by position and the trappings of rank, the deference that power commands and the allure of luxury, leaves artists easily awed by those who have the benefit of all those things, and their work reflects the fact.
So, too, does this seem the case with journalists and with historians. While their work--properly done--differs profoundly from that of the poet or the novelist I suspect impressionability played its part in their choosing their particular line of work. One may add that like artists journalists incline to the telling of stories, with their desire to tell what they think is a good story often getting the better of what is supposed to distinguish them from the producer of fiction, namely that they are supposed to tell us What Really Happened. Indeed, all too often the journalist and the historian give the impression of being frustrated novelists as they go about their work--generally not to its betterment, as the cleaving of both journalists and historians to explaining the world in terms of the doings of Great Men, and their passing off the mediocrities and worse that hold power as such, reminds us constantly.
So, too, does this seem the case with journalists and with historians. While their work--properly done--differs profoundly from that of the poet or the novelist I suspect impressionability played its part in their choosing their particular line of work. One may add that like artists journalists incline to the telling of stories, with their desire to tell what they think is a good story often getting the better of what is supposed to distinguish them from the producer of fiction, namely that they are supposed to tell us What Really Happened. Indeed, all too often the journalist and the historian give the impression of being frustrated novelists as they go about their work--generally not to its betterment, as the cleaving of both journalists and historians to explaining the world in terms of the doings of Great Men, and their passing off the mediocrities and worse that hold power as such, reminds us constantly.
James Ponsoldt's The Circle and the Tyranny of Generic Classification
I missed James Ponsoldt's The Circle when it first came out back in 2017 but caught it on streaming some years later. As I had largely missed the film's publicity at the time of its release--and I must admit, also not read Dave Eggers' book--I saw the film with very few expectations. I will not go so far as to claim that it is a latterday classic, but when I saw just how poorly it was received (a 16 percent on Rotten Tomatoes!) I thought it deserved better than it got, indeed a lot better. It also seems to me that I am not alone in thinking so, as while the audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes is almost as bad as that of the critics (21 percent), the users of the Internet Movie Data Base give it a far from great but still better than absolutely horrible 5.4.
It also seems to me that there is something worth saying about the extreme negativity of the professional critics toward this film. Part of it, quite frankly, is that critics today as much as ever have a deep bias against socially critical material, and often hide this behind bad faith claims that a work which is socially critical is somehow really saying nothing at all. (We saw plenty of this with Todd Phillips' Joker, for example.) It was not that The Circle said nothing, or said something "outdated" in a "condescending" fashion, or as Peter Griffin had it, that it "insists upon itself," or anything else of the sort, but rather that it all too clearly said something relevant but which they did not want said that excited them to their displays of contempt, the more in as it was a Tom Hanks and Emma Watson-starring wide release opening in three thousand theaters rather than a small arthouse film (watching which the critics tend to be more indulgent when a movie has a Message, plausibly because so few will see it).
Indeed, it seems plausible that the critics are especially sensitive to any challenge to the Cult of Silicon Valley, with all it has meant for the legitimation of neoliberalism in our time, and which in so many cases these days is their employer with all that means, given the digitalization and corporatization of the media, and the way the "move fast and break things" crowd has bought up that media, and not hesitated to exercise the political power that comes with its ownership.
However, it also seems to me that the film version of The Circle was the more vulnerable to such attack because of the way in which it was categorized for marketing purposes, The Circle sold as a "thriller." Judged by the standard most people have in mind when people hear the word "thriller" (especially in this period in which thrillers are more and more associated with shock and with action rather than a Hitchcockian cultivation of tension) the movie is at best unconventional, and at worst rather limp. Had it been presented as the darkly satirical comedy-drama the film actually is I suspect some at least would have been less harsh in their judgment--but alas, such things are more difficult sells in the world the movie marketing folks Pauline Kael so rightly called out a near half century ago have made.
It also seems to me that there is something worth saying about the extreme negativity of the professional critics toward this film. Part of it, quite frankly, is that critics today as much as ever have a deep bias against socially critical material, and often hide this behind bad faith claims that a work which is socially critical is somehow really saying nothing at all. (We saw plenty of this with Todd Phillips' Joker, for example.) It was not that The Circle said nothing, or said something "outdated" in a "condescending" fashion, or as Peter Griffin had it, that it "insists upon itself," or anything else of the sort, but rather that it all too clearly said something relevant but which they did not want said that excited them to their displays of contempt, the more in as it was a Tom Hanks and Emma Watson-starring wide release opening in three thousand theaters rather than a small arthouse film (watching which the critics tend to be more indulgent when a movie has a Message, plausibly because so few will see it).
Indeed, it seems plausible that the critics are especially sensitive to any challenge to the Cult of Silicon Valley, with all it has meant for the legitimation of neoliberalism in our time, and which in so many cases these days is their employer with all that means, given the digitalization and corporatization of the media, and the way the "move fast and break things" crowd has bought up that media, and not hesitated to exercise the political power that comes with its ownership.
However, it also seems to me that the film version of The Circle was the more vulnerable to such attack because of the way in which it was categorized for marketing purposes, The Circle sold as a "thriller." Judged by the standard most people have in mind when people hear the word "thriller" (especially in this period in which thrillers are more and more associated with shock and with action rather than a Hitchcockian cultivation of tension) the movie is at best unconventional, and at worst rather limp. Had it been presented as the darkly satirical comedy-drama the film actually is I suspect some at least would have been less harsh in their judgment--but alas, such things are more difficult sells in the world the movie marketing folks Pauline Kael so rightly called out a near half century ago have made.
Awkwardness in Contemporary Life: A Few Notes
The idea that contemporary life is somehow notably awkward seems to have been popular these past few decades. (Adam Kotsko, in fact, devoted a whole book to it.)
There seems reason for that--and not just the postmodernist tendency to shy away from the large social questions and instead obsess over the "little things in life." We really do seem to be living in a society where the gap between the received rules, and our ability to follow them because of the actual terms on which we are compelled to live our lives, seems to be widening to a degree of which a critical mass of people is all too aware and about which they are sufficiently discomfited to call attention to the fact, all as there seems to be no progress whatsoever toward consensus about a newer set of rules that would make more sense in the new circumstances.
Consider, for instance, the conventional idea about how an "adult" is supposed to live in North American society. You are "all grown up" when you have progressed sufficiently in a career to enjoy a "stable" job that has enabled you to start and maintain a family at a middle class standard of comfort and security--expectations that, if they were more an aspiration for most then than a reality even at the height of the post-war boom, have become less and less plausible since. Yet the expectations remain, with the young often protesting, and their elders responding only with scorn, sure that rather than victims of the neoliberal societal model, and the way it has turned college into a quasi-financial bubble loading the game's losers with debt, a lousy job market for even the holders of so-called "useful" college degrees in times when the business community's courtiers sniff about "labor shortages," the exorbitantly priced housing inevitably following from an economy where housing is an "investment" rather than shelter and housing policy expected to enrich real estate speculators rather than provide human beings with places to live, etc., their elders insist that the young have no one to blame but themselves for their problems, dismissing what they say on their own behalf as the whining of "Betas," and not letting facts or logic get in the way of their gleefully punching down at them.
As the situation implies the lack of any new consensus reflects a sharpness of political division--a reactionary politics of backlash and cultural war, and a bitter "status politics" on both sides of the divide escalating higher and higher into ugly forms of bigotry, with a good deal of class snobbery in the mix (with those who fall short of upper middle class norms fair game for abuse)--all in a situation of increasingly frayed nerves amid growing societal dysfunction and declining prospects and the ever more brutal educational and career demands the complacent call "competitiveness," and of course, an unhinged cult of self-assertion in its meanest and stupidest forms that makes of culture heroes the asshole, the bitch, the bully. Thus is everyone, rather than attempting to display what urbanity and tolerance may be reconcilable with the demands of decency and dignity, instead sure that they have the right and even duty to impose their prejudices on the world at large, and ever on the lookout for offense as they accord themselves the right to police everyone else's behavior in a way that would be called "police harassment" if a police officer did it--and everyone, the more in as this is an age of ubiquitous, The Circle-like surveillance, being watched and judged and condemned for failure all the time according to multiple and completely inconsistent sets of rules, always seemingly doing "the wrong thing."
Some, much more than others, get the worst of it. Those who don't have power, those who find themselves outsiders in a particular grouping, those who perhaps even at a neurological level less easily fit in --the attention to neurodiversity these days seeming to me a reflection of, at least as much as anything else, the ever-rising penalty on imperfection in conformity that has been so bound up with the pathologization of behaviors that might once upon a time have been taken in stride. Still, few indeed wholly escape the awkwardness of the times, and the penalties exacted for it.
There seems reason for that--and not just the postmodernist tendency to shy away from the large social questions and instead obsess over the "little things in life." We really do seem to be living in a society where the gap between the received rules, and our ability to follow them because of the actual terms on which we are compelled to live our lives, seems to be widening to a degree of which a critical mass of people is all too aware and about which they are sufficiently discomfited to call attention to the fact, all as there seems to be no progress whatsoever toward consensus about a newer set of rules that would make more sense in the new circumstances.
Consider, for instance, the conventional idea about how an "adult" is supposed to live in North American society. You are "all grown up" when you have progressed sufficiently in a career to enjoy a "stable" job that has enabled you to start and maintain a family at a middle class standard of comfort and security--expectations that, if they were more an aspiration for most then than a reality even at the height of the post-war boom, have become less and less plausible since. Yet the expectations remain, with the young often protesting, and their elders responding only with scorn, sure that rather than victims of the neoliberal societal model, and the way it has turned college into a quasi-financial bubble loading the game's losers with debt, a lousy job market for even the holders of so-called "useful" college degrees in times when the business community's courtiers sniff about "labor shortages," the exorbitantly priced housing inevitably following from an economy where housing is an "investment" rather than shelter and housing policy expected to enrich real estate speculators rather than provide human beings with places to live, etc., their elders insist that the young have no one to blame but themselves for their problems, dismissing what they say on their own behalf as the whining of "Betas," and not letting facts or logic get in the way of their gleefully punching down at them.
As the situation implies the lack of any new consensus reflects a sharpness of political division--a reactionary politics of backlash and cultural war, and a bitter "status politics" on both sides of the divide escalating higher and higher into ugly forms of bigotry, with a good deal of class snobbery in the mix (with those who fall short of upper middle class norms fair game for abuse)--all in a situation of increasingly frayed nerves amid growing societal dysfunction and declining prospects and the ever more brutal educational and career demands the complacent call "competitiveness," and of course, an unhinged cult of self-assertion in its meanest and stupidest forms that makes of culture heroes the asshole, the bitch, the bully. Thus is everyone, rather than attempting to display what urbanity and tolerance may be reconcilable with the demands of decency and dignity, instead sure that they have the right and even duty to impose their prejudices on the world at large, and ever on the lookout for offense as they accord themselves the right to police everyone else's behavior in a way that would be called "police harassment" if a police officer did it--and everyone, the more in as this is an age of ubiquitous, The Circle-like surveillance, being watched and judged and condemned for failure all the time according to multiple and completely inconsistent sets of rules, always seemingly doing "the wrong thing."
Some, much more than others, get the worst of it. Those who don't have power, those who find themselves outsiders in a particular grouping, those who perhaps even at a neurological level less easily fit in --the attention to neurodiversity these days seeming to me a reflection of, at least as much as anything else, the ever-rising penalty on imperfection in conformity that has been so bound up with the pathologization of behaviors that might once upon a time have been taken in stride. Still, few indeed wholly escape the awkwardness of the times, and the penalties exacted for it.
"Cringe" Comedy is All About Vicarious Gracelessness
One of the more wearisome terms of contemporary cultural commentary is "cringe," and especially its usage to denote a subgenre of comedy that centers on the audience's "cringe" reaction toward a character's embarrassing themselves in some manner--with Michael Scott in the American version of The Office, and the reactions he induces in viewers, notorious as exemplifying this.
Of course, laughing at others' embarrassment has probably been a staple of comedy for as long as comedy has been around. Yet while there have been a great constancies in such matters as comedy, there have also been changes--and it seems to me that there may be something significant in the attention given to "cringe."
It seems plausible, even probable, that the pervasiveness of cringe comedy is related to the cultural preoccupation with awkwardness, which seems to have taken off at about the same time that the notion of "cringe" as a distinct style of comedy did--and to be related to what has made awkwardness so significant in contemporary life, gracelessness. Watching Michael Scott make a fool of himself I suspect few laugh because they remember the times when they were acting like Michael Scott, but because they think of themselves as having never been quite like Scott, feeling superior to him and all the other Michael Scotts of the world, and meanly delighting in feeling absolutely graceless toward him as the show's writers positively wallow in Scott's making a muck of to the situation whenever he opens his mouth, the more in as he is completely oblivious to what he has done to others and himself.
Of course, laughing at others' embarrassment has probably been a staple of comedy for as long as comedy has been around. Yet while there have been a great constancies in such matters as comedy, there have also been changes--and it seems to me that there may be something significant in the attention given to "cringe."
It seems plausible, even probable, that the pervasiveness of cringe comedy is related to the cultural preoccupation with awkwardness, which seems to have taken off at about the same time that the notion of "cringe" as a distinct style of comedy did--and to be related to what has made awkwardness so significant in contemporary life, gracelessness. Watching Michael Scott make a fool of himself I suspect few laugh because they remember the times when they were acting like Michael Scott, but because they think of themselves as having never been quite like Scott, feeling superior to him and all the other Michael Scotts of the world, and meanly delighting in feeling absolutely graceless toward him as the show's writers positively wallow in Scott's making a muck of to the situation whenever he opens his mouth, the more in as he is completely oblivious to what he has done to others and himself.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 other tempest in a teacup, 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.
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 other tempest in a teacup, 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.
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.
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.
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