The Talkies/Confessions of a Critic
Podhoretz, John
revenue, administrative favor, and finally of Parliament with its unlimited sovereignty. It becomes the aim of the loser in this contest (Labour is by far the worst in this respect) not just...
...I would call him the "consumer guide...
...If this be mere illusion, mere cant, then my own little life is a wretched failure, an absurd bubble pretending substance...
...In the sociological equation, the audience for foreign films is too small and too unrepresentative of the nation as a whole to tell us very much about the mood of the country...
...The third is the one I would call the "sociological critic...
...The first is the one we are all immediately familiar with...
...I prefer The Godfather to Children o f Paradise, Duck Soup to Smiles o f a Summer Night...
...Their anointed elite of experts were going to wipe out evil by getting rid of poverty and the inequalities of wealth...
...A nice bit of scenery, a good musical number, even the sight of my old neighborhood in New York can obviate much that I do not enjoy...
...Minor art, perhaps...
...We are all experts in the movies...
...I for one cannot believe that Hollywood would think of casting Robby Benson in anything, but it continues to do so, and there are probably nice, normal human beings out there whose hearts leap with joy when they see Benson's name in the opening credits...
...Discounting the onerous myth of original sin, Pelagius held that salvation was a prize to be earned purely by human effort, without the complicating factor of God's grace...
...That you know better than I...
...At certain points during my previous tenure, I said and wrote things of which I am ashamed because they weren't true when I wrote them, and I knew it...
...There are, I think, basically three kinds of movie critics...
...But many factors contribute to my overall opinion of a movie...
...This is happening today despite the fact that the poor are on the whole far more comfortable than they were in the time of Beatrice Webb, as is almost everybody else...
...But a fourteen-year-old can offer an explanation of a movie he has just seen that will be as worthwhile as mine, and probably ten times as valuable as Vincent Canby's in the New York Times...
...As a result, not once during my previous tenure did I review a foreignlanguage film...
...After writing a score of articles on the movies, I found that I had run dry, could think of nothing more to say...
...they are at the heart of the moviegoing experience...
...He contributes huge, detailed articles to scholarly journals like Film Comment, Sight and Sound, and Films in Review...
...they are how we come to judgment of a movie...
...Webb nor her Fabian friends, nor the postwar idealists in the Labour party realized the infinite nature of expectations...
...In any case, here is the caveat: Do not expect this column to tell you what you should go to see at the movies...
...Since movies are made for the purpose of garnering profits, the sociological critic assumes that the moviemakers are seeking audience approval by tapping into an audience's mood, by seeking t ~ play chords that will be pleasing to an audience...
...What is important about the movies, and the reason that an audience knows what it likes better than a critic, is that movies are what Warshow called "the immediate experience...
...but the truly great movies, the ones that seem to elevate us to a higher plane, can, I think, literally be counted on one hand...
...British democracy seems headed away from a ritual of electoral consent to govern, into a mutually destructive b a t t l e which a c t u a l l y impairs government...
...He is the daily reviewer who often uses stars and halves of stars to evaluate the movies he discusses...
...Webb's feudal model for society...
...So I write about movies as a cultural, not an artistic, phenomenon...
...A mass audience unself-consciously responds to what it is seeing up on the screen, it remembers that it enjoyed this scene, didn't particularly like that one...
...I may like or dislike The Last Starfighter or Conan the Destroyer, but I simply don't know you well enough to know whether you would agree with me...
...This is why, unlike all the other arts, movies don't really require that their THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1984 33 critics have any special training...
...Their assumptions rested on a certain concept of human nature, much older even than Mrs...
...So what the movie says is of great importance...
...we've all grown up with them, we have sampled film history on television, we know more about movies than about any other art...
...When it comes to the movies, I am an unremitting lowbrow...
...the form was pioneered by Robert Warshow and Manny Farber...
...Webb and her colleagues meant to achieve salvation (they called it socialism) not in the next world but in this one...
...I n September 1979, I became the movie critic of The American Spectator, and in February 1982 I contributed what was to be my last review during that stint...
...This is the category I would place myself in...
...When an audience responds positively or negatively to a movie, in the sociological critic's eye, it is revealing a great deal about its own thoughts on the subjects the movie is dealing with...
...They name the hot directors, impugn the not-so-hot, and raise the specter of greatness that is the most terrifying demon haunting the consumer's guide...
...Now, this may seem like a cardinal violation of the principal purpose of any critic: to discuss and evaluate the artistic quality of the works within his general purview...
...It might also be an epitaph for those politics, if they were dead and gone...
...Of course Beatrice Webb did not consciously model herself on Pelagius...
...how horrible it would be for a consumer's guide to condemn a movie like Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris when a eonsensus is developing among the experts that it is "great...
...These reactions are spontaneous...
...That is because the mass audience knows what it likes before seeing something...
...But her books stress again and again that the nature of her quest was religious--not just in her "Christian" faith in the sacrifice of the individual to the state, but in this summing up of her own true belief: I have staked all on the essential goodness of human nature, on that which maketh toward righteousness...
...I f the popcorn is inedible, that inevitably colors my reaction to what is happening on the screen...
...these good works, in true Pelagian fashion, would save society and mankind...
...I gave Kramer vs...
...This might be an elegy for Beatrice Webb herself, or a lament for the mutually corrupting influence of her ideas and the democratic politics of Britain...
...A person who loves Clint Eastwood cannot possibly explain why to a person who hates Eastwood...
...In 1957 consumer's guide critics laughed at Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, and I think they were right to do so...
...I ' m certainly happy to offer my views and will do so during the course of a piece...
...Neither in her diary nor in her autobiographies does she mention him...
...For it is they who usually set the agenda that the consumer's guides follow...
...There was not a film being made that truly inspired me to sit down at the typewriter and bat out the thousand words necessary to fill this space...
...the sociological critic invents trends when there are none...
...I'm not sure I would like to have a drink with them, though...
...But the sorts of difficulties that caused my initial block are in fact at the very core of the problems with movie criticism in general...
...How this can be I don't know, but it is a truth acknowledged in Hollywood, and if anyone could figure it out he would have a lucrative career in store for him at Paramount or Universal...
...But a consumer's guide usually reads all about a movie months before its release, and he knows from trade papers that Hollywood has high hopes for this one and no hopes for that...
...What mainly interests the sociological critic is the failure or success of a given film with its audience--himself included...
...If I were, I would long ago have run screaming from a movie theater, vowing never to return...
...Clearly 1 have had a change of heart, since I am resuming my duties as TAS's movie critic...
...Like Nietzsche's ass-worshipers in Also Sprach Zarathustra, Mrs...
...Now, after ten years of serious intellection in the quarterlies about the greatness of Vertigo, the movie is rereleased and the consumer's guides fall all over it...
...Fabian socialism was essentially a secular version of this belief...
...Kramer higher marks as an anti-feminist statement than it deserved because that was what I wanted it to be...
...Like all academics, he takes up specific " a u t e u r s , " directors usually, and examines these masters' works over the course of a career, looking for the themes, symbols, and issues that supposedly run through all of the movies...
...It is for this reason that I don't think there is much value in the consumer'sguide approach to reviewing...
...His studies are as intricate and worshipful as an English professor's on one of the great works in the literary canon...
...more important, on those rare occasions when I truly detest a movie, I find there is something especially loathsome about that movie that gives me reason to attack it...
...A fourteen-year-old may not know why Portrait o f a Lady is a great novel, and his words against it can be dismissed as ignorant or philistine...
...A pretty girl can go a long way toward redeeming a bomb...
...In this sense, at least, I think I am pretty close to the mass audience as a whole, which overwhelmingly prefers the low to the high in the movies...
...he is Gene Siskel or Roger Ebert, the often unintentionally hilarious hosts of the popular syndicated television program "At the Movies...
...A sadder but wiser boy, I hope to have outgrown this tendency...
...This view appeared as a major influence in Europe on the cusp of the fourth and fifth centuries when another Briton, a monk called Pelagius, offered a famous heresy to the Western world, one which appealed (as Fabianism later did) to the sort of rough common sense which then held that the world was flat...
...A critic like Canby can destroy the possibilities for success of a small art film, but he will have little impact on a movie going after a mass audience...
...In any case, I like far too many movies, and for far too many reasons, for my personal judgment on them to be of any use to anyone...
...The academic critic invents great movies when none can be found...
...Neither Mrs...
...We are all critics...
...But this is precisely the point: As a critic, I am not really interested in the movies as an art...
...But just as consumer's guides are susceptible to corruption and intimidation, and the academics susceptible to their desiresto "make" a movie's artistic reputation, the sociological critic is in danger of spinning theories about the movies that conform to his own views about what the audience should be feeling instead of what the audience really is feeling...
...I think we all operate in much the same way...
...he is the fellow granted 90 seconds on the nightly news to offer his often monosyllabic judgment on a given movie...
...There is time enough still for this little confession to serve as a grim warning...
...The second is the "academic critic," of whom the general public is by and large ignorant...
...I f the movies are to be considered high art, then they have failed massively...
...We all laugh when we read that Samuel Pepys called A Midsummer Night's Dream a ridiculous play...
...And amusingly enough, these movies are far from my favorites...
...But they are not--yet...
...Mostly these things had to do with political questions...
...This is where the academic critics come in...
...It is a bitter comment on the Fabian belief that, if only people were better housed and clothed, they would be better or (which was the same thing to the reformers) behave better...
...He knows that Mike Nichols is an important director, Richard Fleischer unimportant, and deals with their movies accordingly...
...I made light of the anti-Semitism of the movie Eyewitness because I needed the movie to be good and sound to strengthen my attack on the "auteur" theory I was making in my piece...
...It becomes the aim of the loser in this contest (Labour is by far the worst in this respect) not just to keep the ruling party honest in the normal way of a loyal opposition, but further to inflame and exploit popular discontent and expectations by fair means or foul, and to use these forces to destroy the current government...
...John Podhoretz is critic-at-large o f the Washington Times and movie critic o f The American Spectator...
...He can also be expected to change his opinion when he gets better educated...
...I have never met anyone who relies upon the opinion of a movie critic with any regularity to make his cinematic selection of the weekend...
Vol. 17 • September 1984 • No. 9
