IT'S TIME TO TAKE SIDES Has Commonweal surrendered to the spirit of nihilism in the arts? No
Alleva, Richard
Richard Alleva I asked the editors to print the excerpts from my reviews side by side with relevant quotes from Mr. Hagen's article [see page 22] for two reasons. First I wanted to set the record...
...saunter out of a restaurant at the film's conclusion, we know that one of them is doomed and the other saved...
...Occasionally, such terrible need results in a major work like Gulliver's Travels...
...And that's a very bad thing to do...
...Richard Alleva is film critic for Commonweal...
...Sometimes, the flaw at the heart of a bad movie is a moral flaw, and so my inquiry becomes, however superficially, a moral inquiry...
...First, I think that most readers of Commonweal, being Christian, sane, and intelligent, don't have to be informed by me that sadism and smirky depictions of sex and bodily functions are deplorable...
...The Piano I found singularly lacking in curiosity about human motive, and-though Mr...
...Did Oliver Stone hope to capture this buzz on film and amplify it so egregiously that his audience would finally beg for silence and sanity...
...Second, our readers have a right to know exactly whom they're reading...
...That's true...
...On behalf of my readers, I've walked through some of this debris but I haven't walked around it...
...Richard Alleva on Natural Bom Killers: "Perhaps the actors [Harrelson and Lewis] benefited from the fact that, by story's end, they are virtually Stone's surrogates, dispatching the rest of the cast with a relish that their creator, I fear, shares...
...once said that a well-timed close-up was a moral choice...
...Planning the sequence of events in a story can also show moral choice...
...Refusing to see the significance of events, dismissing all circumstance as happenstance, refusing to believe that you are undergoing your own destiny, can doom you...
...So you have a destiny anyway-a horrid one...
...Mindless editing choices or camera set-ups may reveal a basic lack of interest in the humanity of the situation posited by the script...
...John D. Hagen, Jr., on Richard Alleva "Once again, the review [of Pulp Fiction] is all about style, without the least tincture of moral critique...
...But it is also exhilarating, mind-teasing, breathtakingly well-made-and fundamentally moral...
...Commonweal readers have good reason to ask that this magazine's art critics write within a Catholic intellectual perspective...
...Clearly, the writer-director is trying to show us something and, lest we miss it, he's even expressed it in a line spoken by a minor character: "When you're together with someone in a pit of hell, you owe something to that person...
...Alleva John D. Hagen, Jr., on Richard Alleva "[Oliver Stone's] script for Natural Born Killers gave the killers excuses (child abuse), a twisted emotional depth, and a certain amount of high-sounding discourse...
...The results of this rage for sensation litter our movie screens...
...Furthermore, the midsection of the story climaxes with a scene in which Bruce Willis rescues his worst enemy even though it's in his own best interest to let that enemy suffer a terrible demise...
...In Pulp Fiction, significance saves...
...There are two reasons for this...
...I've just used the A word...
...Movies are now filled with violence cut loose from any moral context, sex unmoored in love or even passion, obsessions with bodily functions that express an adolescent boy's dismay with his own body...
...Pulp Fiction is an adolescent, ultravi-olent, foulmouthed romanticization of the gangster milieu...
...Thus, I found Cape Fear's failure rooted in Scorsese's obsession with obsessives...
...I will persist in recognizing the morality in art by exploring the art in art...
...I have obliged with relish...
...Second, invective is too often a substitute for analysis...
...Meanwhile, the victims were dehumanized...
...That is why I did not write, "The victims are photographed in close-up at the moment of death and are made to look stupid, craven, repellent, and bereft of dignity...
...Sooner or later, a movie's or novel's moral delinquency betrays itself through aesthetic delinquency...
...Whence the doom...
...If I walked around it by pronouncing simple-minded anathemas unsupported by analysis, if I didn't attempt to see into the heart of artistic folly, then neither I nor my readers would discover anything about those possibilities of art that artistic folly always sabotages...
...Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino burn America down while Alleva fiddles away at aesthetics...
...The victims are photographed in close-up at the moment of death and are made to look stupid, craven, repellent, and bereft of dignity...
...But Mr...
...Hagen broaches issues that throb better heads than his Hagen vs...
...Hagen would disagree-my revulsion from Natural Born Killers was prompted by its need "to make us feel that all humanity should be slaughtered for cravenness, vulgarity, and physical unattractiveness...
...Mindlessly obscene dialogue betrays indifference to the substance of human speech, a moral as well as an aesthetic failing...
...Aesthetically...
...Someone (maybe Truffaut...
...But I see no need to fog my writing with fulminations...
...Hagen refuses to see this because aesthetic matters like plot development are beneath him...
...But the results of such need in Natural Born Killers is mere hideous-ness...
...Trash TV, tabloids, much American cinema and fiction, all contribute nowadays to a sickening buzz that is a perfect accompaniment to, and perhaps incitement of, the violence that is rending the fabric of American life...
...Whence the salvation...
...The perception of the free choice between good and evil that is one of the tenets of Catholicism is also at the heart of most good drama...
...But a really good orator knows how to silence a roomful of loudmouths...
...But without the pattern-no morality...
...He lowers his voice...
...or mine...
...Richard Alleva on Pulp Fiction: "When the hit men...
...Alleva reviews this barbaric film in an absolutely clinical manner, without any moral comment whatever...
...Plot illogic may signal unconcern with human motive...
...That would be like a doctor trying to determine a patient's vitality without examining his or her body...
...I think my negative reviews pretty devastating but it is true that I don't employ much invective in them...
...He can see the isolated incidents of immorality that dot the landscape of Pulp Fiction, but he can't connect the dots to see the pattern...
...When a movie doesn't work, I want to find out why it doesn't work, and I take the reader along on my investigation...
...That was correct, for I regarded the film as aesthetically and morally dead...
...Question: how can you get at the moral sickness or health of a movie without examining its art or lack of art...
...Perhaps...
...First I wanted to set the record straight for those Commonweal readers who aren't familiar with my columns...
...There...
...On the cover of the October 7,1994, issue, the editors labeled my review "an autopsy...
...Nowadays, many of Hollywood filmmakers are perpetuating infernos on screen that certainly aren't underpinned by any Dantean theology...
...The reason I wrote the first sentence is that I felt the second and count on my readers to feel the same way without any prompting from me...
...Consider:Tarantino begins Pulp Fiction by showing Samuel L. Jackson savagely killing and ends the movie by showing Jackson scrupulously avoiding violence at considerable risk to his own life...
...Oh, decadent sign of our decadent times...
Vol. 122 • September 1995 • No. 16
