The World of 'Pop-Culture'

...For when the piece was first printed some seven years ago in Commentary, we were less disenchanted with what Don Hager calls elsewhere "The Rhetoric of Intergroup Liberalism" and some of the now-wearisome cliches had not yet become the property of every culture-hungry stenographer hustling to the New School...

...If Politzer is dull, he is at least dull in a new way...

...Even Milton Klonsky's gorgeously-written "Greenwich Village: Decline and Fall" seems outdated, presenting a Village as hard to come by as a cold-water flat...

...Politzer manages, nevertheless, to take the Yokums in stride, serving them up with only about a dozen-or-so learned references...

...Thus, his analysis of The Crucible is not only a superb hatchet-job on Miller-though we would be grateful for this alone, for his characterization of Miller as "Odets without the poetry"-but a terrifying indictment of the "orthodox dissenters" who saw the play both as "universal" art and thinly-veiled affirmation of the innocence of Hiss and the Rosen- bergs...

...Not so Arnold Green, who addresses himself to the overwhelming problem "Why Americans Feel Insecure...

...And, as Seymour Krim says, "Think what an enormous release this is to us as human beings...

...Nor is Anatole Broyard to blame if his hipster has moved straight from "nowhere" to the Nirvana of the TV screen...

...by its very nature, it could never attain to the life-span of traditional literary criticism...

...Young graduate students in sociology, for example, writing papers on such themes as Changing Aspects of the Western Hero or Urban Anxiety in Modern Cinema, are now a dime a dozen...

...For Politzer, it is not enough to call Li'l Abner a "Simple Simon, a Lucky Hans, a hillbilly...

...at play's end, that audience which "believes the fright ening complexities of history and experience are to be met with a few ideas, and yet does not even possess those ideas any longer but can only point significantly to the place where they were last seen and where it is hoped they might still be found to exist...

...It is questionable whether the new freedom in marriage has appreciably raised the general level of happiness...

...the piece would be worth reading if only for the dazzle of his flung-off images...

...More typical of the kind of "pop- culturist" we have been reading over the past decade is Heinz Politzer...

...of Orphan Annie's Sandy could be made to yield up some relation to 18th- century capitalism or the Cartesian view of the universe...

...But Superman, that combination of "Goethe's Sorcerer's Apprentice," "Doctor Faust," Hercules and Atlas, gets the real treatment...

...In all fairness, though, the fault is not entirely Green's...

...Writing in the style a Max Lerner might employ be- fore a Hadassah chapter, Green commits to paper such doggedly earnest platitudes as: "But the majority of men are not handsome, the majority of women are not beautiful, and the majority of both are poor...

...The late Robert Warshow, represented here by a piece on Arthur Miller's Crucible, is about as far re- moved from Farber as could be any pair of writers born into the same generation and concerned with similar material...

...And poor Mammy Yokum gets it in passing, too, emerging as something "carved from the wood of the man- drake root . . . one of the great mothers who live on in the subconscious of the people, of every people...

...In part, this phenomenon came about from the American intellectual's growing awareness that the gulf between "high-brow" and "lowbrow" was each day growing narrower, that Time and Life were encroaching more and more on the provinces he had marked off as his own...

...Yet there is a passion and even bitterness in his work which lends it the bite and vigor of fine polemic: if he uses a movie or play as an object lesson, a diagnosis, it is not from lack of feeling for the medium but from overriding concern with the problems of art and belief...

...if he was moved at all by anything in the film, it was likely to be the rising of Eisenstein's stone lions or smokestacks toppling in Cocteau's Blood of a Poet...

...To W. C. Fields, Chaplin, Orphan Annie and the Marx Brothers, they brought some of the freshness, vitality and excitement that might, in a better time, have gone into their fiction...

...His logic and development are far from flawless, his belief that the "gimp" was ushered in with Citizen Kane could probably not hold up under too-close scrutiny, and I have considerable doubts about some of his examples...

...Today, the intellectual has turned with missionary zeal to the examination of popular culture...

...Over the past decade, Partisan, Review, Commentary and most of the "little mags" have spiced their pages with serious articles on the film and comic strip, while contributors to the short-lived City Lights turned upon Gasoline Alley the kind of high-powered critical guns an F. R. Leavis might use for George Eliot...

...Of the two dozen contributors to The Scene Before You, it is only Manny Farber who has no such problem, who is willing to take the wild swings and high dives which are needed, giving us a lean, driving, image-rich prose that is born from and suited only to his subject...

...He leaves us with a brilliant, merciless image of those who rose to shout "Bravo...

...as the literary quarterlies entered what Randall Jarrell has called "The Age of Criticism," many of the best young creative writers, declaring a moratorium on Kafka and Kierkegaard, found a new kind of release in probing the underbelly of American life...

...A real worrier...

...His method is scholarly, pedantic, a painful, painstaking demonstration of what the truth is and where it lies...

...the world's injustice, which he senses more than perceives, leaves him no rest...

...To the comic strip, he brings the approach, essentially, of the social worker, who must make his material yield something useful and constructive at all times, who sees it only as an expression of and in relation to something else: i.e., desires, drives, anxieties, Zeitgeists, mythology, medieval painting, Henry Wallace, the anti-trust spirit and the Biblia Pauperum...

...Each in its own way gives us, if not the last word, a good starting point for our own investigations, if not a window on the world, at least a peep-hole...

...The function of 'love' in modern society is peculiarly complex...

...in Citizen Kane, for example, Orson Welles becomes "a blown-up cue-ball adorned with the facial features of Fu Man Chu...

...And even though this bashful, amiable Superman is to the petty Uebermensch who unleashed the Second World War as Robin Hood to a storm trooper, they have one thing in common: They both blur the transition from the technically possible to the miraculous irrational, their efficacy rests on the vague hybridism of heroism and Utopia, of technology and the miracle...

...And if there were nothing else to recommend it...

...Marx, Jung, Dali and the Popular Front...

...Where a kind of brash innocence was needed, a willingness to un- learn the old criteria, they fell back, instead, upon politics, psychoanalysis and sociology, too often using popular culture primarily as a symptom of what is wrong with us and our society...

...In Movies Aren't Movies Anymore, Farber argues, briefly, that the movies have substituted, for an intelligent, structured image of reality, the art of the "gimp"a-weird blend of monstrous camera-work, freakish acting, un- related symbols and attitudes which have their origin in Freud...

...Reviewed by Wallace Markfield Contributor, ''Partisan Review," "Commentary" and other journals Twenty years ago, the intellectual entered his local movie house with the air of one committing an obscene act...

...Like Menasha Skulnik confronted by a plate of Chinese roast pork, his attitude was: "I'll eat it, but I wouldn't handle it...

...Pieces like David Bazelon's "Dashiell Hammett," Seymour Krim's "Our Middle-Aged Young Writers," Weldon Kee's "Muskrat Ramble," or Norman Podhoretz's "Our Changing Ideals as Seen on TV" are the most permanently satisfying...

...where Farber bludgeons, Warshow needles...

...The trouble is that the appeal of much of the writing here resided, originally, in the way it defined the immediate, caught and held for a moment the nerve-jangling kaleidoscope of our daily lives...

...And scarcely a year goes by, of late, with- out the publication of a half dozen books on one or another aspect of kitsch, books which end inevitably on the remainder shelves...

...This was coupled with a peculiar crankiness as they made the transition from "pious alienation" to "pop- culture" criticism, a testy reluctance to fully accept their material and relate to it, to find a way of writing about, say, the Western that would not serve equally well for The II aste Land...

...Where Farber's prose explodes in all directions, Warshow's is complex, sophisticated, unhurried, held fast to a discernible course...

...And Marshall McLuhan on Time and Life has hardly more relevance than Ida Tarbell on Standard Oil...

...Where popular culture was concerned, he held himself wary and aloof, a captive consumer...

...Thus: "Myths crumble, heroic figures can be watered down, but symbols and names cannot be used with impunity...

...he must also be "in the unconscious depths of his being a protestant...

...In Politzer's capable hands, it is not unlikely that the "Arff...

...Frustration is inevitable...

...What Farber does offer, though, is a genuine love for the movies that does not bother apologizing for itself, a brand new way of looking at movies, and a refreshing unpretentiousness...

...For him, nothing good could come from Hollywood...