Popular Culture, Politics and Art

...A year after he wrote those words Robert Warshow was dead, but they show, I think, how much he was reluctantly becoming an esthetic animal, and how much we have lost by his death...

...Wertham...

...Thus even raising the question of our guilt about the atom bomb is "political obscurantism," and at one point a concern with "death and suffering" is opposed to "the field of politics and morals...

...A handless veteran in The Best Years of Our Lives is "an unusually clear projection of the familiar Hollywood (and American) dream of male passivity...

...The Marx Brothers are perhaps the most striking example...

...He recognizes the justice of Wertham's case against the comics, and at the same time recognizes its exaggeration, the sense in which Wertham's book Seduction of the Innocent is itself "a kind of crime comic book for parents.' Warshow's conclusion, roughly midway between Wertham's view and Paul's, sadly aware that the tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction, is a triumph of ironic intelligence...

...At these times, the concept of the immediate experience is limited to sociological experience, so that the plays of Clifford Odets, for example, are only fully meaningful to "the experienced ear," by which Warshow means someone who grew up in a New York Jewish lower-middle-class background (as though Chekhov were only to be fully meaningful to Russian aristocrats...

...Warshow was truly a zoon politikon in both senses, Aristotle's meaning as a city animal, and our own punning extension, a political animal...

...Thus he observes that Arthur Kober's stories are as vulgar a travesty of the Jew as Milt Gross' work, points out the "merciless constrictions" and "assured simplicity" of Arthur Miller's vision of human life, and finds the seriousness of The Grapes of Wrath a "surface characteristic...

...What truth did he want...

...His statement that a heavy diet of horror comics did not appear to disturb his 11-yearold son Paul (because no effect was visible at the time) may be psychologically superficial, but it is entirely honest and empiric...

...The title comes from Warshow's statement applying for a foundation grant to do a study of the movies, printed as the book's preface...

...Warshow makes it clear that he feels deeply for "the weight of their suffering" as parents and as fellow human beings...

...As the consequence of this directness, no one is better than Warshow at puncturing the fake...

...It was Warshow's belief, stated repeatedly in the book, that "the chief means of concealing the reality of politics is to present every problem as a problem of personal morality...

...He writes eloquently of the movie gangster: "The gangster is the man of the city, with the city's language and knowledge, with its queer and dishonest skills and its terrible daring, carrying his life in his hands like a placard, like a club...

...One need look at no more than the superb Southworth and Hawes daguerreotype (printed as a frontespiece to F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance) of Donald McKay, builder of the clipper ship Flying Cloud, to see how much truth about passion, craft and beauty a 19th century photograph can convey...

...Instead it is a painfully honest human exploration, at once clear-sighted and loving...

...Now Sherry Abel has edited, with a warm introductory appreciation by Lionel Trilling, a collection of Warshow's essays and reviews as The Immediate Experience (Doubleday, 282 pp., $4.50...

...What limits him as a critic of art, even of these popular arts, is his obsessive politicality...

...With Odets—whom Warshow thought "the poet" of New York Jewish lower-middle-class life, his talent "the richest ever to appear in the American theater"—he notes "intellectual shallowness" and "crudities," then puts aside these limitations as "of no great importance...

...What this produces at Warshow's best is a fully esthetic response, an equation of form and content...

...On the upper levels of our culture," Warshow writes, meaning levels that he and we inhabit, "it is assumed that literature is a form of explicit social criticism...

...Even the horses of Westerns become symbols of the Decline of the West (not merely of the Western): "It seems to me the horses grow tired and stumble more often than they did, and that we see them less frequently at the gallop...

...In this politically obsessed world, movie art becomes only "this unhappy preoccupation with style," "this aestheticizing tendency...

...This quality of felt life comes through strongly in the book...

...In this mood he calls for the directly didactic, and denies the value and even the existence of the implicit...

...The responses called up are thus not esthetic, but "responses to the life of the Jews, to the psychological roots of one's own life," ultimately, "a direct apprehension of sociological truth...

...We do best, I think," he writes, "to leave 'Krazy Kat' alone...

...In it Warshow refers to "the actual, immediate experience of seeing and responding to the movies as most of us see and respond to them...

...Immediate contact with material reality," Warshow concludes dogmatically at one point, "is the only possible basis for serious drama or literature...

...He notes that various people "felt that their sentence was too severe," but he never says whether or not he did, and he concludes the piece, not on that overriding moral issue, but on the crudity and emptiness of the letters as adequately representative of "the Communism of 1953.' Why this odd inhumanity in a humane man...

...Finally, in the two essays on Charles Chaplin, Warshow simply dismisses without further discussion "the quality of Chaplin's own politics.' Instead he celebrates the Martha Raye character, Annabella, in Monsieur Verdoux—"loud and vulgar and stupid"—as a wonderful life force more powerful than Verdoux's death force...

...Visual images in movies become power"ful ontological statements...

...An Old Man Gone," Warshow's deeply moving account of his father's death, could readily have become a parable of the old-time Socialist become a business success...

...when he thinks that the question itself is extraneous, one must insist that his concept of politics shrank his sensibility instead of enlarging it...

...As the typological criticism of the Bible reads the Gospel story into the incidents of the Old Testament— the burning bush is a figuration of the Virgin Birth, the Red Sea of Baptism, manna of the Eucharist, and so on—so Warshow sees everything in films as figurative, typological...

...He might eventually have tired of those sitting ducks and turned to the higher-flying targets of literature, but he died of a heart attack in 1955, at the age of 37...

...The complexity of Warshow's own awareness is best illustrated by his essay "Paul, the Horror Comics, and Dr...

...We can see this most clearly in Warshow's statement that "the chief fact about nineteenth-century photographs, to my eyes at any rate, is how stonily they refuse to yield up the truth...

...the Marx Brothers are Lumpen, they spit on culture, and they are popular among middle-class intellectuals because they express a blind and destructive disgust with society that the responsible man is compelled to suppress in himself...

...and he describes the concert scene with Buster Keaton in Limelight as an utter triumph, coming to us "out of that profundity where art, having become perfect, seems no longer to have any implications...

...Warshow's piece on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg is an example, not of an inhibited esthetic response, but of an inhibited human response...

...The analysis of Carl Dreyer's film Day of Wrath, perhaps the profoundest movie criticism in the book, entirely ignores the politics of 17th century witchcraft or of Dreyer's 20th century Denmark, to demonstrate the tension in the film's images of "flesh against form," the paradox of "a woman burnt to serve beauty...

...His fine account of George Herriman's comic strip Krazy Kat not only does not translate the strip into sociopolitical allegory, but explicitly resists such translation...

...Warshow writes of "honor" in Westerns not as a virtue but as "a style, concerned with harmonious appearances as much as with desirable consequences, and tending therefore toward the denial of life in favor of art...

...At his best, for one reason or another, Warshow managed to transcend his political preoccupation...

...Unfortunately, Warshow is not always at this pitch of esthetic awareness in the book...

...WRITERS & WRITING Popular Culture Politics and Art By Stanley Edgar Hyman Robert Warshow had a first-rate critical mind and chose to exercise it on inferior materials: movies, comics and other aspects of the popular culture...

...The finest essays in The immediate Experience are all non-political...

...It is a brilliant and devastating demonstration of the poverty and falsity of the Rosenbergs' minds, based on their published letters and written immediately after their execution...

...The more profound a scientific insight," he writes, in reference to social science, "the more it demands a kind of aesthetic appreciation...

...The quality of a Marx Brothers movie," Warshow writes, "comes from an uncompromising nihilism that is particularly characteristic of the submerged and dispossessed...

...Warshow had a keen sense of humor and thought highly of the Marx Brothers, but you would not learn either of those facts from his analysis, as you would not be able to imagine the gaiety and verbal wit of a Marx Brothers film from it...

...If Warshow thought that the Rosenbergs' sentence was just and necessary, as someone honestly might, one could disagree but respect his view...

...Warshow writes of Rossellini's Paisan: "The qualities of the men and the nature of their situation are inseparably contained in the particulars of their physical presence—for example, the way the large and ungraceful helmets diminish the faces beneath them, forcing one to see each man as a whole body, with his 'personality' expressed in movement and in the details of his clothing and equipment...