Here is one final metaphor I’d like to employ to describe my graduate school experience:
Imagine jumping, with tremendous enthusiasm, onto a giant, spinning merry-go-round, then very quickly being thrown off at a tremendous speed, flying across the room, landing face-first into a brick wall, and slowly sliding down that wall in a cartoon-like fashion, leaving a trail of slimy residue as you did so, until you finally came to rest on the floor.
That was sort of what it felt like.
And so, as I scraped my flattened carcass off the linoleum, I concluded that writing about art and culture, whether I liked it or not, would probably need to be a “hobby” of mine, and not a vocation.
Back in civilian life, degree in hand (not literally in my hand), whenever I could find the time between a kaleidoscopic parade of mesmerizing temp jobs, I continued to explore my twin passions of late 20th century popular music and film from the 1930’s to the present day. And as I continued to explore them, I also continued to read other writing on those topics. But as I continued to read such writing, a funny thing happened.
I began to notice some of the same issues that I felt were prevalent in the work of academic writing. It was like staring at one of those Magic Eye posters – once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. I tried to pinpoint exactly what I was noticing. And I began to long for a kind of critical writing that seemed pure, that seemed true, that seemed untouched by all this foolishness.
I began to long for writing that was … part-time Buddhist.
*****
When I was a much younger man, long before my sojourn through higher education, I, like many young people, sought guidance. I think it’s fair to say that I received a fair amount of guidance from my father, up to a certain point, and that I received virtually no guidance from my mother (one might have called it a sort of “anti-guidance”), but I’ll spare you the intimate details of my dysfunctional childhood for another day. They tried their best. In the end, I needed more.
I looked for guidance in many places. I looked for it high and low. I looked for it in a house, I looked for it with a mouse. Sometimes I looked for guidance, thought I’d found some, and then, through my own experience, realized the crappiness of that guidance. Eventually, in bits and pieces, I believe I found the guidance I’d been searching for.
I can tell you one thing, though: for better or worse, I found a massive pile of guidance from music, film, and literature. I feel like I owe certain works of art a debt of great gratitude. Those key albums, movies, and novels made me a man! Perhaps I’m still paying off the massive metaphysical mortgage to this very day.
Appropriately enough, in my search for guidance, I frequently turned to actual “guides.” I am referring, naturally, to music reviewers and film critics. I was young. I needed a road map, a compass, a North Star on my journey through the popular culture landscape that had preceded me. Of course, one sort of road map is popularity. There were movies and albums I assumed were “good” simply because they were so well-known. Like many aspiring aficionados, I started there. Often, I found that I enjoyed those works, although sometimes I didn’t. Eventually, like a jaded high school cheerleader, I longed to move beyond “popularity.”
Thus, I relied on these guides for many years. I always felt somewhat bothered when my own opinions differed from the guides’ consensus. When that was the case, I often wondered if I was an idiot. However, one day, the wounds of graduate school still fresh in my mind, droplets of blood still dripping from my metaphorical veins, I began to consider that music reviewers and film critics could potentially be doing a better job of being guides than they were actually doing. In fact, I began to consider that I could do a better job of being a guide for those young people like myself who were searching for guidance than established music reviewers and film critics were. But … how?
I would venture to say that art, unlike science, is subjective. Unless you’ve found some secret miracle method I haven’t heard of, there is no way to objectively, definitively, officially declare certain works of art “good” and certain works of art “bad.” To deploy my favorite Latin saying (I probably don’t know enough Latin sayings to have a favorite, but whatever): De gustibus est non disputandum. I am told this translates roughly to “There is no judging taste.” Or, as the film critic Robert Warshow once wrote, “A man goes to the movies. The critic must be honest enough to admit that he is that man.”
And yet, admirers of art in all its various guises do form a “consensus.” And I believe there is value in this. After all, a young person who is approaching an artistic medium for the first time will need to gain a sense of “where to start.” And so, there are music and movie reviewers, music and movie guides, and music and movie lists. Some guides are written by one solitary writer, but most are a collaborative effort. The slant of these reviews, guides, and lists can vary from generous and populist to harsh and elitist. The quality of the writing can vary from clichéd and slap dash to charmingly idiosyncratic and carefully considered. However, even some of my favorite writers, the ones who try to be fair and try to maintain a mature perspective, can fall into a trap, I think. What they do, perhaps unconsciously, is that they occasionally try to speak for the experience of people who are not them. It’s a hard trap to avoid. I have even, dare I say, done it myself, and I may even, dare I say, do it again.
This tendency of critics to speak for their audience is so commonplace that I think most readers wouldn’t even call it a problem. “Well of course they’re only giving their own take on the work. What else could they do?” Or, in the words of the Dude from The Big Lebowski, “Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion man.” But I feel like writers rarely make it clear enough that they are writing their opinion. Often I sense that they’re trying to “will” their own views into becoming the consensus view. I don’t think this is what writers should try to do. When I read a writer stating an opinion as a fact, it makes me kind of vaguely, slightly … mad. I don’t like it. I’m wondering if it would be possible to write about art in such a way so that the writing would rarely, if ever, make the reader mad. Or at least minimize the anger as much as humanly possible. That would be … impossible, right? That would be crazy.
Well “crazy” is my middle name.
Because the interpretation of art is an extremely subjective activity, I feel like those who write about art ought to, perhaps, write about it in an extremely subjective fashion. One of the reasons I ceased to enjoy academic writing was because of the sense I had that all these professors may have been sitting in their New England cottages, huffing and puffing and making a lot of noise, but at the end of the day, they didn’t really say what the works they were analyzing really meant to them. They hid their feelings behind a veil of objectivity. Frankly, I think that if every one of those professors whose essays I’d read had simply set aside their ideas about “post-modern alienation” and “the subconscious reinforcement of patriarchy” and had simply written a first-person account of why they loved the works that they loved, I would much rather have read that instead. Because what’s interesting about art is what it says to people, and how the same work of art can even say different things to different people. At least, I know that’s what is interesting to me. (See? Almost spoke for my audience there.)
Here’s another thing: I don’t see much point in writing about works of art that I don’t like. If I don’t like certain bands or certain directors, all I need to say is that I don’t like them, and I should probably just leave it at that. If other people like something I don’t like, then what the hell do I care? I find a lot more value in writing about the works of art I like than the ones I don’t. I guess if I were being paid to review new movies or new albums, then I would need to approach it with a mentality of suggesting which works I thought were worth people’s time and which ones weren’t. Well, as Barrett Strong once sang, “The best things in life are free.” Meaning this blog. Meaning, I’m writing this for free.
I just feel like artists are out there on the front lines, baring their souls, taking risks, doing the dirty work, you know? What is the critic doing? Playing Monday morning quarterback? Any schmoe can sit behind a computer screen and complain about stuff. That doesn’t take any risk. You’ve got to put some skin in the game. And if you’re not going to put some skin in the game, at least acknowledge it and try to be nice to artists, OK? I don’t even think the word “critic” is the best word to describe the kind of writer I envision myself being. “Critic” implies “criticism” or “critical.” I would almost rather be thought of as an “appreciator.” Yes, occasionally, I do think it’s worthwhile to make a few negative observations about a work of art – but rarely, and if so, it should be done delicately. One kind of criticism that I do think is of value, however, is criticism of other critics. Allow me to demonstrate.
Examples of Film Writers Who I’m Pretty Sure Weren’t Part-Time Buddhists
Disclaimer: I am not saying that the following writers are/were “bad” writers, or that their work is without merit. I am not attempting some thorough “take-down” of their written legacies. I am simply hoping to explain, in great detail, the ways in which these writers fail to exemplify the core tenets of part-time Buddhism, at least as I envision them. Where they have gone hither, I plan to go thither. I know what you’re thinking: “Jesus, there’s nothing worse than some writer on the internet complaining about other writers.” Maybe this should be considered more like an inoculation: while the initial prick might sting, it’s better to get it out of the way now, and then we’ll never have to think about it again. But perhaps the simplest and most effective way to describe what part-time Buddhist writing is … would be to describe what part-time Buddhist writing isn’t.
Pauline Kael
Back in 1996, when the internet was merely a gleam in a pornographer’s eye, I came into possession of a product from Microsoft then known as a “CD-ROM,” called Cinemania. The blurb on the back of the box boasted that it contained, among other thrilling features, the reviews of legendary film critics Leonard Maltin, Roger Ebert, and Pauline Kael – a veritable kingdom of riches!
Well, Cinemania rapidly became my one-stop shop for movie knowledge. In summary: I enjoyed Ebert’s reviews the most (more on the Thumbed One later), found Maltin’s reviews generally helpful, if a bit square and brief, but soon grew genuinely puzzled by the inclusion of Kael’s reviews. Almost without fail, I would watch a movie, enjoy it to one degree or another, read Maltin’s review, find it pleasant and harmless, read Ebert’s review, find it insightful, stirring, and inspiring, and then read Kael’s review, and find it … sour.
In almost every review, even discussing movies she seemed to love, I felt like Kael invariably had something petty and harsh to say. I didn’t get it. Why was she so revered, exactly? As far as I was concerned, she came off like a giant spoilsport. I swear, whenever I would watch a “classic” movie for the first time and find myself on an incredible high, Ebert would stoke my high even further, and then Kael would come in and kill the buzz. For instance, after an initial viewing of Network, which left me grinning from ear to ear like the Cheshire Cat, I promptly read Ebert’s four-star review (which was not, despite what the rating might imply, entirely worshipful), and then thought, “Oh, what the hell, let’s see what Kael had to say.” And so I read this:
Television, Paddy Chayefsky says, is turning us into morons and humanoids; people have lost the ability to love. Who has – him? Oh, no, the blacks, the revolutionaries, and a power-hungry executive at the fictional UBS network named Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway). The cast of this messianic farce includes William Holden, Peter Finch, Robert Duvall, Beatrice Straight, and Ned Beatty, and they all take turns yelling at us soulless masses.
Eh? I dunno, I thought Network was, mainly, a lot of fun. Had she ever heard of “fun”? You know, this thing you do that makes life bearable? Granted, there’s only so much one can say in a tiny blurb, but maybe she could have potentially made an attempt to describe the film’s virtues as well as its flaws, or provided some broader cultural context, or offered a hint of respect for the supposed “soulless masses” who enjoyed it, even if she personally did not? Instead, the vibe I took away from a “review” like that one was “I don’t get why everybody’s making such a big fuss about this movie; maybe they haven’t watched all the other, much more interesting, movies that I’ve watched.” It was sort of a compact belch of a review. Was she recommending the movie? Not recommending the movie? Beat the hell out of me. And yet Kael would salivate all over something like Last Tango in Paris, a film which, in my opinion, might be best viewed as an unintentional comedy. Differences of opinion are fine, desired even, but only if some of the overall … goals are shared. I couldn’t figure out what her game was. It was like I was playing badminton while Kael was playing curling.
Although I continued to use that CD-ROM long after such a format became a museum piece, after a while, I simply stopped reading Kael’s reviews. In deciding which movies to watch and not to watch, I found them essentially useless, and as food for thought after a viewing, they failed to give me anything valuable to chew on. They didn’t add much to my moviegoing experience. As time went on, I began to suspect that their inclusion might have been a secret Microsoft prank.
Fast-forward a few years, to graduate school, where I gained a slightly deeper appreciation for Kael – but let’s stress the “slightly.” First of all, I realized that the reviews I’d been reading on Cinemania, taken from 5001 Nights at the Movies, were essentially truncated capsule summaries of much longer reviews. So, I got my hands on a few of the anthologies that included her original, longform reviews, which she usually gave titles that vaguely alluded to sex, like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and I Lost It At the Movies – as if she wanted to cultivate a slightly risqué, erotic image, for reasons unclear to me – and I felt that she came off better in that format, even when she was essentially panning a film and being snotty.
I also discovered a little context, learning that, when she had gained prominence in the late ‘60s, it was as a refreshing counterpoint to mainstream reviewers of the day such as Bosley Crowther, who infamously panned “New Hollywood” films like Bonnie and Clyde, while Kael brazenly championed them. I went so far as to go back and read that influential essay on Bonnie and Clyde, and could see why her authorial voice might have felt fresher and more modern than the authorial voices of her immediate predecessors. I even read her famous essay on Citizen Kane (which, so I’ve since learned, is considered rather inaccurate and slightly slanderous these days), but yes, I could see the appeal of her style. I’ll say this: I enjoyed Kael more when she was writing about movies she seemed to like (which, granted, didn’t seem to be very often).
And so, for about two months in graduate school, I went through my “I think I can tolerate Pauline Kael” phase, flipping through a physical copy of 5001 Nights at the Movies that a film professor lent me, with sort of a “Hmm, I wonder what Kael thought about ____?” attitude. Because I will say this: her opinions were unpredictable. Unlike Ebert or Maltin, I could never quite be sure how she’d feel about a movie. Let’s call it the Simon Cowell Effect. I mean, if Pauline Kael said something nice about a movie, then it must have been pretty good, right? But then after a while I thought, “Who cares?”
Reading Pauline Kael was like eating a really tasty navy bean soup, but where half the beans didn’t quite cook properly, and you keep eating and eating the soup, because so much of it tastes so damn good, and the beans that did cook are nice and soft, but the rest of the beans are crunchy and solid and you have to keep spitting them out into a napkin, and you know you should just stop eating the soup because, as delicious as the rest of it is, the uncooked beans are basically ruining the whole thing.
Maybe I’m just a sensitive guy, but I feel like Kael was always looking for something to complain about – even in movies she ostensibly loved! Here’s a typically praise-cancelling comment from her review of 8 ½: “It’s a deluxe glorification of creative crisis, visually arresting (the dark and light contrasts are extraordinary, magical) but in some essential way conventional-minded.” Oh come on, how is 8 ½ “conventional-minded”? Does there always have to be a flaw somewhere? Can’t you just enjoy the damn movie like everybody else? She seemed so easily irritated. Sorry but I’m just not into Oscar the Grouch reviewing movies for me. You know what I want when I read a movie reviewer? I want a buddy, a friend, someone who I can rely on through thick and thin for a tiny little lift when I’ve had a crappy day. I’ve got enough problems in my life. I don’t need some film critic to give me more crap to deal with.
But I think I partly understand what Kael was going for. She appears to have seen herself as a critic who was willing to say what she felt many moviegoers were “thinking” about Oscar-nominated “prestige pictures” but were too afraid and conformist to say themselves. She relished puncturing the balloon. Her preferred movies tended to be the kind of small, off-the-radar pictures that weren’t generating Academy Award buzz. Or, to put it another way: she preferred movies that managed not to annoy her somehow. I think Kael imagined that she was speaking for this silent, vaguely oppressed crowd of filmgoers who resented Hollywood telling them they were supposed to like a certain kind of movie. But, I don’t know, that kind of stance doesn’t seem particularly heroic to me.
One example (out of many): I was watching Sophie’s Choice for the first time in about twenty years (as one is inclined to do), and I was thinking about this little essay I was composing right here, and at some point during the film, I thought to myself, “You know, I’ll bet Pauline Kael hated this movie.” And sure enough, while reading Meryl Streep’s Wikipedia article, I came across this nugget: “Pauline Kael on the contrary called the film an ‘infuriatingly bad movie’ and thought that Streep ‘decorporealizes’ herself, which she believed explained why her movie heroines ‘don’t seem to be full characters, and why there are no incidental joys to be had from watching her’.” Such authority. “‘I experienced no joy watching Meryl Streep’s acting, therefore, no one else did either, and anyone who says they did is probably lying because they don’t want to sound like a philistine.’” Tell us how you really feel.
OK. I don’t want to spend too much time down in the mud here. Let me just say that calling a movie “infuriatingly bad” is, in my opinion, a fruitless exercise. I think Kael would have been on safer ground if she’d simply said, “I hated this movie.” Nothing wrong with that! It wouldn’t make me give a crap, but at least it would strike me as being a little less arrogant. (Side note: how the hell does one “decorporealize” oneself? I’d like to try it sometime.) I am tempted to say that this review of Kael’s was “infuriatingly bad,” but instead, I will simply say that I didn’t enjoy it very much, and that if other people liked it, that would be perfectly OK. See? Was that so hard?
You know, human beings desire to have some power and influence over their environment, but the reality is that we’re actually quite powerless and insignificant. I feel like Kael really wanted her opinions to be powerful, but in that desire for power, she just came across to me looking sort of petty and ineffectual. Here’s what I think writers should do. Before they sit down to write something, they should ask themselves, “How is what I’m about to write going to potentially bring happiness to other people, which is, after all, the reason why I write stuff to begin with?” I just want to know: what did Pauline Kael think to herself before she sat down to write a review? I assume she thought she was helping people be happier, but I’m not sure how well she succeeded in that goal. Sometimes I feel like her goal was to make filmmakers feel bad for trying to impress her and failing.
It’s like there’s a party where everyone’s hanging out and enjoying certain movies and having a great time, and then along comes Pauline Kael to defecate on everybody’s good vibes and tell them why they were suckers for falling for that manipulative tripe. And there’s a group of insecure people in the corner nodding their heads up and down and saying, “Yeah! Thank God. Somebody’s finally speaking for us.”
I guess, like I said, I just don’t share Kael’s overall worldview. She doesn’t seem to me like someone who possessed a great deal of broader “life wisdom.” I’ve heard it said that people admired her for writing from her gut, and for taking her immediate reaction to a film and running with it, whether it fit the developing “consensus” or not. But what about a little thing called “perspective”? One thing I learned from reading Kael is that it’s possible for a writer to express her thoughts and emotions engagingly and entertainingly, and yet still not be a writer who I feel is worth reading. A lot of film fans would say that what made Kael’s writing great was her passion. Look, I’m down with passion, but what is passion without wisdom?
Robin Wood
Remember my third Part-Time Buddhist Noble Truth, “One Should Try to Appreciate the Present Moment Exactly As It Is, and Not As One Might Wish It Would Be”? Well, Robin Wood didn’t really go for that.
Robin Wood, as far as I can tell, saw a version of the world that existed in his head, observed that it didn’t match the world he found himself living in, seemed super angry about it, and thought this made for good film writing.
Allow me to share some excerpts from his prologue to the revised edition of his book Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, another work which I read in graduate school. The prologue is titled “Our Culture, Our Cinema: For a Repoliticized Criticism.” At first, Wood almost sounds a bit like me (!). Here, for instance, is how he starts things out:
I am a critic. As such, I see my work as in many respects set apart from that of theorists and scholars (though it is of course frequently dependent on them). The theorist and the scholar are unburdened of any necessity to engage intimately and on a personal basis with any specific work; they can hide behind the screens of theory and scholarship, they are not compelled to expose the personal nature of their work because they deal in facts, abstract ideas, and data. Any critic who is honest, however, is committed to self-exposure, a kind of public striptease s/he must make clear that any authentic response to a work of art or entertainment is grounded not only in the work itself but in the critic’s psychological makeup, personal history, values, prejudices, obsessions. Criticism arises out of an intense and intimate personal relationship between work and critic. If it is the critic’s duty to strive for “objectivity” (in the negative sense of avoiding distortions), s/he knows that it is an objectivity that can never be fully achieved, because even when one is convinced that one “sees the work as it is,” the relationship to it has still to be established. I have not the right to say, for example, “David Lynch makes bad movies”: many people for whom I have great respect admire them, and they can certainly be defended on grounds of imagination, accomplishment, originality, strong personal commitment. I do, however, have the right to say, “I find Lynch’s films extremely distasteful; my sense of values repudiates them.”
Random loathing for David Lynch aside (and blurry distinction between, “scholar,” “theorist,” and “critic” aside), Wood at least sounds like he understands the folly of trying to speak for other people when writing about art (*cough* Pauline Kael). But then, in my humble part-time Buddhist opinion, he goes on to engage in an entirely different sort of folly: freaking out about things that are way beyond his control.
Wood observes the world as it appears to him from his beautiful perch in Toronto, Canada circa 2003, and nothing is good enough: society is too capitalistic, patriarchal, racist, homophobic – all the greatest hits. Amusingly, he is perceptive enough to note, and yet is utterly exasperated by, his colleagues’ repeatedly informing him that they think his writing is too political:
Today I feel more politically motivated than ever; as a result, I also feel somewhat stranded. Contemporary reactions to my work (though they are generally polite and intended to be encouraging) depress me. People praise my book on Hitchcock, but it usually turns out that the sections they admire are those written for the original little book in the very early 60s, when I had no political awareness whatever; a close friend told me recently that he values my work solely for its analyses of films, finding the sociopolitical views superfluous; one of the very few reviews (it appeared on the Internet) of Sexual Politics and Narrative Film (which I consider my best work) insisted upon a sharp division between the (apparently) insightful analyses and my beliefs, the writer rejecting the latter contemptuously. This seemingly common reaction bewilders me: everything I have written from Hollywood from Reagan to Vietnam onwards seems to me characterized and structured by my political position, so that it should be impossible to separate the aesthetics from the politics (in which I include of course sexual politics), the analyses from the radical attitude that animates and pervades them: if you accept one, you accept the other.
Well, uh, Robin, maybe it’s because most of the people who’ve read your work no longer hold the worldview of a 19-year-old college student? I love how all his friends have basically been trying to gently tell him, “Hey, Robin, drop the diatribes and lectures and just write about films you like.” But instead of taking the hint, he doubles down:
Perhaps I should be humble and attribute this to my shortcomings as a political thinker (I lay no claim to profundity or originality); I prefer to attribute it to the present climate of political apathy and disenchantment, perhaps underpinned by an unadmitted despair and (understandable) sense of helplessness. Today we need political struggle, protest, and feminism more than ever before, but the enemy now seems dauntingly pervasive and omnipotent. My aim in this prologue is to do everything in my extremely limited power to reactivate the revolutionary ideas and ideals of the 60s and 70s and to develop them further, within the context of a world that, at its increasing peril, appears to regard them as redundant.
If I have achieved no more of value than a few allegedly illuminating interpretations of films, then my life, professionally at least, has been wasted.
Uh-huh. I can’t really pass judgement on whether Wood’s professional life was “wasted,” but I will say that I haven’t bothered to read him since I read him back in grad school. It’s not a popularity contest, but, show of hands: how many of you and your film-loving friends have heard of Robin Wood before?
The truth is, I don’t really think art and writing can “change the world” in that way. What I think art and writing can do is lift the spirits of certain specific individuals at certain moments in time. If Wood wanted to change the political landscape, maybe he should have run for office? As the following excerpt shows, I’m not sure he was into that:
Above all, we need the creation and development of a strong (and eventually international) party – a party of the humane radical left that could at some stage (early or subsequently) incorporate the existing Green Party and its relevant concerns. The next stage would be gaining its election (against all the currently existing odds) by passionate yet thoroughly rational and thereby effective campaigning … The world desperately needs leaders – not mere demagogues, but enlightened, educated, committed leaders, idealistic yet schooled in the actualities of political theory, thought, and action … As this party acquires power, its initial platform and duties would be:
1. To take over all the major corporations, demolish their present antidemocratic structures, and rebuild them so that profits go to the benefits of humanity at large (depending upon needs), irrespective of race, nationality, creed. This would be accompanied by
2. The drastic curtailment of all methods of production that threaten the future of life and welfare on our planet.
I am quite aware that this proposal will be rejected by many (most?) readers as hopelessly naïve and idealistic, and they will be swift to point out that I offer no practical account of how such an agenda (which may, in the present cultural context, appear as realizable as flying over the rainbow) is to be realized. But I never laid claim to being a political theorist. My knowledge of what is happening to us goes little beyond reading the headlines in our daily papers (we are privileged, where I live in Toronto, to have one which is at least marginally to the left of center). What I am presenting appears to me the only viable alternative to outright and universal disaster. If anyone has a better, more practical solution, let’s hear it. Prayer (if you’re religious) is all that comes to mind, and that seems to me infinitely more naïve and impotent than my admittedly simplistic blueprint.
Well, I wouldn’t suggest prayer as a meaningful form of action, but may I suggest … part-time Buddhism? I’ll tell you one thing: I think writing about what you would like to see happen in the world without describing the steps that people should actually take to make it happen … is silly. Who does it serve? I imagine it might have made Wood feel good for about five seconds, but that’s about it.
I’m not even sure I would argue with Wood that humanity as a whole is not headed toward some type of “outright and universal disaster.” You might not want to pat me on the back for saying it, but this is kind of what I think: most people are probably screwed. However, I also believe that you, the individual reading this right now, might not be quite so screwed. (Side note: he was writing this in 2003; I’m sure he would have absolutely loved 2022).
This all raises some rather salient part-time Buddhist questions though. How should sensitive people like you and me process all the suffering and injustice that we see in society? What kind of action is effective? Maybe I sound like a crazy person when I suggest that one should be at “peace” with a world in which war, murder, rape, oppression, inequality, racism, sexism, environmental destruction, etc. seem to be ever-present. But do you have a better suggestion? Be angry?
See, I don’t really believe in anger. I would say that, 98% of the time, anger is a useless emotion. What good does it do? I believe in action, but I don’t believe in anger. Either do something, or don’t do something, but don’t just shout about it like Robin Wood did. I have yet to be convinced that being angry actually helps get you where you want to go.
One of the key contradictions of part-time Buddhism is that one should strive to make the world a “better” place, and yet at the same time, one should accept the world in its current state, warts and all. Tricky needle to thread. Although I am greatly in favor of minimizing human suffering, I also feel that human suffering is something that is kind of … inevitable. I mean, if we woke up one day and discovered that humans had magically eliminated suffering … what would we do? Would we even be humans? I suppose what I’m against is “needless” suffering. But I don’t believe that the human race will ever live in a utopia – or should, for that matter.
I would say that someone like Wood might have been more “idealistic” than I am, which I do not necessarily see as a virtue. His type might have called me “cynical”; I would call myself “realistic.” I feel like writers such as Wood are “unrealistic”: they are expecting to live in the kind of world that they feel “could” exist, but it’s not the world they “actually” live in, which means they get snippy about it. (One thing they “don’t” do, at least, is excessively put ordinary words in quotation marks.)
Maybe my problem is that I’m a part-time Buddhist and not a Marxist. The issue I have with writing that is rooted in a philosophy like Marxism is that it seems to posit the notion that there is something fundamentally “wrong” or “off” about the present-day world, and that anyone with a proper sense of ethics and morality should not rest until these injustices are collectively, finally “solved.” In short, it seems like a recipe for misery. You’re hoping for a day that will never come! Like I said, I don’t mean to bum anyone out, but, honestly, I feel like injustice is here to stay. This does not mean, however, that I think people should therefore be selfish assholes. I just think people should try to appreciate the beauty of the present – injustice and all. I do not think the “revolution” is coming. We’ve got to savor the “now.” That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t act. It just means we should … lower our expectations, maybe? Take a chill pill?
Which is why all of Wood’s rants about capitalism seem about as valuable to me as someone ranting about the brightness of the sun. I think Wood believed, like many writers, that if, one day, enough people took the proper “political action,” we could live under an entirely different socio-economic system. Yeah. Got it. I do not actively support inequality, but I believe that, to a certain extent, life is unfair. Frankly – plots of hundreds of inspirational films notwithstanding – I don’t think any one person can honestly change the world all that much. I’m more into local change. The rest is not worth getting worked up about. I’ve always liked that Gandhi quote, “We must be the change we want to see in the world.” Which I’ve always interpreted as: Just be the change; don’t fucking talk about it all the time.
Mainly, for a 71-year-old, Wood strikes me in his book as sounding very unhappy. Because Wood can’t accept the world as it “is,” then in his mind, so much of reality becomes a “problem” that needs to be “fixed,” and he can’t be happy until it’s fixed. His disgust and frustration with the direction he feels society is heading in – the “wrong” direction, of course – permeates all his writing, and honestly, I just find it exhausting. In Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan, one can find an essay about Lucas and Spielberg called “Papering the Cracks: Fantasy and Ideology in the Reagan Era.” Here are a few of the more entertaining highlights:
The category of children’s films has of course always existed. The 80s variant is the curious and disturbing phenomenon of children’s films conceived and marketed largely for adults – films that construct the adult spectator as a child, or, more precisely, as a childish adult, an adult who would like to be a child. The child loses him/herself in the fantasy, accepting the illusion; the childish adult both does and does not, simultaneously … It will be scarcely surprising that they – as it were, incidentally and obliquely – diminish, defuse, and render safe all the major radical movements that gained so much impetus, became so threatening, in the 70s: radical feminism, black militancy, gay liberation, the assault on patriarchy … I had better confess at once that I enjoy the Star Wars films well enough: I get moderately excited, laugh a bit, even brush back a tear at the happy endings, all right on cue: they work, they are extremely efficient. But just what do we mean when we say “they work”? They work because their workings correspond to the workings of our own social construction. I claim no exemption from this: I enjoy being reconstructed as a child, surrendering to the reactivation of a set of values and structures my adult self has long since repudiated, I am not immune to the blandishments of reassurance … I do not want to argue that the films are intrinsically and uniquely harmful: they are no more so than the vast majority of artifacts currently being produced by capitalist enterprise for popular consumption within a patriarchal culture.
So then what’s the problem?
The pervasive, if surreptitious, implication of the fantasy films is that nuclear power is positive and justified as long as it is in the right, i.e., American, hands. Raiders is particularly blatant on the subject, offering a direct invitation to deliberate ignorance: you’ll be all right, and all your enemies will be destroyed, as long as you “don’t look”; nuclear power is synonymous with the power of God, who is, by definition, on our side … The question has been raised as to whether the Star Wars films really fit this pattern: if they contain a fantasy embodiment of nuclear power it is surely not the Force but the Death Star, which the Force, primarily signified in terms of moral rectitude and discipline rather than physical or technological power, is used to destroy. Can’t they then be read as anti-nuclear films? Perhaps an ambiguity can be conceded (I concede it without much conviction) … the unease is epitomized in the final sequence of Star Wars, with its visual reference (so often pointed out by critics) to Triumph of the Will. A film buff’s joke? Perhaps. But Freud showed a long time ago that we are often most serious when we joke. From the triumph of the Force to the Triumph of the Will is but a step.
George Lucas is Hitler, people, Hitler! Just swap that mustache for a beard, and the resemblance is uncanny. OK, fine, so Wood harbors deep concerns regarding American imperialism. But did he really need to write an essay on Raiders of the Lost Ark and Star Wars in order to critique American imperialism? Couldn’t he have just … written an essay critiquing American imperialism?
Although Princess Leia is ultimately revealed to be Luke Skywalker’s sister, there is never any suggestion that she might inherit the Force, or have the privilege of being trained and instructed by Obi One [sic] and Yoda. In fact, the strategy of making her Luke’s sister seems largely a matter of narrative convenience: it renders romance with Luke automatically unthinkable and sets her free, without impediments, for union with Han Solo. Nowhere do the films invite us to take any interest in her parentage. They play continually on the necessity for Luke to confirm his allegiance to the “good father” (Obi One) and repudiate the “bad father” (Darth Vader), even if the latter proves to be his real father. With this set up and developed in the first two films, Return of the Jedi manages to cap it triumphantly with the redemption of Darth Vader. The trilogy can then culminate in a veritable Fourth of July of Fathericity: a grandiose firework display to celebrate Luke’s coming through, as he stands backed by the ghostly figures of Obi One, Darth and Yoda, all smiling benevolently. The mother, here, is so superfluous that she doesn’t figure in the narrative at all – except, perhaps, at some strange, deeply sinister, unconscious level, disguised as the unredeemably evil Emperor who, as so many people have remarked, seems modeled on the witch in Snow White (the heroine’s stepmother) … Thus the project of the Star Wars films and all related works is to put everyone back in his/her place, reconstruct us as dependent children, and reassure us that it will all come right in the end: trust Father.
Well … yes and no. Rather than rebut Wood’s analysis point by point (if your father is Darth Vader, would you really want to trust him?), I’d like to ask a simple question: Who was this essay for?
Is there something I’m supposed to do about the “Lucas-Spielberg Syndrome”? Tell a friend? I imagine Wood saw it as providing a service to the filmgoing community, a warning. If he pointed out the ways in which the Star Wars original trilogy (in his view) played on the kinds of dominant ideologies that he felt were harmful to society at large, then perhaps people would change their minds about Star Wars and demand more “radical” cinema from Hollywood instead? Am I getting that right? Hmm, and how did that project go? Let me just do a quick check on the popularity of the Star Wars franchise since 1983 and … yeah, hmm, still popular.
See, at a glance, Wood’s goals might bear a resemblance to my part-time Buddhist goals: here was someone who just wanted to make people happier. He was observing certain aspects of extremely popular (and, in some quarters, critically praised) Hollywood films that concerned him. He felt that other people did not notice the ways in which the views and ideas promoted in these films could potentially make people unhappy, and he wanted other people to notice what he noticed. My sense is that he wrote what he wrote because he envisioned that, one day, people might have absorbed his views, changed their viewing habits, and possibly even encouraged Hollywood studios to make movies that no longer promoted, even if unintentionally, the kind of views that, in his opinion, were causing people to be unhappy.
The thing is, as I said earlier, I feel like film critics have a tendency to see their writing as much more influential than it really is, and that observation goes double for academic film critics (allow me to reiterate that, despite my many issues with him, on the spectrum of academic writing, I would categorize Wood’s to be on the more readable and relatable end, which sort of raises the question, “Is this the best you’ve got?”). And yet, on a subconscious level, I think they are aware of how impotent they are, and their frustration and anger comes out in their writing, turning it into something decidedly not part-time Buddhist, and sort of silly.
Robin Wood assumed that if he simply made his writing more angry and more political, his writing would somehow become more powerful, but I feel like he merely achieved the opposite result. What I get from Wood’s essay is: “Nobody is listening to me! They should be listening to me!” But I think he was, shall we say, overestimating his ability to influence the moviegoing public and the world in general. I highly doubt that any fan of Star Wars was going to read his essay and suddenly say, “Oh my God, he’s right! I used to love Star Wars, but now I realize that it reinforces patriarchy, so I don’t like it anymore, I’m going to watch Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles instead.” He merely made less people want to read his writing – including me! I’m sure he found readers who agreed with him, but my sense is that he was mostly preaching to the choir. I think he would have been better off simply writing about the movies he loved, and explaining why he loved them.
I also find his assumptions about the supposedly “straight, white, Christian, American, male” target audience of Star Wars particularly amusing, given that I have known, throughout my life, women, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, members of the LGBTQ community, Rastafarians, Bulgarians, and people from all sorts of non-white, non-male backgrounds who were rabid fans of the Star Wars universe and who didn’t watch the original trilogy and think, “God, I can’t stand how these films indoctrinate us with their American imperialist views!” Perhaps there is something to be said for growing up with a film; I wonder how Wood would have felt about Star Wars if he had viewed it as a child? In essence, I feel like he merely saw what he wanted to see in it.
Here’s what I think: Wood should have just said that he didn’t like Star Wars, and then moved on. It wasn’t his thing. Hey, that’s fine. In the past 25 years, Pixar movies have been very popular, but I don’t really care for them much; granted, I haven’t watched any of the recent ones, but then again, I have no need to entertain young children in my home. I feel like they cater to a certain American middle-class mentality that I don’t particularly relate to. But am I upset about it? Not really. Am I going to write a lengthy essay about it and insinuate that John Lasseter is Hitler? No. I just don’t watch Pixar movies. Easy. Done.
It’s like trying to turn an oil tanker around by jumping into the water and pushing against it with your arms. It’s too big for you, man. You just gotta let it go. Perhaps this whole essay was simply Wood’s attempt to express his view that, in the words of the pre-eminent film scholar Farrokh Bulsara, “Jaws was never my scene and I don’t like Star Wars.”
One final example of my impression of Wood’s overall lack of a wider perspective. In an essay expressing his slight enthusiasm for late ‘90s teen comedies (as opposed to other more widely respected Hollywood genres), he writes the following unrelated bit:
With Fellini, for example, self-expression reached its apotheosis in 8 ½, which fully deserves its established position as a modern masterpiece; everything since seems variously (and comparatively) thin, repetitive, strained. Bergman’s work, which once seemed to me the peak of cinematic achievement, has come to satisfy me less and less … while the great films of Hawks, Ford, Hitchcock, McCarey, Preminger, Ophuls, Cukor, Sturges (Preston!), Mann (Anthony!), Ray, Sirk … retain their amazing freshness and vitality today.
Exclamation marks? What’s with the exclamation marks?
Well, my guess is that Wood was concerned that, when he wrote “Sturges,” some uninformed middlebrow pseudo-aficionado might have assumed he meant the supremely inferior John Sturges (director of The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape) and not that sublime comedic genius Preston Sturges, or that when he wrote “Mann,” he might have meant the insignificant Delbert Mann (director of 1955 Best Picture winner Marty) or that overrated hack Michael Mann (of Manhunter/Heat/Miami Vice fame), not the woefully underappreciated Anthony Mann. It has a tone of “I’m so sick of everyone misunderstanding my directorial preferences! Geez, people, get it right!” Heaven forbid. When I came across this section years ago, I read it to a friend of mine, who promptly laughed. “Does he know that 99% percent of people have probably never heard of any of these directors?”
This is what I mean by lacking perspective. Wood was shouting at some really tiny crowd for no reason. I mean, it’s his book, he can shout if he wants to, right? Sure, and it’s my life, and I can go read some other writer who can deal with being in the minority like a mature adult. Look. Take a deep breath, accept that being in the minority can sometimes be frustrating, and then try to write something that will help people live their lives. Save the venting for your diary.