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Kanye Goes Back to the Old Landmark

Mon, 29 Oct 2018 06:00:00 -0400

Kanye West’s October 11 visit to the White House displayed unforced conviviality mixed with mutual sincerity—a welcome change from the routine, stiff decorum of most summit gatherings. At this meeting, West defied the overwhelmingly white mainstream media’s disapproval of the Republican president, an unfortunate journalistic lack which has impeded cooperation among traditionally Democratic black Americans.

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Paul Schrader’s Acts of Repentance

Tue, 19 Jun 2018 06:00:00 -0400

Religious films rarely receive critical acclaim these days, but a recent exception is Paul Schrader’s First Reformed —a combination character study, psychological drama, and social-activist thriller about a Dutch Reformed pastor, Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke), ministering to a small congregation in upstate New York. Toller’s sorrow and confusion as a divorcé and grieving parent draw him into eco-terrorism.

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Superheroic Testimonies

Fri, 22 Dec 2017 06:00:00 -0500

The most extraordinary image in any movie this century appears in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice . It depicts the moment when Superman flies to rescue a child caught in an urban disaster in Mexico. The native folk crowd around Superman, reaching out to him, their faces expressing thanks beneath the makeup of their interrupted Day of the Dead celebration. Superman looks startled. He is surprised by the vast display of gratitude and humbled (as I was) by the unexpected spectacle of worship.

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Rediscovering Hollywood’s Eve

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Playing a middle-aged woman still remorseful about the teenage decision to give up her out-of-wedlock baby for adoption, Annette Bening’s quietly convincing and uniquely moving performance in Rodrigo Garcia’s film Mother and Child missed out on a nomination for this year’s Academy Award for best actress. This failure to recognize Bening’s subtle portrayal suggests more than the Academy’s indifference to strong art. It’s a sign of modern Hollywood’s reluctance to value the moral calling implicit in Bening’s character’s penitence. This ethical blindness is encouraged by the sexually insouciant behavior celebrated in many recent films.

Consider the fact that Bening has been nominated for an Oscar for her acting in The Kids Are All Right . (This is written prior to the announcement of the winners.) In that film she portrays a partner in a lesbian-mom couple, one of those supposed “breakthrough” roles that “challenges” middle America. Apparently the Academy could not resist a film that prioritizes politics over spirituality.

Although the contrasting maternal characters she plays in these two very different films bear testimony to the range and taste of Bening’s acting choices, she seems to follow the general train of opinion that prefers politically correct simplicities to moral depth. Bening told a New York One television reporter that she took the Kids role because it was “about a woman desperate to hold her family together””an admirable goal but, like the film itself, lacking in the nuances and ambivalences of family intimacies. In Mother and Child , director-writer Rodrigo Garcia’s vision of family connections rises to a higher level.

Both films are set in contemporary, progressive California, yet while Kids congratulates popular liberal politics, Mother and Child offers a more personal political perception”that is, social relations with spiritual dimensions. It’s a soulful melodrama whose refinement gets lost in our shrill, faddish film culture that typically overlooks the impulse toward self-criticism and contrition, especially in the realm of sexual behavior. In The Kids Are All Right , the sexual impulse is portrayed, as its title reference to a song by the rock group The Who implies, against a background of permissive sexual license associated with ’60s rock’n’roll. By contrast, Mother and Child roots sexuality in holy convention. The title evokes the sacred image of the Virgin Mary, a genre of religious iconography that fuses the supernatural mysteries of God’s love for humanity with the natural mysteries of a mother’s love for her child.

The central figure in Mother and Child is Karen, played by Bening. She works as a therapist at an old folks’ home where mortality shadows every human choice. The film’s other main characters include Elizabeth (Naomi Watts), orphaned as a child and now a grown-up young woman focused on a legal career, and Lucy (Kerry Washington), a middle-class entrepreneur desperate to become a parent through adoption. As their disparate stories converge, Garcia’s narrative gradually reveals emotional and social connections. He observes what it means to be a woman by focusing on each character’s attempt to become a mother. Elizabeth and Lucy’s personal frustrations are paralleled in their tense family, professional, and sexual relations. As with Karen, their identity revolves around issues of fertility and associated emotions. Motherhood is felt as an extension of their childhood experience; each has a concept of womanliness formed by parental influence (or its lack) in their own lives.

As a storyteller, Garcia recognizes Karen, Elizabeth, and Lucy’s humanity in the inimitable”almost mystical”aspects of their gender that become manifest in each woman’s relationship with men: how Karen reconnects with her teenage lover, Elizabeth’s compulsive sexual conquests, and Lucy’s seductive/intimidating marital habits. These details are different from the identity politics displayed in The Kids Are All Right , where sexual preference is brought up in order merely to question or accuse social conventions, a paltry and now very conventional ploy. In Mother and Child , sexuality is seen as something more profound. Garcia treats it as the means by which people fulfill their human obligation”or offend against it. Lucy coerces her husband into accepting adoption, and Elizabeth casually wrecks a pregnant neighbor’s marriage. These incidents intensify the story beyond typical melodrama, and Garcia’s stark yet luminous visual compositions draw viewers into the turmoil.

Karen’s skepticism derives from an adolescent disaster”her pregnancy and decision to put her child up for adoption”that deranges her idea of female responsibility. Still devastated by her decision and carrying an adult sense of loss, she looks at a new suitor (Jimmy Smits) with a nonbeliever’s mixture of gratitude and befuddlement: “Who are you? Where did you come from?” She’s dealt with ruined romance, maternal disillusionment, and filial disappointment, all of it fluently replicated in the anxieties that rise from caring for her ill mother. A Mexican home attendant, Sofia (Elpidia Carrillo) and her child offer a mirror to the crisis Karen cannot overcome on her own without entering into a painful dance of both lashing out and reaching out for help. When a talisman passes between them”from Karen’s mother to Sofia’s daughter”it acquires a poignancy that suggests the sanctity of a rosary, a continuity of good wishes between mothers and daughters, an intuitive communication that counts blessings and desires.

What goes unarticulated between Karen and her mother finds expression in the generational dynamics of the film’s other adult/child relationships: Lucy’s candor with her own inquisitive mom; the pregnant unwed teenager (Shameeka Epps) who first accepts Lucy’s adoption petition while questioning the devotion of her own mother (Lisa Gay Hamilton); then the self-punishing Elizabeth’s unexpected pregnancy that leads to an encounter with a blind teenage girl.

Unlike pop media’s usual coarsening of human sexuality in programs like MTV’s insidious 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom that reduce pregnancy to reality-TV sensationalism, Garcia bravely combines vulgar habits with sacred perspectives, common behaviors with spiritual aspirations. In Mother and Child the women use a feminist principle”autonomous sexual independence”to assert their social position. But it’s a political reflex with personal consequences: The slightly older Karen becomes bitter toward men, whom she now keeps at a distance. Her effort to recapture a long-lost opportunity, or reverse earlier decisions, reunites her with the teenage lover who impregnated her, but this is futile, an example of the modern desperation that warps sexual interaction and prevents true intimacy.

Filmgoers unfamiliar with Garcia’s earlier work will be surprised by the ways in which Mother and Child grapples with the spiritual complexities of human existence. Garcia’s filmmaking (2004’s Nine Lives , 2003’s Ten Things You Know Just By Looking at Her ) is not conventionally religious, but like his father, the Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Márquez, he displays amazement at the commonality of human experience. His films are more socially grounded than literary “magical realism.” He is awed by fate, humbled by its universality and puzzling meaning. A remarkable moment in the earlier film Nine Lives features Sissy Spacek playing a woman contemplating adultery who hesitates when, in the midst of the rendezvous, her paramour looks up at the night sky and asks, “Is that the same moon Jesus Christ saw?”

In Mother and Child , Garcia’s female personae make up a community of “new Eves””a classical image of the Virgin Mary that Pope Pius XII used in his 1954 encyclical Ad Caeli Reginam . There Pius XII draws attention to how Mary sacrifices her “maternal rights and maternal love” for the sake of the greater love of the one who can redeem and create us anew. Although by no means theological in any explicit sense, Mother and Child ’s worldly storyline works toward a picture of social unity and social salvation by matter-of-factly illustrating race- and class-mixing and personal sacrifices.

Garcia’s flawed yet yearning characters suggest a larger principle of intimacy and love that redeems original sin, transcending the facile race/class/sex cynicism of our era. His female portraits concentrate on the conscious and unconscious efforts women make to hold the family of mankind together in their personal lives. The climactic revelation of their interconnectedness brings out the inner coherence of the narrative and becomes one of the film’s unexpected glories.

Garcia makes the most of what Pius XII termed “those sentiments of filial reverence which are not ours alone, but which belong to all those who glory in the name of Christian.” He achieves some portion of cinematic greatness as he guides the tormented Karen, desolate Elizabeth, and doubtful Lucy toward a shared mother-and-child reunion. Elizabeth sees her predicament reflected in the figure of a blind teenage girl, Cristi (Simone Lopez). To the blind young girl Elizabeth confesses her pregnancy, and she receives Cristi’s innocent, modern adolescent reply that suggests, if not an absolution, then a benediction: “A person inside another person. It’s like science fiction. It doesn’t know a thing; only its mother’s heartbeat.” A poetic expression firmly grounded in the most primeval human feelings and modern terms, it epitomizes Garcia’s extraordinary spiritual vision.

Armond White, film critic of the New York Press , is chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle.

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The Coens Keep the Faith

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Famous for the Oscar-winning movies Fargo and No Country for Old Men , the team of filmmaking brothers Joel and Ethan Coen are less well-known for their spiritual undertakings. Today’s most popular notion of sophistication emphasizes cynical humor, and the Coen Brothers are certainly renowned for an eccentric impudence that can seem snarky: as when showing a human appendage sticking out of a woodchipper in Fargo or a childless couple becoming kidnappers chasing after scrambling infants in Raising Arizona . But if a mocking view of compulsive and ruthless behavior characterizes contemporary hipness, it is also a sign of emotional desperation. Behind the frequent violence and threat and neediness in Coen Brothers scenarios is a remarkable confrontation with the meaning of mankind’s existence, humanity’s grappling with the unknown, and individuals’ relationships with God.

In the Coen Brothers’ newest film, True Grit , a remake of the 1969 Western that brought John Wayne his long-awaited Academy Award, an opening epigraph quotes Proverbs 28:1: “The wicked flees when no one pursues, but the righteous are bold as a lion.” It’s not the first time the Coen Brothers have used a religious tag; their 2009 A Serious Man began with a quotation from the eleventh-century biblical scholar Rashi, Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki (“Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you”). These references announce a hermeneutic purpose, using Scripture and proverb to explain unpredictable circumstances, but the quotations also evidence the Coens’ interest in following a moral precept and demonstrating its truth and efficacy in inventive accounts of worldly experience. It is the classic tradition of storytelling that addresses fundamental human concerns.

An ecumenical filmmaker such as Steven Spielberg assiduously applies Judeo-Christian values to tales about innocence and experience, belief versus skepticism. Spielberg’s interest in bearing witness through drama equates filmmaking with a form of testimony. The Minnesota-born Coen Brothers, whose name is a derivative of Cohen, the Hebrew term for leader or rabbi, match Spielberg for films of sermonlike roundedness and intent that usually”and always humorously”investigate the complex ways characters face up to their natures and confront their fates. The Coens’ narratives are folkloric, and, in the attention they give to language that often revives and spoofs esoteric argot, their films present scriptural voices that all creeds can recognize.

This is not the reading the mainstream secular media prefer. Received opinion of the Coens places inordinate attention on the sheer shock of their films’ bloodiest scenes rather than on the intricate play of ideas and dialogue and deep feeling. But a more insightful appreciation of the Coens was recently encouraged by Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou’s A Woman, A Gun, and a Noodle Shop , a remake of the Coens’ debut feature, Blood Simple , in the style of a traditional Chinese folk legend. Zhang’s translation highlights the existential aspects of the Coens’ storytelling, distilling the Postman-Always-Rings-Twice fatalistic plot of Blood Simple to its cosmic essence: elemental figures, hyperintense psychology, and lunar landscapes”settings in which mankind’s spiritual nature is writ large.

This is also the method of True Grit , the Coens’ first classical Western. It follows their acclaimed modern Western/serial-killer film, No Country for Old Men , as if to improve on it and bring its desolation closer to spiritual consciousness. The Western”the primal American movie genre”allows the Coens to essay the same fundamental historical precepts as a biblical epic. True Grit ’s opening image”a dark cabin illuminated by a fireplace glow that has the distant appearance of a crucifix (a site of agony and redemption)”sets the stage for the story of teenage Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) avenging her father’s death at the hands of an outlaw. Looking back, narrating her memoir in a matured, remorseful voice, Mattie surmises, “You must pay for everything in this world. There is nothing free except for the grace of God.” Underneath her sorrowful wisdom is heard the old-timey hymn “Lean On Jesus.” It’s not a scoffer’s joke. Mattie’s sojourn through the turbulent, brutal West, where she hires Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) a drunken bounty hunter, to effect her mission, becomes a sincere, multilevel search for satisfaction, self-knowledge, the father she misses, the authority and succor she craves.

Mattie’s spiritual desperation recalls the Coens’ most plainly ethnic movie, A Serious Man , in which a mathematics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) deals with a failing marriage, estranged children, and workplace troubles by seeking out advice from a triumvirate of rabbis, leading to the crucial question, “What is my relationship with Ha’Shem [God]?” The question hangs in the movie’s atmosphere (set in the late 1960s, it uncovers a key moment of cultural revolution, when Jefferson Airplane songs and an emerging drug culture were unraveling social conventions). Larry’s moral quandary has the same urgency as Mattie’s. His lament, “Actions always have consequences, morally if not physically,” expresses Old West fatalism, 1960s caution, and even post-9/11 anxiety.

Common as agnostic pronouncements are in faddish Hollywood, where stars routinely embrace cults and exotic, indulgent philosophies, the Coens take a different route by regularly”steadily”examining their characters’ principles and their own ethnic-cultural roots. The lack of honor among thieves in Blood Simple , the post-Carnegie corporate ethics in The Hudsucker Proxy , the lapsed 1960s radicalism in The Big Lebowski , the Washington, D.C., conspiracies in Burn After Reading , the commercial exploitation of marriage vows in the legal comedy Intolerable Cruelty ”all show the Coens reflecting on fundamental social values as a way of taking the contemporary moral temperature. That return to basics explains the genius of updating Homer’s Odyssey to the pre-civil-rights era American South in the Coens’ folk-music operetta O Brother Where Art Thou? ; refracting film-noir codes in Miller’s Crossing and pulp-fiction fantasy in The Man Who Wasn’t There ; the Yiddish folktale prologue of A Serious Man ; and the collision of a black Southern Baptist woman with an unscrupulous white con artist/professor and his gang in The Ladykillers .

The latter was a remake of a 1950s British comedy that was a remake of a 1942 American film Larceny, Inc. ”proof that the Coens are not gimmicky tale spinners. Their artistic commitment involves a kind of ethnographic research that takes them into the origins of myth, ethics, and instinct: They recontextualized The Ladykillers as a farce that subtly illuminates the precarious social ideas confronting Christian conservatives and liberals alike. (In a satirical twist, the church lady’s benevolence and the con artists’ disillusionment wind up in a donation to Bob Jones University.) Similarly, the Beltway hijinks of Burn After Reading take place between interplanetary opening and closing images, as if human foibles were seen from God’s point of view.

Essentially humane satirists, the Coens purposely spring their punchlines (varieties of moral reckoning) in the midst of a largely faithless era. The 1950s-set The Man Who Wasn’t There revisited the post“World War II moment when we supposedly lost our bearings, leaving cynical comic books, pulp fiction, and B-movies to celebrate our decline in the guise of subversive pop culture. In that film science fiction became an irrational replacement for religious dogma. Tellingly, in True Grit and A Serious Man , Mattie Ross and Larry Gopnik share a special kind of desperation: Their despair (“I felt like Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones,” Mattie remembers) moves them relentlessly toward an unsentimental hopefulness. Their personal stories show the essence of faith, even when it is not explicitly stated. And True Grit ’s Twain-like language revives an era in which the Bible, quoted as vernacular, defined the ethos.

The classicism of the Western permits the Coens to reiterate the strange longing that was almost inchoate in No Country for Old Men , when Tommy Lee Jones, after witnessing the abyss, recounted a dream about seeing his father in the hereafter”a monologue that puzzled horror-movie habitués keyed up by the film’s cavalcade of senseless, unstoppable violence. They could not comprehend Jones’ belief in the hereafter but expected fashionable nihilism. Yet this longing”recurring as it does in the heartfelt twang of True Grit ’s score (“Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” sung dulcetly by the great folk artist Iris Dement) and in the film’s blasted landscape, which describes America’s long fall from paradise”is also what distinguished the Coens’ modern spiritual search in A Serious Man . The Coens’ most Jewish film holds hands with True Grit and its Christian fundamentalism. Both films reveal the brothers’ richest, most ecumenical meaning”and without a single snarky moment. Who knew America’s coolest filmmakers would turn out to be its most openly spiritual?

Armond White, film critic of the New York Press , is chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle.

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A Tangled Mess

Wed, 01 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0500

By changing the title of the Rapunzel fairy tale to Tangled , the folks at Disney have found a perfect euphemism to represent today’s cultural confusion. But so many conflicting interests are apparent in this animated reboot—hewing (at least a little) to the Disney fairy tale—musical tradition that stretches from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to Aladdin ; competing with the popular antic, self-referential tone of such non-Disney cartoon hits as Shrek and Ice Age ; showing off the latest digital production technology—that Discombobulated also would have worked.

Our motivations for engaging with fairy tales have changed from a simple childhood enthrallment with bedtime narratives to a febrile taste (in a world post TV and video games) for excitement unto turmoil, tension unto cynicism, and clarity unto doubt. Thus “Rapunzel” has been amped up from the morality tale told by the Brothers Grimm into a typically overactive Disney concoction of cute humans, comic animals, and one-dimensional villains. While this is probably a reflection of society’s deeper political disorder, the hyped-up story line of Tangled also gives evidence that cultural standards have undergone a drastic change. We are not just a fragmented culture; as we live, suffer, and hope in our polarized states, our aspirations, fears, and relations become knotted, enmeshed, and fraught. And Hollywood exploits this jumble. The Walt Disney Company, ever conscious of a lucrative opportunity, knows how to compensate. Its new title disguises the lack of cultural continuity that makes the name Rapunzel seem not simply uncommercial but worse: obscure.

The once common moral lessons of fairy tales no longer get passed on the same way they used to. Tangled disconnects from the Grimms’ portrayal of feudal life, superstition, and nature. The name Rapunzel is German for “rampion”; that vegetable sets in motion the tale’s story of wild appetite and thwarted desire when a witch bargains for the expected child of a couple who have stolen rampion from her garden. The witch keeps the child locked in a tower that can be entered only by climbing the girl’s long, golden locks of hair. In Tangled the Rapunzel legend gets strained through a sieve of political correctness that includes condescending to fashionable notions about girlhood, patriarchy, romance, and what is now the most suspicious of cultural tenets, faith.

Tangled ’s lack of faith contrasts with the recent announcement of a new venture by the British dance-pop duo the Pet Shop Boys. Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe are adapting Danish author Hans Christian Andersen’s 1870 story “The Most Incredible Thing” into a full-length ballet. This surprising project, which is consistent with the duo’s sophisticated and literate approach to popular music (“West End Girls,” “It’s a Sin,” “What Have I Done to Deserve This”), addresses not only the moral and political quandaries of their usual terrain (the dance-music demimonde) but also the modern, tangled pop world.

Through Andersen’s fable—a parable, really—lapsed Catholic Tennant and his partner Lowe explore the circumstance of heretical cultural fashion, a phenomenon that existed even in the nineteenth century. “The Most Incredible Thing” describes competition among artists for contemporary recognition and acclaim. A modish, faithless artist wins the contest until something extraordinary happens. The tale’s meaning recalls that of the better-known “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” but “The Most Incredible Thing” tells a more complex story and is well worth reading because of its vision, which projects past skepticism and attaches to faith. Andersen posited the power of substantive art that by divine right overwhelms the folly and insincerity of current, passing style. It turns out that “the most incredible thing” isn’t rebooted technology (technology figures in the story) but art that maintains the principles and beliefs by which our civilization established its social and moral foundations. Andersen’s tale asserts the value of faith just as the Pet Shop Boys’ 2001 London stage musical Closer to Heaven— truly adult entertainment—featured characters who sought personal commitment and sustenance against the desperate distractions of hypersexualized hedonism.

In its attempt to turn “Rapunzel” into the next most trendy thing, the story of Tangled climaxes with a jest that not only disregards the spiritual values that informed Andersen’s climax but also demonstrates our moral and spiritual disorder. This newfangled “Rapunzel” features the resurrection of the heroine’s mortally wounded suitor (no longer a prince but a bandit); he’s brought back to life by her one magical tear. Of all the changes rung to Disnify the Grimm tale, this is the most significant. In Grimm, the prince has his sight restored. Now Disney elevates the crisis and then de-dramatizes the transfiguration, as if the filmmakers are afraid to give the thought of resurrection its due.

Just as Disney’s 1989 cartoon of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” traduced its story of faith into the exploits of a flirty amphibian, Disney’s 2010 Rapunzel story streamlines its heroine, who still lives in a medieval tower, into a girl of contemporary spunk, daring, and godlessness. In this shrill context, Tangled ’s resurrection is denuded of the Grimms’ mystification. Resurrection becomes less than a parlor trick. It doesn’t emanate from some divine provenance; it’s simply a plot gimmick. Rapunzel does not learn compassion in that instant; the restoration to life happens too quickly for her grief to express the depth of her loss. Notwithstanding one sweetly sentimental song whose lyrics wonder about her fate, Tangled moves on to more jokes and musical high jinks for its wrap-up.

We’ve accustomed ourselves to the formula by which a family movie designed to pacify children is considered innocuous, but we cannot ignore the ramifications of entertainment concepts that move away from profundity or that deny audiences the persuasiveness and the confirmation of epiphany. That’s what makes Andersen’s “The Most Incredible Thing” so remarkable and unforgettable. The unpretentious tale gives testimony to faithfulness and is a reminder of the genuine power of art.

When that miracle of resurrection occurs in Danish filmmaker Carl Dreyer’s 1955 Ordet (“The Word”), it provides one of the great moments in art-movie history—an intense, then luminous moment as a minister’s dead wife is revived on the catafalque. The scene conveys Dreyer’s belief in immanence; all his movies, such as the 1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc , vibrate with a sense of a larger reality than what is immediately before our eyes. Going from Dreyer’s twentieth-century masterworks to the digital wonders of the new millennium, our eyes and imaginations are routinely pacified, as in Tangled , without being inspired to contemplation of greater things or even the unknowable.

Some form of faithlessness is apparent in the recent films that cheerlessly depict the phenomenon of resurrection. Silent Light , a 2007 film by Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas (a film-festival darling) about contemporary Mennonites, takes a postmodern, almost derisive approach to Dreyer’s metaphysics—first with explicit references to Ordet , attenuating the circumstances surrounding resurrection until it is observed without passion but with a kind of benumbed ambiguity. The same is true of Clint Eastwood’s 2010 Hereafter , in which a medium (played by actor / leftist political crusader Matt Damon) adamantly denies his ability to communicate with souls who have passed on (“It’s not a gift, it’s a curse,” he insists) until he surrenders to luck and finds a secular, completely faithless, love match.

These recent movies, including Tangled , replace the old-fashioned need for something to believe in with a bland uncertainty. The tradition of popular culture that provides understanding, explanation, and succor gets tangled up with the desperate motivations of art-house, film-festival nihilism and atheism. We’re far past the days of Carl Dreyer, Ingmar Bergman, and Federico Fellini, who contemplated the lines between devotion and agnosticism. And we’re far past Spielberg’s E.T. (essentially a resurrection tale) and the afterlife metaphysics of his daunting A.I. ; both are derived from the richness of Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. Now even fairy-tale cartoons loot our moral heritage to make jaunty fodder that might eventually wind up in a Broadway-musical tourist trap.

Religion offers a way to understand our human impulses; popular culture has become a way to muddle them. That’s the theme the Pet Shop Boys identify in Hans Christian Andersen’s “Most Incredible Thing”; it’s also exemplified by the commercial corruptions that Tangled performs on the tale of Rapunzel. In his classic study The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales , psychologist Bruno Bettelheim argued that readers “find folk fairy tales more satisfying than all other children’s stories” because “fairy tales carry important messages to the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious mind, on whatever level each is functioning at the time.” As pop culture gets away from faith, it also abandons its most important social function, confusing rather than uniting our humanity. It will take faith to raise corrupted pop culture from the dead.

Armond White, film critic of the New York Press , is chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle.

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The Lost Dimension

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0400

The 3-D explosion in Hollywood may add depth to the screen, but Armond White argues that it subtracts from the movies.

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Do Movie Critics Matter?

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

It’s always a good year at the movies, even if the great films can be counted on a few digits and never get mentioned at the Academy Awards. That’s why we need film critics—to help us understand the state of movies, our cultural life, and our general moral and political being. On the occasion of the New York Film Critics Circle’s Seventy-Fifth Anniversary and Awards dinner, my duties as the circle’s chairman led me toward one unavoidable fact: The practice of critical thinking about film is under assault.

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Do Movie Critics Matter?

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 01:46:00 -0400

[Editor’s Note: The April Issue of First Things is now available on newsstands and online! Hot off the press, this issue is filled with thoughtful essays, critical reviews, and lovely poetry”all of which, for a limited time, you can access for free on FT Online. For starters, here’s film critic Armond White’s excellent piece in this issue, “Do Film Critics Matter?””the perfect piece to read following Hollywood’s recent Oscars season.]

It’s always a good year at the movies, even if the great films can be counted on a few digits and never get mentioned at the Academy Awards. That’s why we need film critics”to help us understand the state of movies, our cultural life, and our general moral and political being. On the occasion of the New York Film Critics Circle’s Seventy-Fifth Anniversary and Awards dinner, my duties as the circle’s chairman led me toward one unavoidable fact: The practice of critical thinking about film is under assault.

It seems that film critics, as a breed, survive even though so much else in our culture is moving further and faster away from intelligence, individuality, morality, and literacy: As the filmmaker James Toback put it, “the deterioration of life as we know it.” Still, film critics persist, just as great movies”such as Jan Troell’s Everlasting Moments , Michael Jackson’s This Is It , and the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man ”persist, in the face of technological changes that leave little room for art, reflection, or human expression.

Those activities and qualities need our attention in order to be nurtured and preserved. But how”unless there’s true critical guidance? When the film circle was founded in 1935, its first chairman, Frank S. Nugent (who eventually went on to be a screenwriter for the legendary John Ford on such classics as Wagon Master and The Searchers ), wrote about the circle’s creation and, in a New York Times article, quoted the circle’s constitution: “to represent, as an impartial organized working unit, the profession of film criticism; to recognize the highest creative achievements in the field of motion pictures and thereby to uphold the dignity and significance of film criticism.”

After seventy-five years, belief in that constitution has declined. There are few examples where critical practice exhibits those basic principles and ideas. Most editors and publishers today cut out or limit criticism’s traditional media function. Journalistic standards have changed so drastically that, when I took the podium at the film circle’s dinner and quoted Pauline Kael’s 1974 alarm, “Criticism is all that stands between the public and advertising,” the gala’s audience responded with an audible hush”not applause.

Over recent years, film journalism has”perhaps unconsciously”been considered a part of the film industry and expected to be a partner in Hollywood’s commercial system. Look at the increased prevalence of on-television reviewing dedicated to dispensing consumer advice, and of magazine and newspaper features linked only to current releases, or to the Oscar campaign, as if Hollywood’s business was everybody’s business. Critics are no longer respected as individual thinkers, only as adjuncts to advertising. We are not. And we should not be. Criticism needs to be reassessed with this clear understanding: We judge movies because we know movies, and our knowledge is based on learning and experience.

“Truth is the first casualty of war,” runs an old axiom of journalism. In the current war between print and electronic media, in which the Internet has given way to Babel-like chaos, the critical profession has been led toward self-doubt. Individual critics worry about their job security while editors and publishers, afraid of losing advertisers and customers, subject their readers to hype, gossip, and reformulated press releases”but not criticism. Besieged by fear, critics become the victim of commercial design”a conceit whereby the market predetermines content. Journalism illogically becomes oriented to youth, who no longer read.

Commerce, based on fashion and seeming novelty, always prioritizes the idea of newness as a way of favoring the next product and flattering the innocence of eager consumers who, reliably, lack the proverbial skepticism. (“Let the buyer be gullible.”) In this war between traditional journalistic standards and the new acquiescence, the first casualty is expertise.

By offering an alternative deluge of fans’ notes, angry sniping, half-baked impressions, and clubhouse amateurism, the Internet’s free-for-all has helped to further derange the concept of film criticism performed by writers who have studied cinema as well as related forms of history, science, and philosophy. This also differs from the venerable concept of the “gentleman amateur” whose gracious enthusiasms for art forms he himself didn’t practice expressed a valuable civility and sophistication, a means of social uplift. Internet criticism has, instead, unleashed a torrent of deceptive knowledge”a form of idiot savantry”usually based in the unquantifiable “love of movies” (thus corrupting the French academic’s notion of cinephilia ).

The popularity of movies used to be celebrated during the 1960s pop-art era, when popular culture was considered a new form of mass, democratic communication that united all classes and was open to heterogeneous creative temperaments. Hollywood always catered to a populist impulse that seemed, in itself, to call for outbursts of excitement or vitriol.

This is the source of the witty riposte or sarcastic put-down’s being considered the acme of critical language. The Algonquin Round Table’s legacy of high-caliber critical exchange has turned into the viral graffiti on aggregate websites such as Rotten Tomatoes that corral numerous reviews. These sites offer consensus as a substitute for assessment. Rotten Tomatoes readers then post (surprisingly vicious, often bullying) sniper responses to the reviews. These mostly juvenile remarks further shortcut the critical process by jumping straight to the so-called witticism. This isn’t erudition; as film critic Molly Haskell recently observed, “The Internet is democracy’s revenge on democracy.”

By dumping reviewers onto one website and assigning spurious percentage-enthusiasm points to the discrete reviews, the Internet takes revenge on individual expression”the essence of criticism, if not a definition of democracy itself. This shows an oddly anarchic tendency in pop culture to vulgarize professionalism”to distrust it. As surely as the Rotten Tomatoes fanboys rabidly anticipate high percentages for the Hollywood blockbusters geared to their adolescent taste, this distrust demonstrates our journalism’s failure to encourage cinematic literacy.

Art appreciation”once a staple of a liberal-arts education that taught music, literature, and fine art”derives from knowledge of a form’s history and standards, not simply its newest derivations or mutations. Movies also must be given the acceptance and protection that distinguish them from television and equate them to the other fine arts. Only critical expertise can provide this grounding and guidance.

But it cannot happen in an atmosphere that is hostile to the idea of learning, reflection, and personal (rather than herd-mentality) expression. Personal expression turns average journalistic criticism into its own justifiable work of art. Disrespect for expertise and personal response in criticism comes down to a vulgar, if not simply craven, attack on intelligence, taste, and individual preference. All opinions are not equal; the opinion most worth disseminating is the informed opinion, based on experience and learning. If criticism is to have a purpose beyond consumer advice, it is important that critics not follow trends but maintain cultural and emotional continuity”a sense of mankind’s personal history”in their reporting on the arts.

Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker received this year’s top awards from the New York Film Critics Circle, her Iraq-war action film offering another instance of the circle’s acknowledgment of topical relevance in popular art. It wasn’t my personal choice, but I accept it as proof that politics are an important component of the understanding of art”and increasingly so in this era of polarizing political and moral positions. It is the film critic’s constant struggle to get filmgoers and filmmakers to understand that politics and morality are still part of the artistic equation, even at the movies.

Without using morality, politics, and cultural continuity as measures of value, there is no way to appreciate the state of the culture or to maintain intelligence. Without criticism, we will have achieved naivete.

This essay is adapted from a speech given by Armond White, chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle, at the group’s annual awards banquet on January 11, 2010. With movie luminaries such as Meryl Streep, George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, Mo’Nique, Kathryn Bigelow, and others in the audience, White’s remarks were met with stony silence.

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Why Nine Got Only Four

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 01:01:13 -0500

[Note: The following is a review/essay on the movie musical Nine , which yesterday received only four 2010 Academy Award nominations, and failed to earn one of the ten slots for Best Picture. This is the first contribution to First Things by Armond White, chief film critic of the New York Press and chairman of the New York Film Critics’ Circle.]

It’s a sign of the times that Federico Fellini’s 1963 classic 8½ ”widely considered the best film ever made about filmmaking”has been remade in such a way that its famous story of one man’s artistic and spiritual crisis no longer resembles itself. The newly released Nine , a movie-musical update of 8½ , flattens personal moral struggle into a singing-and-dancing extravaganza.

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