More on the 50

If there’s any secondary theme to CL after debate life, it’s probably art. I’ve certainly written a lot about art that I’ve subsequently collected for permanent access, e.g. Caveman. I am intrigued by what art is, and what it does, for many reasons. Not least among these is the difficulty in actually establishing in many cases what, indeed, art is. From there, one takes on the issues of good art and bad art, of taste and fashion, of all sorts of things that would not necessarily be meaningful if we were talking about something else. The thing is, because of the importance of art to the human spirit, the subject of art warrants our deep analysis. Whatever it is, it is one of the things that makes us human. And as such it has been a subject for philosophers since the very beginning of philosophy. Given the audience for CL, it seems like a good subject for us.

When I wrote about the so-called best films of all time, I was talking off the top of my head, mostly. Not that I didn’t mean what I said, but I hadn’t dug too deeply. But the idea of movies and art is a rich one, worthy of more analysis. RM commented thus: Isn't film for trained critics the way debate is for trained critics? Clearly there's a place for popularization in both spheres, but there's also a place in both for the education of the audience into a realm where they do understand and benefit from the interconnections. I'm clearly not there in film, but in other areas like painting, theater, philosophy, and debate, I find myself riveted by a lot of performances that 'laypeople' would find terminally boring. So it's not that I value other things over engagement so much as I've been molded into the kind of viewer who finds more abstract material engaging.

I’m not terribly excited about discussing the idea of debate for trained critics at the moment, which I don’t think is a question of art. But I do think Ryan’s point about critics in general is a good one. Simply put, isn’t it true that the more we are trained to understand things, the more we understand them? And the more we understand things, the better able we are to appreciate them? The answer is obviously yes. And no. (I love when Ryan takes me to task!)

First of all, critical knowledge is no guarantee of taste. I don’t have to explain that.

Secondly, critical knowledge is no guarantee of understanding anything but what one has been taught to understand. The history of art is rife with examples of new people coming along and being dismissed by the critics, and later being recognized. The Impressionists, Van Gogh, Melville, Charles Ives, etc. This also connects to a narrowing of critical opinion, rather than a broadening, based on one’s belief that one’s education was definitive and correct, rather than merely one step on an endless journey.

Third, there is the “conspiracy of art” a la Baudrillard, where commerce in the arcane is masterminded by those with the most to gain, i.e., the galleries and critics “conspire” to call something good art because it is to their mutual benefit, not because the item in question is, in fact, good art. (Damien Hirst polka dots? Not even painted necessarily by Damien Hirst? Now that's a shark.)

Fourth, there is often a tendency of critics to show off their knowledge, in pure self-aggrandizement, a sort of Ellsworth Toohey haughtiness that I think does tend to demonstrate itself in areas where the average person may not have a lot of background (like architecture, and I can’t believe I used an example from Ayn Rand, and I should rot in hell for that).

And then there’s movies themselves. Of all the things we might want to call an art form, movies might be the least like art. First of all, it is a collaboration. Take The Godfather, which most people agree is a great movie. What makes it great? The script? Which parts of the script, those from Puzo or those from Coppola? Is it the direction? The acting? Would it have been as good if the studio had managed to keep Brando out? The photography? The music? Absolutely every single one of those things? Boy, that’s a tough one. Given that all those things except for Brando are repeated in The Godfather Part 2, which most people also agree is a great movie, and that all those things in Part 2 are also repeated The Godfather Part 3, which most people agree is pretty much just meh, you’ve got to wonder.

Maybe we can pin down what makes a movie great or not great, when we have the similar sets of pieces from something like the Godfather trilogy, if we have the time and energy. It should be the easiest case to do so, when you think about it, because of the similar sets of pieces. But I wonder…

One thing about movies that is different from every other form of entertainment, except, perhaps, video games, is their expense. Because they cost millions of dollars, they must also sell millions of dollars of tickets. But we wouldn’t equate popularity with quality. The Godfather was enormously successful, as a matter of fact, but that doesn’t make it better or worse than any other picture, it just makes it more popular. Still, at some point all movies must have it in their DNA to be seen. Even something like Warhol’s Empire has no point if no one sees it. That movie would have only been made as an example of some sort of artistic vision, though. I know a lot about movies, and a lot about Warhol, and I don’t care how many National Film Registry recognitions it gets, I don’t want to watch more than the two minutes I’ve already seen. After all, I know how it ends.

My point is that a movie, to be successful on its own DNA terms, must pay for itself, and therefore must sell tickets, and the only way it can do that is to entertain (unless the movie stars Adam Sandler). There must be an audience for a film, or the film won’t exist in the first place. Or at least, that’s the presumption of everyone along the way. The producers won’t produce it if they think it won’t pay; the studios won’t back it; the agents won’t put their people into it. (Except, again, for Adam Sandler. I don’t begin to understand Adam Sandler, and let’s face it, neither do you. No one does. Which may, in fact, completely explain the regular creation of Adam Sandler movies.)

So popularity does, in fact, play a part in filmmaking. Which means that filmmakers must, at some level, strive for success by connecting with paying audiences. This can be done, of course, with no pretense to creativity beyond craft. I recently say Moneyball and enjoyed it quite a bit, but I doubt if anyone involved in it saw it as anything but a piece of commerce. Good commerce, smart commerce, but commerce all the same. They set out to make an entertaining movie—nothing wrong with that—and they did. Good for them. It will never be on anyone’s top hundred list. But that’s true of every single movie ever made (except for a hundred of them).

So let’s look at Citizen Kane. To say that Orson Welles had artistic ambitions is to say that rice comes in little grains that are usually white. His theater history prior to heading out to Hollywood is nothing if not ambitious on a grandiose scale. He wanted to reinvent everything, to move the needle on everything, to change everything. (In a way, his biography is a tragedy of his ultimate failure to do so after his prodigious beginnings.) When he got his hands on “the biggest electric train set a boy ever had,” i.e., the RKO back lot, he made the most of it. Practically every scene in Kane, if not every shot, is an attempt to shake things up. It redefines a closeup or a a longshot, it reinvents depth of field, it does three things when most shots barely do one. Characters age, characters change. Imagery and allusions collect in an embarrassment of riches. Just the opening scene alone, fade after fade after fade, is amazing. For that matter, just watch the movie for scene changes: it wipes, it pans, it blacks out, whatever. If you’re knowledgeable about movies, it makes you dizzy to watch all of this, not used at random, but put in aid of a fascinating story. In other words, if you’re an educated audience, the more you know, the more you appreciate.

But here’s the thing. If you’re not an educated audience, if you’ve never seen a movie before in your life, you are still going to be blown away by this movie. You will be drawn in to the opening series of fades, and you won’t be let go of until you see the sled on the fire. This is a movie for everybody. The fact that you might be able to refine your tastes to make it even better is a plus, but the bottom line is already greatness.

My complaint against some of the movies on the list was not that some of them aren’t as exciting as Kane, first of all because some of them are, and second of all, a movie doesn’t have to be exciting to be great. My complaint was that some of them were there because of the Ellsworth Toohey factor: "I have learned a lot and gotten my tastes remarkably refined, and this is the sort of movie that appeals to tony taste buds that only those of my high quality can appreciate." The two movies that most reflect that for me have been for years Vertigo and The Searchers. I don’t dislike them—don’t get me wrong—but I see in them critic-bait (not deliberate on the directors’ parts) that makes them pets of people who don’t care as much about movies as an overall experience as much as a measure of their own ability to read into them intellectual themes that don’t necessarily make them good movies. My problem with Vertigo versus lots of other AH films is that it is so psychologically cerebral that it fails to connect to the visceral. The Searchers is just too damned long and needs twenty minutes cut from the second act. The thing about The Searchers is that practically every filmmaker cutting his teeth in the 70s was so influenced by it that they elevated it to ideal status that it didn’t deserve, and then alluded to it so much that you felt that every picture you saw was just another homage to John Ford.

Anyhow, I think Ryan has a valid point, but I don’t think it’s absolute. And it’s so much fun to write about this stuff!