In a longish essay about a collection of American film crit, British Film Institute honcho Clive James clarifies the stakes of a variety of debates by tendering two promises. The first is that theoretical approaches are just plain worse:
It quickly becomes obvious that those without theories write better. You already knew that your friend who's so funny about the "Star Wars" tradition of frightful hairstyles for women (in the corrected sequence of sequel and prequel, Natalie Portman must have passed the bad-hair gene down to Carrie Fisher) is much less boring than your other friend who can tell you how science fiction movies mirror the dynamics of American imperialism. This book proves that history is with you: perceptions aren't just more entertaining than formal schemes of explanation, they're also more explanatory.
The editor, Phillip Lopate, an essayist and film critic, has a catholic scope, and might not agree that the nontheorists clearly win out. They do, though, and one of the subsidiary functions that this hefty compilation might perform — subsidiary, that is, to its being sheerly entertaining on a high level — is to help settle a nagging question. In our appreciation of the arts, does a theory give us more to think about, or less? To me, the answer looks like less, but it could be that I just don't like it when a critic's hulking voice gets in the way of the projector beam and tries to convince me that what I am looking at makes its real sense only as part of a bigger pattern of thought, that pattern being available from the critic's mind at the price of decoding his prose.
That The Times believes it gains by reviling intellectualism in the arts is scarcely news; said tendency has grounded certain discussions of the stakes of theory in poetry and poetics (many of which are linked to from within this post). In those debates, the opposite number of theory tends to be a vitalist array of everyday life, immediacy, to-itselfness. James' (ahem) theory, as it creeps up through his weedy prickishness, is that the opposite of theory is observation.
Already this is a useful binary (and please understand that the word "binary" always already means false binary; we can simply save typing time by agreeing on this). It becomes practicallly revelatory as it leads James and us to the second tender:
For as long as the sonar-riddled soundtrack of "The Hunt for Red October" has me mouthing the word "ping" while I keep reaching for the popcorn, I don't want to hear that what I'm seeing is an example of anything, or a step to anywhere, or a characteristic statement by anyone. What I'm seeing is a whole thing on its own. The real question is why none of it saps my willingness to be involved, not even Sean Connery's shtrangely shibilant Shcottish ackshent as the commander of a Shoviet shubmarine, not even that spliced-in footage of the same old Grumman F9F Panther that has been crashing into the aircraft carrier's deck since the Korean War.
On the other hand, no prodigies of acting by Tom Cruise in "Eyes Wide Shut," climaxed by his partial success in acting himself tall, convinced me for a minute that Stanley Kubrick, when he made his bravely investigative capital work about the human sexual imagination, had the slightest clue what he was doing. In my nonhumble ticket purchaser's opinion, the great Stanley K., as Terry Southern called him, was, when he made "Eyes Wide Shut," finally and irretrievably out to lunch. Does this discrepancy of reaction on my part mean that the frivolous movie was serious, and the serious movie frivolous? Only, you might say, if first impressions are everything.
But in the movies they are.
The virtue, per the estimable James, of observational criticism — the reason it is finally and irrevocably superior to theoretical criticism — is that it will forever and only confirm for us what we already know, what we flawlessly decided for ourselves without any fancypants hovering over our shoulder. As in, say, physics, the conclusions are already known; now we just need a lifetime supply of observations to justify them.
Let's nevermind the continent-sized hole in the logic (what about observational critcism whose observations dispute our own? what of theoretical readings that confirm our own initial pleasures and displeasures?) We'll ignore this yawning gap because James does, the only way he can: he defines it out of existence. Quicker than you can say "tautology," James proceeds as if we had all already agreed on the definitions: if a thought confirms our initial suppositions, it's an observation; if a thought confounds them, it is theoretical.
Which is another way of saying something that's been said before: theory is what you think, while my aesthetic judgment is common sense.
Which is to say that Clive James and sugarhigh! finally agree: theory absolutely should be excluded from film criticism, music criticism, poetry, poetics, politics, and every other sphere — if one is satisfied with rendering the tastes of a certain population as objective truths, and if one is satisfied with being limited to endless variations of whatever set of observations can be seen to achieve this objective.
Posted by jane at June 4, 2006 07:56 AM | TrackBack