Suppose that through the medium of the movies pulp, with its five-and-dime myths, can take a stronger hold on people's imaginations than art, because it doesn't affect the conscious imagination, the way a great novel does, but the private, hidden imagination, the primitive fantasy life—and with an immediacy that leaves no room for thought. I have had more mail from adolescents (and post-adolescents) who were badly upset because of a passing derogatory remark I made about Rosemary's Baby than I would ever get if I mocked Tolstoy. [...] At the moment, the shared pop culture of the audience may be all that people feel they have left.
This is from Pauline Kael's 1973 review for The Long Goodbye, which I watched over the weekend as a double feature with The Big Sleep. If you're unfamiliar with either of the two: The Big Sleep is the definitive film noir, starring Bogart and Bacall, with a script adapted from a Raymond Chandler novel by none other than William Faulkner. Its hero, Philip Marlowe, appears again in The Long Goodbye, a profoundly different kind of film—now Los Angeles is living through the 70s, and the shrewd greed and ostentatious aristocracy is replaced by a gentler, post-flower-power narcissism.
The 40s had a place for a hard-boiled man in a suit; gorgeous women throw themselves at Bogart's Marlowe, exchanging sparkling and semi-aggressive banter, while men perpetually match their machismo against his, or their firepower, or their (considerably vaster) wealth. The 70s have no room for Elliot Gould as Marlowe: they laugh at his suit, they don't fear his inquiries, and people with power swat him aside with indignant and frightening force. Marlowe is still, fundamentally, a force for good, but in a way that leaves him exploited by everybody from his close friends to sad wives to his own cat.
Back-to-back, the two make for a fantastic double feature, neither stepping on the other's toes in the slightest. It's a delight to jump from Bogart's embrace of Bacall to a ten-minute grocery store meander (at the behest of the aforementioned cat), watching the character who defined tough, cynical masculinity reduced to swapping labels on cat foot, cheerfully picking up brownie mix for his next-door neighbors, who live in something like a nudist yoga commune. But the one movie comments on the other: the way I described it, immediately after watching, was that The Big Sleep is a stunning reminder of what Hollywood's Golden Age was capable of, and The Long Goodbye is a poignant, loving look at why it had to die.
I'm slowly working through the works of Long Goodbye director Robert Altman. He has a way of shooting films that leaves them feeling like hazy dreams; they are so densely packed with people and with overlapping conversations that they feel like lived-in spaces, rather than like manicured dramas. It has the curious effect of making his films simultaneously feel compressed and relaxed: I watched another of his movies, Gosford Park, twice back-to-back without feeling bored at all with the second viewing, because so much was going on. At the same time, the first viewing felt less like an overwhelming quiz than like, for lack of a better description, settling into a long, warm bath. He's one of the rare directors whose films, to me, feel like they speak a different language than films generally do; it's almost like getting entangled with a totally different medium, since the economy of filmmaking generally lays forth rules for production and sequencing and dialogue and character development and so on that run from commercial blockbusters all the way down to your average low-budget indie films. It's magic. I'm entranced.
What struck me about Pauline Kael's review of The Long Goodbye is her lengthy foray into defining pulp as its own creative mode: Raymond Chandler, she argues, was a pulp writer through-and-through, his mystery novels externalizing every thought and removing room for any genuine interiority. (She contrasts him unfavorably with Ernest Hemingway, these days a somewhat-maligned literary figure, and talks about how Hemingway's removal of his characters' interior monologues, combined with his meticulous descriptions of external space, give you room to feel his characters more movingly than if you were told, flat-out, what they were thinking or how they felt.) Kael, who championed cinema as art and held it to correspondingly high standards, doesn't define pulp as "bad" in any qualitative sense: she's careful to point how how skillful pulp's craft can be, and how enjoyable the result can become. "Good" and "bad" are too simple of terms to discuss art with any substance. What matters is wonder, enrichment, mystery, imagination, dreams—stuff that can't easily be quantified, things that obey strange and elusive rules. Proper art almost needs to deviate from typical standards of what art "is", taking risks that can only be justified by the rules of their given surroundings. Simply focusing on craftsmanship will get you so far, but no further.
The bit I quoted at the top feels strikingly similar to the discourse between Martin Scorsese (one of Kael's most-championed directors) and Marvel enthusiasts. For a year and change, Scorsese has off-handedly mentioned that he doesn't think Marvel movies really qualify as cinema; hordes of Marvel fans have taken to the streets to angrily insist that Scorsese is the one who doesn't do real art, and that he's probably a serious misogynist to boot. (Marvel of course, is extremely feminist these days, thanks to the aid of incomparable feminist Joss Whedon.) Their counterargument often consists of pointing to random GIFable moments from Marvel properties—a line of dialogue in WandaVision, the composition of a shot involving Thor's hammer—and insisting that this is incomparable artistry, cinema redefined, a progressive new medium for a progressive new world.
It's not really a great conversation, and Kael, 50 years ago, pinpoints why: people confuse emotional reaction with meaning, and the Disney/Marvel formula is crafted enough to generate consistent emotional responses, like clockwork, touching upon themes so neatly laid-out that you could fill a tiny book with them, one moral per page, in a tastefully serifed font. Compare Salon's review of the WandaVision finale, tastefully titled "'WandaVision' concludes by giving Martin Scorsese the MCU film he always wanted," which has passages like this...
However, once the fighting ends, the finale bucks Scorsese's assumptions about superhero titles and returns to the attributes that make "WandaVision" such a wonder. To save the people of Westview, she ends her perfect little world and locks Agatha in her supporting "nosy neighbor" role as Agnes. And in her final heartbreaking moments with Vision, Wanda does her best to convey the emotional, psychological experience of her humanity to the synthetic being she loves.
"Wanda, I know we can't stay like this," Vision says softly as his demise creeps closer. "Before I go, I feel I must know: What am I?"
"You, Vision, are the piece of the Mind stone that lives in me. You are a body of wires and blood and bone that I created," she tells him. "You are my sadness and my hope. But mostly, you're my love."
He sheds a tear, kisses her hand and observes, "I have been a voice with no body. A body, but not human. And now, a memory made real. Who knows what I might be next?. . . We have said goodbye before, so it stands to reason –"
She finishes,"– we'll say hello again."
This was not simplistic roller coaster dialogue. This was romantic movie magic as Scorsese defines it in a subsequent piece that published in the New York Times. If, as he says, cinema expresses "the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves," then "WandaVision" is the first MCU title that meets Scorsese's qualification.
Fellini started with his own situation in the early Sixties, and made a film about his artistic breakdown. In so doing, he undertook a risky expedition into uncharted territory: his interior world. His alter ego, Guido, is a famous director suffering from the cinematic equivalent of writer’s block, and he’s looking for a refuge, for peace and for guidance, as an artist and as a human being. He goes for a “cure” at a luxurious spa, where his mistress, his wife, his anxious producer, his prospective actors, his crew, and a motley procession of fans and hangers-on and fellow spa-goers quickly descend upon him—among them is a critic, who proclaims that his new script “lacks a central conflict or philosophical premise” and amounts to “a series of gratuitous episodes.” The pressure intensifies, his childhood memories and longings and fantasies arrive unexpectedly through his days and his nights, and he waits for his muse—who comes and goes, fleetingly, in the form of Claudia Cardinale—to “create order.”
8½ is a tapestry woven from Fellini’s dreams. As in a dream, everything seems solid and well-defined on the one hand and floating and ephemeral on the other; the tone keeps shifting, sometimes violently. He actually created a visual stream of consciousness that keeps the viewer in a state of surprise and alertness, and a form that constantly redefines itself as it goes along. You’re basically watching Fellini make the film before your eyes, because the creative process is the structure. Many filmmakers have tried to do something along these lines, but I don’t think anyone else has ever achieved what Fellini did here. He had the audacity and the confidence to play with every creative tool, to stretch the plastic quality of the image to a point where everything seems to exist on some subconscious level. Even the most seemingly neutral frames, when you take a really close look, have some element in the lighting or the composition that throws you off, that is somehow infused with Guido’s consciousness. After a while, you stop trying to figure out where you are, whether you’re in a dream or a flashback or just plain reality. You want to stay lost and wander with Fellini, surrendering to the authority of his style.
The picture reaches a peak in a scene where Guido meets the cardinal at the baths, a journey to the underworld in search of an oracle, and a return to the clay from which we all originate. As it is throughout the picture, the camera is in motion—restless, hypnotic, floating, always bearing toward something inevitable, something revelatory. As Guido makes his way down, we see from his point of view a succession of people approaching him, some advising him on how to ingratiate himself with the cardinal and some pleading for favors. He enters an anteroom filled with steam and makes his way to the cardinal, whose attendants hold a muslin shroud in front of him as he disrobes—we see him only as a shadow. Guido tells the cardinal that he’s unhappy, and the cardinal responds, simply, unforgettably: “Why should you be happy? That is not your task. Who told you that we come into the world in order to be happy?” Every shot in this scene, every piece of staging and choreography between camera and actors, is extraordinarily complex. I cannot imagine how difficult it all was to execute. Onscreen, it unfolds so gracefully that it looks like the easiest thing in the world. For me, the audience with the cardinal embodies a remarkable truth about 8½: Fellini made a film about film that could only exist as a film and nothing else—not a piece of music, not a novel, not a poem, not a dance, only as a work of cinema.
When 8½ was released people argued over it endlessly: the effect was that dramatic. We each had our own interpretation, and we would sit up till all hours talking about the film—every scene, every second. Of course we never settled on a definite interpretation—the only way to explain a dream is with the logic of a dream. The film doesn’t have a resolution, which bothered many people. Gore Vidal once told me that he said to Fellini, “Fred, less dreams next time, you must tell a story.” But in 8½, the lack of resolution is only right, because the artistic process doesn’t have a resolution either—you have to just keep going. When you’re done, you’re compelled to do it again, just like Sisyphus. And, as Sisyphus discovered, pushing the boulder up the hill again and again becomes the purpose of your life.
Your mileage may vary, but to me, there is a substantiative difference between one and the other. The WandaVision review is just a melodramatic retelling of an essentially comic-book moment of melodrama; the profoundest thing you can argue it's saying is that WandaVision's story did something touching, for all it's trying to claim something much more. Scorsese, meanwhile, touches upon a dozen different moments, poetic details, diabolical machinations, in an attempt to convey what you can clearly tell he is struggling to convey. There's a sense of awe to his words, and a genuine joy—not the cheap, flat thing we call joy nowadays, but the genuine, vital thing. It was Scorsese's essay that pushed me towards my current interest in older cinema: Altman now, Fellini or Welles next, with some film-history viewings to help me understand how we got from one place to the other. The joy in Scorsese's words is why I read Kael too: for all she's a controversial and sometimes disagreeable writer, I don't read her to be told what the right opinions to have are. I read her because, whether I see things like she does or not, she unfailingly has heart.
It used to be a well-known joke that video game reviews were absolute garbage, not only in their attempts to pander to game designers but in their reviewers' absolute lack of meaningful sensibility. A 2013 SomethingAwful article parodied this quite effectively, by taking the game-review style and applying it to film:
It used to be a well-known joke that video game reviews were absolute garbage, not only in their attempts to pander to game designers but in their reviewers' absolute lack of meaningful sensibility. A 2013 SomethingAwful article parodied this quite effectively, by taking the game-review style and applying it to film:
Many of the actors are attractive. Some of the women have flaws, which really takes you out of their respective scenes. I like scenes where a dog reacts to a situation by laying his head down then comedically covering his eyes with his paws while whimpering. That doesn't happen in this movie, which is rather unforgivable.
This has, in many ways, effectively become how modern reviewers handle certain kinds of film and television. The advent of the TV recap led to ongoing reviews of projects that hadn't entirely finished airing, with emphasis on mundane detail over deeper insight. Meanwhile, Disney/Marvel perfected the art of perfectly targeting their reviewers: they found the blend of Product that would satisfy middlebrow not-quite-snobs, learned to throw just enough meat their way to please, and exploited the overall decline of journalism and criticism. There are still plenty of great critics, but they're often shunted to Blogspot publications or low-circulation online magazines, which RottenTomatoes (and by extension sites like Wikipedia) conveniently overlook. Meanwhile, "reputable" publications stick to their content grind, in which bland articulation keeps readers and genuine opinion leads to complaints and harassment.
The Overton window, in politics, refers to the gradual shift of what opinions are considered "acceptable" in discourse; over time, ideas which were once mainstream become unacceptable, and ideas which once seemed impossible or perverse begin to sound like common sense. There is a similar process with media and criticism: at some point, pop culture became defensible as a meaningful kind of art, and then pop culture became the only art, with suggestions that art should encompass more than what's commercially pleasing increasingly dismissed as elitist—never mind that a far more material elitism is required to produce expensive works of popular art than to create any other kind of media.
As Scorsese puts it in his essay:
As recently as fifteen years ago, the term “content” was heard only when people were discussing the cinema on a serious level, and it was contrasted with and measured against “form.” Then, gradually, it was used more and more by the people who took over media companies, most of whom knew nothing about the history of the art form, or even cared enough to think that they should. “Content” became a business term for all moving images: a David Lean movie, a cat video, a Super Bowl commercial, a superhero sequel, a series episode. It was linked, of course, not to the theatrical experience but to home viewing, on the streaming platforms that have come to overtake the moviegoing experience, just as Amazon overtook physical stores. On the one hand, this has been good for filmmakers, myself included. On the other hand, it has created a situation in which everything is presented to the viewer on a level playing field, which sounds democratic but isn’t. If further viewing is “suggested” by algorithms based on what you’ve already seen, and the suggestions are based only on subject matter or genre, then what does that do to the art of cinema?
Curating isn’t undemocratic or “elitist,” a term that is now used so often that it’s become meaningless. It’s an act of generosity—you’re sharing what you love and what has inspired you. (The best streaming platforms, such as the Criterion Channel and MUBI and traditional outlets such as TCM, are based on curating—they’re actually curated.) Algorithms, by definition, are based on calculations that treat the viewer as a consumer and nothing else.
Even if you want to go the WandaVision route and defend comic-book media as potentially artworthy, you can articulate the Overton window shift without leaving that medium behind. You can contrast WandaVision to the far more substantial Watchmen miniseries, which addresses America's racial legacy both at home and abroad, using superheroes and vigilante justice not as stand-ins for institutional authority, but as explorations of when that institutional authority is what perpetrates racial and sexual violence—questioning the essential fascism of both superhero and cinematic imagery, and using those difficult questions to create far more compelling cinema. (As it happens, you can create superhero media without a thirty-minute light-and-sound-explosions interlude—who coulda thunk it?)
But if you end on the Watchmen miniseries, you've succumbed to the shift in the Overton window yourself. Compare the intelligence of the miniseries to the staggering profundity of the original Watchmen comic book, which I couldn't begin to describe without a Kael-eque (or Scorsese-esque) rhapsody of awe and joy. Watchmen creator Alan Moore has come down pretty hard on people who use his characters without his consent, and has been critical in the past of the relative shallowness of their visions to his; listening to Moore speak about his own work, you can't help but feel he has a point. The original Watchmen is a look at a terrifying world in which individuals become superheroes in order to escape into a fantasy of power and possibility; what they find, instead, is that there is no individual escape from the world we have collectively created, and that the only superheroes who gain any measure of power do so by embracing (and being used by) the society they sought to undermine. The least compromised superhero of them all is a psychotic bigot; the most-beloved of them is a psychotic bigot who's shrewd enough to take his shtick to the Vietnam war, slaughtering innocents in a place where they'd approve of his doing so. The only guy that resembles Superman has literally lost his sense of self; while the Watchmen miniseries gives that character an ingenious and moving romantic saga, its breadth of vision is small-scale compared to the scene it's mirroring in the original, which offers a stunning and harrowingly-earned belief in humanity amidst a bleak, nihilistic vision of the world. And the miniseries' villain is an intriguing, ambiguous, and satisfying cog in the show's machine, but she can't help but pale before the original Watchmen's iconic villain, as devastating and compromised a figure as the comic world has ever seen.
Or just compare the miniseries to another show created by the same man, Damon Lindelof's The Leftovers. While the Watchmen miniseries is a technically virtuosic and surprisingly substantial show, The Leftovers is a genuinely sublime, even religious, work of art. It has all the hallmarks of good pop art (laugh-out-loud punchlines, fantastic self-contained stories, broadly memorable characters, stunning imagery, the occasional international assassin), but it revolves around something too vast and crushing and mysterious to truly comes to terms with; its genius is that it knows this from the start, and doesn't even try. In the little details it studies around the big, impossible one, it finds dread and joy and rebelliousness and hope, daring us to either find magic in the mundane or to look at the seemingly magical and call its bluff. Even within the confines of let's-call-it-Whedonesque filmmaking, it's possible to do tremendous things—but only if you let yourself dare to make it in the first place, or to find it once it's made.
Which is why, perversely, I put on Zack Snyder's Justice League: Justice is Grey the other week, and found myself deeply satisfied by it. I'm not exactly a Snyder fan, but his black-and-white Justice League plays out almost like a 1930s silent-movie epic, all giant, overwhelming images and very little concern for anything else. Which, for a comic book movie, works weirdly well. How do you capture that trick in comic books where an establishing shot abruptly takes up an entire page, with perhaps three words of dialogue floating in the middle of a vast vista? Perhaps like Snyder does, with five(?)-minute shots of snowy mountaintops, with Ben Affleck's Batman a tiny and insignificant speck among them. It's no Watchmen, but then, Snyder's Watchmen was no Watchmen either. What it does seem to be is an attempt to depict one 1930s art form by means of another, at once bringing back a style of cinema that's so ancient as to be nearly nonexistent and offering a new way of looking at a popular medium that increasingly seems stuck in a rut. Snyder may not be making something we can call "good", but he does appear to be making something like cinema. Pauline Kael would probably not have very good things to say about Justice League, but I suspect that she would at least have things to say—and perhaps the purest distillation of Scorsese's critique of Marvel, or Kael's critique of pulp, is that, enjoyable or not, they leave us with nothing to say.
Here's Kael again, back in 1973, writing about pulp:
It's precisely the fact that the detective novel is engrossing but does not impinge upon its readers' lives or thoughts that enables it to give a pleasure to some which is distinct from the pleasures of literature. It has no afterlife when they have closed the covers; it's completely digested, like a game of casino. It's a structured time killer that gives you the illusion of being speedy; The Long Goodbye isn't a fast read, like Hammett, but when I finished it I had no idea whether I'd read it before. Essentially, we've all read it before.
In 1973, Marvel Comics was 34 years old. 34 years after Kael's review, the Marvel Cinematic Universe debuted with Iron Man. What Kael was writing about feels surprisingly relevant today, but then, what she wrote about wasn't new even at the time.
On the whole, I prefer the written word to cinema: it stimulates the mind and challenges the imagination more readily, to the point that mediocre writers often evoke more in me than skillful directors do. Perhaps the joy of reading Pauline Kael is that, time and again, she wrote of cinema that flipped its dynamic on its head, and dared her words to live up to their imagination. She writes of cinema like it's a serious, meaningful thing, and it helps that she picks serious, meaningful cinema to write about. And her argument isn't just that The Long Goodbye transcended a 40s masterpiece like The Big Sleep: it's that it transcended Chandler himself, taking his skillful pulp and daring it to dream bigger, reach farther, do more, using a language unique to cinema to counterpoint his words and make a story, not about a mystery, not sheerly entertainment for entertainment's sake, but about what's left once the entertainment ends, what lingers after the mystery is done and gone.