About Last Night

Yes, I’m in Connecticut, but something came up that I thought was worth sharing. The critics of the Chicago Tribune recently published a series of columns called “Critical Reversals” in which they confessed–sort of–to having changed their minds about pieces they’d written in the past. (For links to the individual columns, go here.)

Not surprisingly, these columns have provoked a certain amount of comment in the blogosphere, much of it skeptical. As for me, I have a personal interest in “Critical Reversals,” for in 2002 I published a column in The Wall Street Journal called “The Contrite Critic” in which I discussed one of my own blunders:

The big news for balletomanes is the coming of the Mark Morris Dance Group to Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival. Tonight, the company will be giving the first of four performances of “L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato,” Mr. Morris’s evening-long stage version of the Handel oratorio. “L’Allegro” is one of the most important dances of the past quarter-century, so this week’s performances are by definition a great occasion.

They will also be an occasion for me to eat crow, since I am, so far as I know, the only critic ever to have given “L’Allegro” a bad review. Seven years ago, I covered the Lincoln Center premiere for the New York Daily News, and I just didn’t get it. I called “L’Allegro” “impressive in its seriousness, stunning in its inventiveness–and, ultimately, disappointing in its emotional flatness.” I’ve written my share of wrongheaded reviews, but that’s the one I regret most, because I was too dense to know a masterpiece when I saw it….

I mention this because it is a good thing for critics to abase themselves in public, even though we do it so rarely. I’ve changed my mind about art more than once, and I’ve learned that I not infrequently start by disliking something and end up liking it. Not always–sometimes I decide on closer acquaintance that a novel or painting isn’t as good as I’d thought. More often, though, I realize that it was necessary for me to grow into a fuller understanding of a work of art to which my powers of comprehension were not at first equal….

The Journal posted a free link to this column, and you can still read the whole thing here. More recently, I revisited the subject here.

“Prose is not to be read aloud but to oneself alone at night, and it is not quick as poetry but rather a gathering web of insinuations which go further than names however shared can ever go. Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known. It should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of the stone.”

Henry Green, Pack My Bag

I’m disappearing into the woods of Connecticut to spend the rest of the week working on various literary projects with long-term deadlines (i.e., they’re not due this afternoon). Except for the daily almanac posting and the usual theater-related stuff, I won’t be surfacing again until next Monday. Our Girl will take care of you until then.

Have fun while I’m gone!

Like most prolific authors of a certain age (i.e., middle), I’ve written dozens of uncollected essays, articles, and reviews that vanished into the Black Hole of Forgotten Journalism shortly after they saw print. The posting that follows is cobbled together from a couple of pieces I wrote back in the Nineties, neither of which made it into A Terry Teachout Reader. In the unlikely event that any of you read either one of them when they were originally published, pardon my redundancy. Otherwise, I hope you find this recycled version interesting.

* * *

The surprising thing about American movies is not that most of them are stupid, but that any of them are smart. This blinding flash of insight came to me a few years ago as I sat in my neighborhood movie house and watched a more than usually boneheaded reel of trailers advertising the summer’s coming attractions. I wouldn’t have willingly paid a quarter to see a single one of them, even with free popcorn thrown in. Of course they were dumb. They’re supposed to be dumb, so as to attract the largest possible audience of paying dummies.

Just because I’m not a cynic doesn’t make me an optimist, though. I know I’m betting against the house every time I walk into a theater. For this reason, I sometimes find myself temporarily disarmed by a movie that is smart on the surface; less often, a film may simulate smartness so effectively that I go home thinking it was good, and only later realize that I’ve been hornswoggled. Joel and Ethan Coen fall between these two stools. I’ve seen most all of the Coen brothers’ movies, and in nearly every case I had the same sequence of mixed feelings, not after the fact but on the spot. First came a rush of something like relief, usually within the first minute or two: whatever else Blood Simple, The Hudsucker Proxy, and Fargo were, they weren’t stupid. Thus reassured, I relaxed and started to enjoy myself–but then second thoughts started to creep in, not about how smart the Coens were, but about the ends to which their smartness was being put.

The movie that finally caused me to make up my mind about the Coen brothers was The Big Lebowski, in which they explicitly satirized the film noir conventions with which they played in Blood Simple and Miller’s Crossing. In case you’ve forgotten, The Big Lebowski is the story of Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski, a former SDS member who spent his undergraduate days occupying administration buildings and smoking dope by the kilo (his sole achievement in life is to have helped write “the original Port Huron Statement–not the compromised second draft”), has renounced his dreams of revolution and retired to Los Angeles, the paradise of sloth and disillusion, where he draws unemployment, slurps down White Russians more or less continuously and hangs out at the neighborhood bowling alley with his foul-mouthed friends. But someone has been telling lies about the Dude, for one fine day a pair of hired thugs, mistaking him for a self-made millionaire of the same name, smash up his apartment and urinate on his rug. He thereupon seeks out “the big Lebowski” for a chat and promptly finds himself swept up in a kidnapping.

What follows is straight out of Raymond Chandler–the wheelchair-bound client, the blonde trophy wife, the sex-crazed daughter, the rich pornographer, the impossibly complex plot whose various elements never quite mesh–except that Philip Marlowe, the sardonic knight errant of The Big Sleep, has been replaced by the Dude, an unfailingly amiable slacker who reacts to the chaos swirling around him with a combination of befuddlement and good humor, pushing his remaining brain cells to the limit as he endeavors to puzzle out who did what to whom.

Like all of the Coens’ movies, The Big Lebowski crackles with disdain for the irredeemable banality of American mass culture. Even Fargo, the first of their films to appeal to a popular audience–and the only one to suggest a certain grudging respect for the traditional values it portrays–took a decidedly dim view of life in small-town Minnesota. It’s surely no coincidence that the Dude, who is alienated to the point of paralysis, is also the only person in The Big Lebowski for whom we are meant to feel anything more than amused scorn. Far more representative of the Coens’ now-familiar stock company of blithering idiots is Walter Sobchak, the Dude’s bowling partner, a pistol-packing Vietnam vet whose impenetrable stupidity is matched only by his unshakable conviction that he knows the one best way to do everything. Leave it to the Coens to make a joke out of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Scorn is the gunpowder of satire, and The Big Lebowski is so keenly observed that it’s tempting to treat it as a serious critique of the moral emptiness of American life. It helps that there’s so much to satirize in the apathetic lifestyles of such hapless members of the contemporary lumpenproletariat as Walter and the Dude, not to mention the latter-day cult of noir: both phenomena, after all, are expressions of the homegrown quasi-nihilism that is fully as intrinsic to the American national character as the Puritan work ethic which is its inversion.

But noir, for all its tiresome affectations, really does pose a challenging ethical question: how can a man conduct himself with honor in a radically corrupted society? This, needless to say, is the whole point of Chandler’s novels, The Big Sleep very much included. Philip Marlowe may talk in wisecracks, but there is nothing frivolous about the way he struggles to preserve his integrity in the face of temptation. Nor are the unhappy children of the Sixties who inhabit The Big Lebowski wholly deserving of our contempt. Though they made desperate messes of their lives, their foolishness arose from genuine idealism, however misbegotten, and if they failed to appreciate the values of the society they proposed to dismantle in the name of peace, love, and understanding, it was in no small part because their parents, worn down by the Great Depression and World War II, proved unwilling to defend those values when push came once again to shove.

As for Joel and Ethan Coen, it turns out that they, too, are nihilists, albeit in the postmodern manner: believing in nothing, they find everything funny. This is why their movies so rarely engage the emotions, and thus lack the dangerous edge of real satire. Satire occurs when scorn is ignited by passion, a commodity rarely found in the work of the Coens, who prefer Gen-X cool to baby-boom angst. The last thing they’d want is to be caught feeling something intensely.

“He’s a nihilist,” Maude Lebowski says of one of the heavies in The Big Lebowski, to which the Dude cheerfully replies, “Oh, that must be exhausting.” Indeed it is, and the Coens, like the Dude, are too tired to do anything but poke clever but ultimately pointless fun at the morally null world in which they live. True postmodernists, they look into the abyss and laugh.

“Nihilism as a symptom that the losers have no more consolation: that they destroy in order to be destroyed, that without morality they no longer have any reason to ‘resign themselves’: that they put themselves on the level of the opposite principle and for their part also want power in that they compel the mighty to be their hangmen. This is the European form of Buddhism, renunciation, once all existence has lost its ‘meaning.'”

Friedrich Nietzsche, unpublished note (June 10, 1887)

A reader writes, apropos of this posting:

Your iPod list and brief commentary brought to mind an interesting question. I notice you list “S.O.S.” as a “guilty pleasure.” It seems that whenever I encounter this phrase regarding a piece of music, it is always applied to rock and roll (by which I mean rock and roll in its broadest definition–the momentum-based forms of music that have dominated pop culture since 1955). My question is this: as far as you know, is there such a thing as a “guilty pleasure” in any other essentially populist musical genre? I’ve never once heard a jazz, country or blues record described thus. Same for show tunes or traditional Tin Pan Alley pop or any brand of folk or gospel. I’m interested because quite often when I see something described as a guilty pleasure, it’s a record I like a lot (“S.O.S.” included) and if there are some of them lying around in other forms I’d certainly like to get to know them!

This is a wonderful question, one that makes a point that had never previously occurred to me. The phrase “guilty pleasure,” of course, is itself inherently problematic, because it implies that we ought to be hypocrites when it comes to our artistic responses. Kingsley Amis said the last word about this deeply wrongheaded attitude: “All amateurs must be philistines part of the time. Must be: a greater sin is to be coerced into showing respect when little or none is felt.” The inverse is also true. I really do like “S.O.S.,” which I believe to be a beautifully crafted pop single, so why should I feel guilty about it?

Generally speaking, though, I don’t fall victim to either error, partly because I don’t give a damn about received opinion and partly because it’s unusual for me to like fundamentally dishonest art. It occurs to me that this might point in the direction of a working definition of bonafide “guilty pleasures” and our responses to them: guilty pleasures let us off too easy by pandering to our innate longing for unearned simplicity. They are the Krispy Kreme donuts of art.

Most commercial movies, for instance, are made on the assumption that audiences want to see moral struggle–but not too much of it. Much more often than not, we know as soon as the credits roll exactly what we’re supposed to think the star ought to do (kiss the girl! give back the money!), and we spend the next hour and a half waiting for him to finally get around to doing it. When he does, we go home happy; if he doesn’t, we go home feeling cheated, and tell all our friends to pick a different movie next weekend.

Smooth jazz, like minimalist music, works in something of the same way, but I don’t know that I’d call either genre a guilty pleasure because I don’t find either one pleasurable, any more than I find reality TV pleasurable. As for the pop and country music of my youth–the kind that used to be played on AM radio–I didn’t like most of it back then and don’t like it now, but I always made an exception for simple, well-crafted songs like “S.O.S.” whose “catchiness” was a function of their musical integrity.

And are there guilty pleasures to be found in other musical genres? I’ll end by handing out hostages to fortune: here are fifteen more stylistically wide-ranging records of variously dubious artistic merits from which I nonetheless derive wholly guilt-free pleasure. Brace yourselves:

• George Strait, “All My Ex’s Live in Texas”

• Henry Mancini, “Baby Elephant Walk”

• Kim Carnes, “Bette Davis Eyes”

• A Taste of Honey, “Boogie Oogie Oogie”

• The Carpenters, “Close to You”

• Paul McCartney and Wings, “Junior’s Farm”

• Buck Owens, “I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail”

• Alice Cooper, “No More Mr. Nice Guy”

• The Three Suns, “Twilight Time”

• Toto, “99”

• Rupert Holmes, “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)”

• Carmen Miranda, “South American Way”

• Hall & Oates, “Private Eyes (Are Watching You)”

• Blue Öyster Cult, “I’m on the Lamb (But I Ain’t No Sheep)”

• Bing Crosby, “Sweet Leilani”

Go figure.

Speaking of lists, the cover story in the December issue of the Atlantic is a feature called “They Made America” for which ten “eminent historians” were invited to draw up lists of “the most influential figures in American history,” which were then combined into a giant-sized

“Tragedy is clean, it is restful, it is flawless. It has nothing to do with melodrama–with wicked villains, persecuted maidens, avengers, sudden revelations, and eleventh-hour repentances. Death, in a melodrama, is really horrible because it is never inevitable. The dear old father might so easily have been saved; the honest young man might so easily have brought in the police five minutes earlier.