What no one seems to realize is what every real critic has always known: that there is no connection whatever between popular success and critical acclaim. Just last week I was kicked out of a Facebook Film group because I went and asked a (very) serious question of the forum's founder. I avoid such forums for the simple reason that they are not devoted to cinephilia at all but to fandom. Henri Langlois coined the term "cinephage" for film fans who "devour" every movie that comes along without applying any discriminatory standard that might distinguish the good ones from the bad ones. A fan is someone who is suspicious when a cinephile spends too much of his time (or what they consider too much) responding negatively to a great majority of films. If they truly love films, shouldn't they be expressing more of that love?
This is a headache that afflicts every serious critic. Randall Jarrell, who was the greatest poetry critic of his age, was often attacked for not approving of so much of the poetry that was published in the 1940s and '50s. His response was that a critic's job is to love the light, which obliges him to also hate the dark. And Jarrell was famous as much for the severity of his hate as for the power of his love. But a phenomenon that he didn't address was the ability to distinguish what one likes, for personal reasons that are otherwise unaccountable, and what is demonstrably good. This is the problem from which too many contemporary critics suffer. One can like something one knows is bad. Occasionally I like hot dogs, but I know what they're made of and I wouldn't attempt to argue that they're good food. Yet, time and time again, film critics who should know better are trying to convince me that because they like something it must be good.
But last week, when I was kicked out of a Facebook group, I had entered a discussion about Avengers: Endgame because the group's founder used the curious words "holocaust memories". He was arguing that what these kinds of movies (superhero or comic book movies) needed was a script writer who could add depth to the subject, who could in effect, distract us from its flimsy source material. A comic book's greatest drawback, for a filmmaker, was its emphasis on its illustrations over its ideas. While the illustrations, or "graphics," offer filmmakers valuable indications of how the film should look, the stories are hopelessly primitive. What caught my interest, however, were the words "holocaust memories" (perhaps deliberately, he didn't capitalize the "h"). In the X-Men films, there is a character named Magneto who first discovered his powers when he was a boy sent with his parents to a Nazi concentration camp in Poland. The boy is separated from his parents, who are then herded by guards toward a towering smokestack. The boy objects to being separated from his parents and cries out to them as barbed wire gates are twisted and bent open by some invisible force - the boys mutant power to move and manipulate metal objects from a distance. As I wrote about the scene in a post I made in December 2009 (see Comic Book Movies): "The scene is used merely to introduce the character who later becomes known as "Magneto." This outrageously self-serving attitude, which appropriates one of the most terrible periods of human history merely to introduce a level of seriousness to its subject shows how these films cannot even touch seriousness without falling to pieces."
One of the things that the latest CGI has inadvertently accomplished is exposing the inherent stupidity of the underlying ideas of the superhero movies. Despite CGI's exponential advancements over movie special effects of the past, the ideas behind the superhero movies haven't advanced much further than their comic book origins. They have become the perfect embodiment of Henry de Montherlant's old criticism of Hollywood movies, that exhibit "a perfect technique in the service of cretinism."
So the comment I posted on the Facebook film group page was, "Are you OK with using the Holocaust [capital H] in a superhero movie?" A few moments later I received notifications that my comment had been "liked" and that the group founder had replied to it. Shortly after that, however, the notifications disappeared, along with the link to the forum. I had not only been kicked out of the forum, but I was blocked from acquiring access to it. In trying to provoke discussion on what I think is a serious issue with a superhero movie, the discussion was abruptly ended and I was peremptorily shown the door. What I wasn't given the chance to say was that there are people who say that the Holocaust should never be the subject of a book or a play or a poem, least of all a film. Yet there are great books and plays and poems and even films that have taken on the subject, with compelling results.
The last survivors of the Holocaust are now in their eighties and older. Last week it was reported that half of millennials in a recent poll could not identify Auschwitz in photographs. Clearly the incredibly important job of keeping the Holocaust fresh in people's memories must be left to artists, not to the makers of superhero movies.
No comments:
Post a Comment