Simon Said

Looking up articles by John Simon who, now 93, remains the sole surviving film critic of the Golden Age, I came across a querulous piece from 2015 that its author titled, "The Most Hilariously Damning Review Of The Original Star Wars". It was a post from one of the many blogs on which fans pour forth their seemingly unlimited adoration of pop culture fixtures - in this case the Star Wars movie franchise, created by George Lucas and now owned by Disney.

The author of the piece comes from a base of fans for whom Star Wars is unquestionably one of the pillars of movie art, along with what else I can only guess. His distaste for the "hilariously damning review" (by John Simon) derives from the assumption that the first Star Wars installment, released in 1977, is an inviolable film masterwork: "When Star Wars came out in 1977, nobody knew it would become the classic that we all recognize today. Some people were skeptical, for sure. But few reviewers were as hilariously savage as John Simon, with New York Magazine, who called it 'a set of giant baubles manipulated by an infant mind.'"

The author offers "some choice passages from Simon’s review," which I won't repeat here. Simon was possessed of two things that sometimes acted against each other: acute discernment and a sometimes brutal means of expressing it. While recognizing that shooting ducks in a barrel wasn't very sporting, he occasionally couldn't resist the sheer fun of it. Simon's conclusion ("Still, Star Wars will do very nicely for those lucky enough to be children or unlucky enough never to have grown up.") was virtually identical to Stanley Kauffmann's assessment: "This picture was made for those (particularly males) who carry a portable shrine within them of their adolescence, a chalice of a Self that was Better Then, before the world’s affairs or—in any complex way—sex intruded. Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers and their peers guard the portals of American innocence, and Star Wars is an unabashed, jaw-clenched tribute to the chastity still sacred beneath the middle-aged spread."

When the 3rd installment of the Star Wars franchise was released, in 1982 I think, Simon appeared on ABC News Nightline in a "debate" with Chicago movie reviewers Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel. Simon repeated his opinion that the Star Wars films were made for kids, both underage and overgrown, and that they were trying to make kids dumber. Siskel & Ebert, smiling like they were in firm possession of the high ground, played straight into Simon's argument first by questioning Simon's upbringing (the only explanation they can imagine for why he chooses not to revisit his childhood), and by pointing out the overwhelming popularity of the films among children. Siskel told Simon he should've been with him at a matinee, surrounded by delighted kids who easily identified the good guys and the bad guys, cheering and booing in perfect synchronization (I'm paraphrasing).

What Simon should've asked Siskel was what was he doing sitting among a throng of squealing kids at an matinee? Didn't he feel even the slightest bit out of place? And would he try to smuggle a child into an audience of grownups at an R-rated movie, at the risk of getting kicked out of the theater? (I argued before that the MPAA ratings should cut both ways. Adults should be prevented from watching films marketed to children. But, of course, Star Wars wasn't marketed exclusively to kids. It was given a PG rating, after all -  albeit there wasn't much parental guidance at Siskel's matinee.)

John Simon, like myself, probably had a perfectly normal childhood, of a normal duration, ending some time in his mid-teens when self-knowledge and knowledge of the ways of the world impelled him to turn away from childhood and embrace adulthood. Speaking for myself, if you had asked me when I was 12 what I wanted to be when I grew up, I am confident that I would've replied that I wanted to be an adult. That's all. My profession was unimportant. I saw my childish condition as manifestly, if necessarily, unfair. I was at a disadvantage - one that grownups capitalized on. I wasn't taken seriously because I was a child. And, of course, adults who used physical violence against me as a form of coercion did so precisely because I was too small to defend myself. Why is it that no one remembers this about being a child, but only the endless process of discovery and wonder that is the natural result of being new to everything?

I read comic books when I was a kid and loved watching Western movies and cheered when the cavalry arrived in the nick of time to save the white settlers from the clutches of the the savage "injuns". Even John Ford's "masterpiece" The Searchers is informed by this creed. My heroes were Johnny Unitas and Wilt Chamberlain and Hank Aaron. I thrilled to the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper. On TV, I watched Daniel Boone and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and The Munsters. But when I arrived in my teens, I saw Fellini's La Strada (because it had two Hollywood stars, Anthony Quinn and Richard Basehart) and I was inadvertently made aware of a whole world of films that had been deliberately kept from me, just as they were kept from most Americans, by a monopolizing Hollywood.

What ultimately determines the value of any work - a book, a piece of music, a film? Not the opinions of critics, no matter how learned and deftly expressed. Longevity decides. Will it still be known and celebrated in 20, 50, 100 years? Only posterity will tell. Ask a film producer if he cares what posterity will say of his film. He only cares about the film's first run. Not even a cult following can make up for a film's disastrous first showing. The vast majority of what are stupidly called art-house films (by a generation of doofuses) are also known as "niche" productions. They aren't expected to make a killing at the box office. So when they don't, no one is surprised. But if a blockbuster bombs (the word blockbuster was first applied to an actual bomb), it sends shock waves through the film industry. A manufactured product designed expressly to put butts in movie theater seats has failed to function. The butts failed to materialize in sufficient numbers to offset the enormous cost of the production. Careers are in peril.

What can be done to prevent it? Is there no algorithm that can be used to guarantee box office receipts? I can tell you from experience, just as every other experiened critic can tell you, that there is no connection at all between critical success and sales. What is good and what sells exist in different dimensions that never touch. A good film can sometimes sell, but it is unlikely to. What sells, to the extent of its popularity, is mostly bad, but not invariably so.

The clash of sensibilities that the aforementioned Star Wars article highlights is not, of course, an isolated event. It happens whenever a believer comes in contact with the expressed views of a skeptic. I wrote about a similar encounter at the beginning of this month. A website for fans of J.R.R. Tolkien published a review of The Lord of the Rings (by Edmund Wilson) that was highly unfavorable. It was inconceivable to these fans that everyone couldn't share in their unquestioning enthusiasm for the books. Of course, it was also inconceivable to them that a literary world could exist in which Tolkien wasn't among the greatest writers who ever lived, even if they were unacquainted with the writing of Flaubert, Joyce, Mann, Fitzgerald, or any other writer whose work is esteemed to be great. Edmund Wilson came from such a literary world. Which is why, when his job as a professional literary critic required him to read Tolkien's books, because some misguided critics had praised their literary qualities, he had to denounce Tolkien as a writer for children. More recently, Harold Bloom denounced J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books for identical reasons.(1)

John Simon came from a world of film that Star Wars fans know nothing about. It is a world in which the standards were set by films that no Star Wars fan has probably even heard of. So when Simon was required in 1977, as the film critic of the weekly New York Magazine, to express his judgement of the first Star Wars movie, it wasn't at all in accordance with the feelings of its fans. Simon saw it as a poorly written, clumsily executed (however buttressed it was by technical effects) dud aimed at undiscerning children and adults whose childhoods never ended. It's no wonder, then, that Ebert & Siskel took exception to Simon's judgement, even if, as critics, they were miserably unequal to Simon's standard. Had they been book reviewers (which is unlikely), they would've mistaken Stephen King's phenomenal success as some dubious proof of literary prowess, not knowing that sales is never enough of a guarantee of quality.


(1) “The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character stretched his legs’. I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling’s mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.” 

Hobbitual

For everything, it seems, there is a category, a classification, or a genre to which it must be assigned before any discussion of it can get off the ground. I recently blundered onto a blog devoted to film wherein the author described what are now known as "art-house films" and their relation to "other film genres". It's probably no accident that the contemporary film consumer should have come up with the idea of placing films that defy categorization - like Renoir's The Rules of the Game, Antonioni's L'Avventura, Ozu's Late Spring, and our very own category-defying Citizen Kane - in a separate section of the Netflix catalog. There was simply nowhere else to put them. I posted a comment on the blog, asking, "Since when is art a 'genre'? Unless you have conceded, at last, that L'Avventura is art and The Searchers is a Western?"

Every writer who attempts a work of fiction works in two directions. They work to set down a record of the world as they see it or as they think it really is. But they also work, whether they know it or not, to record their visions, a world that exists only inside their heads. So however much they might strive to be "objective" and be nothing more than a pair of eyes, sacrificing their egos to the objects of their love, every word they write is a personal choice that inevitably reveals their presence in the created work.

For the past few decades, a seismic shift has occurred in American popular culture. Its first manifestations occurred in the mid-1970s, when two filmmakers, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, rose to such unprecedented prominence that they eventually established their own production companies, enjoying artistic freedom that rarely existed before. And they made a number of films that set box office records. The films they produced are examples of what I would call belated juvenilia - films that abide by an implied pact between the filmmaker and the viewer that adulthood is regrettable and that the point of their lives sometime prior to adulthood is not just preferable but endlessly renewable.

Go back still further in American pop culture to the 1950s, when the dictatorship of youth transformed popular music. A generation of Baby Boomer teens, with disposable incomes of their own, took music away from their parents' generation and haven't relinquished it since. So instead of songs written by and for adults, speaking from an experience of life and of love, exploring and satisfying that experience in creative ways, songs were passed into the hands of children who needed nothing but lyrics that strung together comforting platitudes through endless variations of cliché. A generation of singers, whose oldest survivor today is Tony Bennett, that responded to the challenge of singing and creating standards in ways distinctive enough to make the standards their own, were replaced by singers whose talents were drowned out by the screams of teen-aged girls, singing songs that addressed the problems of teenagers.

And if you look back still further to 1937, to popular fiction, an otherwise insignificant book called The Hobbit was published in England, quickly followed by an edition in America. It was an elaborate fantasy story marketed to children, replete with maps and illustrations of hobbit characters, as well as various elves and dwarves that inhabit an alternate world that existed long before industry and technology, where magic antedates religions, reminiscent of Europe's oldest fairy tales that emerged from extinct mythologies. The author of The Hobbit was J. R. R. Tolkien, a most unlikely teller of fairy tales: an Oxford scholar of philology, of ancient dead languages and the epics and sagas written in them. Spending most of his creative life with these languages and their obscure significance and meanings known only to him and his colleagues, Tolkien tried, evidently, to expand and improve on them, without having to appeal to any scholarly authority, but deriving from scholarship of the highest authority. But it was marketed as a children's book.

So serious was Tolkien, however, that his fairy tales should be taken seriously, when he learned of an American publisher's interest in The Hobbit that expressed their intention to publish color illustrations to supplement Tolkien's own drawings, Tolkien wrote to his British publisher, Allen & Unwin, “It might be advisable, rather than lose the American interest, to let the Americans do what seems good to them - as long as it was possible (I should like to add) to veto anything from or influenced by the Disney studios (for all whose works I have a heartfelt loathing).”

According to his biographers, Tolkien had gone to see Disney's first feature-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, accompanied by fellow Oxford don C. S. Lewis, and took umbrage at the depiction of the dwarfs. Who else but the creator of a (literary) world filled with elves and dwarves [to use Tolkien's spelling] should sit in judgement of Disney's silly misrepresentation of a classic fairy tale? What probably bothered Tolkien the most was that audiences took to Disney's film precisely because it is unlearned. Otis Ferguson, who called Snow White the best film of 1938, said that he found "something beautiful about all of it, I think, because it does not try to be wise about fairy tales, or fairy talish about its birds, rabbits, people." (1)

In 2009, I wrote in a post called "The Fairest of Them All" the following: "It was perhaps inevitable that folk tales should have been exiled to the nursery. before we renamed them fairy tales and heavily censored them, they were a kind of cultural subconscious. The original tales, like the ones collected by the Brothers Grimm, are filled with strange imagery and associations that only an ethnographer would understand." Or, indeed, a philoligist. But Tolkien rejected my hypothesis: "Folk-lore origins (or guesses about them) are here quite beside the point. It is of little avail to consider totemism." This line is from Tolkien's essay, "On Fairy Stories" in which he addressed the subject with much feeling and authority. What is most clear from my reading of the essay is that Tolkien wanted to rescue fairy tales from the nursery and convince people that they were worthy of being taken seriously. "Is there any essential connexion between children and fairy-stories? Is there any call for comment, if an adult reads them for himself? Reads them as tales, that is, not studies them as curios. Adults are allowed to collect and study anything, even old theatre programmes or paper bags."

Tolkien described how he himself came upon fairy stories:

"I was keenly alive to the beauty of 'Real things,' but it seemed to me quibbling to confuse this with the wonder of 'Other things.' I was eager to study Nature, actually more eager than I was to read most fairystories; but I did not want to be quibbled into Science and cheated out of Faerie by people who seemed to assume that by some kind of original sin I should prefer fairy-tales, but according to some kind of new religion I ought to be induced to like science. Nature is no doubt a life-study, or a study for eternity (for those so gifted); but there is a part of man which is not 'Nature,' and which therefore is not obliged to study it, and is, in fact, wholly unsatisfied by it."

But one important aspect of Tolkien's "escape" into fairy stories was his first-hand experience of war. He served in the British Army in World War I and his experience created in him a profound hatred for the modern world. "A real taste for fairy-stories was wakened by philology on the threshold of manhood, and quickened to full life by war." In other words, his discovery of ancient languages at university, followed by the traumatic experience of war, gave him a place of refuge from the modern world that could create such things as the maxim gun and mustard gas, whose effects on human beings he witnessed in the trenches.

But the subject of writing stories exclusively for children became an issue for Tolkien when his Lord Of the Rings trilogy was published, books that he insisted were written for an adult audience rather than for children. Literary critics (some of them anyway) took exception with Tolkien's claim. One review of The Rings that has had its own kind of immortality was written by Edmund Wilson. "Oo, Those Awful Orcs" is available for perusal in Wilson's collection, The Bit Between My Teeth, but, curiously, it is available online, quoted in its entirety, on some Tolkien fanzine sites, where Wilson's essay is used as an illustration of the lengths to which a literary critic will go to express his skepticism of their religion.

"Dr. Tolkien has announced that this series – the hypertrophic sequel to The Hobbit – is intended for adults rather than children, and it has had a resounding reception at the hands of a number of critics who are certainly grown-up in years." But Wilson, who had previously expressed his distaste of detective and horror fiction, refused to taken in by Tolkien's fairy stories. "One is puzzled to know why the author should have supposed he was writing for adults. There are, to be sure, some details that are a little unpleasant for a children’s book, but except when he is being pedantic and also boring the adult reader, there is little in The Lord of the Rings over the head of a seven-year-old child. It is essentially a children’s book – a children’s book which has somehow got out of hand, since, instead of directing it at the “juvenile” market, the author has indulged himself in developing the fantasy for its own sake ... An impotence of imagination seems to me to sap the whole story. The wars are never dynamic; the ordeals give no sense of strain; the fair ladies would not stir a heartbeat; the horrors would not hurt a fly."

Instead of simply dismissing Wilson's review as the expression of opinion that it is, and agreeing to disagree, some of these online Tolkien sites interrogate - feebly - Wilson's own motives for not falling in line with their orthodoxy. Especially since Wilson briefly examines the psychology of Tolkien's fiercest supporters - their insatiable taste for what I identified above as Belated Juvenilia:

"Now, how is it that these long-winded volumes of what looks to this reviewer like balderdash have elicited such tributes as those above? The answer is, I believe, that certain people – especially, perhaps, in Britain – have a lifelong appetite for juvenile trash. They would not accept adult trash, but, confronted with the pre-teen-age article, they revert to the mental phase which delighted in Elsie Dinsmore and Little Lord Fauntleroy and which seems to have made of Billy Bunter, in England, almost a national figure. You can see it in the tone they fall into when they talk about Tolkien in print: they bubble, they squeal, they coo; they go on about Malory and Spenser – both of whom have a charm and a distinction that Tolkien has never touched."

Perhaps in anticipation of Wilson's incredulity, Tolkien, in his "On Fairy Stories" essay, attacks the criticism directly:

"I do not deny that there is a truth in Andrew Lang's words (sentimental though they may sound): 'He who would enter into the Kingdom of Faerie should have the heart of a little child.' For that possession is necessary to all high adventure, into kingdoms both less and far greater than Faerie. But humility and innocence - these things 'the heart of a child' must mean in such a context - do not necessarily imply an uncritical wonder, nor indeed an uncritical tenderness. Chesterton once remarked that the children in whose company he saw Maeterlinck's Blue Bird were dissatisfied 'because it did not end with a Day of Judgement, and it was not revealed to the hero and the heroine that the Dog had been faithful and the Cat faithless.' 'For children,' he says, 'are innocent and love justice; while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.'”

The issue arises again whenever J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books are examined by anyone other than fans of the books. They wonder that such "young adult" fiction [a stupid term, equal to "old child" perhaps?] that centers on the fantastic adventures of adolescents in an imaginary world should attract adult readers. I won't go there, since I have never read any of Rowling's books, and the films did nothing to change my mind. (I loved, however, all of the great old actors in the films, some of whom we have since lost to various ailments of extreme old age.) I could, but I have not, expressed the wish that Harry Potter had come along in 1970, when I might have been (but wasn't) more amenable to its attractions.

Tolkien wrote about one of the requirements of reading fairy stories, the "suspension of disbelief."

"Children are capable, of course, of literary belief, when the story-maker's art is good enough to produce it. That state of mind has been called 'willing suspension of disbelief.' But this does not seem to me a good description of what happens. What really happens is that the story-maker proves a  successful “sub-creator.” He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. If you are obliged, by kindliness or circumstance, to stay, then disbelief must be suspended (or stifled), otherwise listening and looking would become intolerable. But this suspension of disbelief is a substitute for the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe, or when trying (more or less willingly) to find what virtue we can in the work of an art that has for us failed."

But this is precisely where I find myself when I read Tolkien, or listen to popular music (which includes several genres, like rock, pop, rap/hip hop, country, et al), or watch the Indiana Jones or Star Wars movies - on the sidewalk outside, in the Primary World, my credulity reawakened, my disbelief functioning fully.

All of which reminds me of a remark made by G. B. Shaw in reference to the faith we have developed (even while some of us - including the current American president - seem to have abandoned) in Science:

"I have pointed out on a former occasion that there is just as much evidence for a law of the Conservation of Credulity as of the Conservation of Energy. When we refuse to believe in the miracles of religion for no better reason fundamentally than that we are no longer in the humor for them we refill our minds with the miracles of science, most of which the authors of the Bible would have refused to believe. The humans who have lost their simple childish faith in a flat earth and in Joshua's feat of stopping the sun until he had finished his battle with the Amalekites, find no difficulty in swallowing an expanding boomerang universe."

Look out. The Flat-Earthers are back.


(1) Otis Ferguson, "Walt Disney's Grimm Reality," The New Republic, January 26, 1938.