Harold Bloom

"The climate of our culture is changing. Under these new rains, new suns, small things grow great, and what was great grows small; whole species disappear and are replaced." Randall Jarrell, A Sad Heart at the Supermarket, 1962.


How hard it must be to be a polyglot like Harold Bloom in an age as stupid as ours. His enemies hated him because, from their low perspective, he was nothing but a big bully, punching so far down at them that he had to get down on one knee. He was smarter than his harshest critics, but that didn't make him invulnerable to criticism. Polyglots - and Bloom was one of the best - simply cannot be experts at everything. His intellect was imposing and wide-ranging, and he followed it into areas like Talmudic scholarship that were presumably safely hermetic. He claimed, for example, that some of the first books of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, had been composed by a brilliant woman from the highest echelon of royal society. Of course, his claims are are entirely speculative and ultimately unprovable. Similarly, Samuel Butler claimed that Homer's Odyssey had been written by a woman. 

Bloom's close textual analysis was best applied to literature, and it was as a literary scholar and critic that Bloom made his greatest impact. He only came up with such a short list of 26 literary works that he regarded as essential to any Western canon off the top of his head to satisfy his editor. It was a mistake that trivializes every great book on the list and further marginalizes all the ones he left out. But Bloom knew that it was a terrific conversation starter. As cranky as he seems in some of his interviews, I am not alone in noticing how he sometimes resembled Zero Mostel.

He lived through, fighting all the way, the steady decline of what is now known (mostly with contempt) as High Culture, i.e., not just the culture itself and its standards, but our understanding of what it is and of what it consists. Harold Bloom acknowledged that there are sometimes dramatic shifts in taste. But he held firm to his conviction that our culture's bedrock is made up of solid blocks of creative achievement that haven't shifted in centuries and that they are unmoved by modern political fashions. George Orwell saw the beginnings of a movement that tried to marginalize literary work that was at variance with certain contemporary radical tastes. Orwell saw the importance of aesthetic standards, whereby a literary work cannot be considered good one day and bad the next. But he also insisted on praising good work that presented a worldview or a political agenda that was markedly different from one's own. However, Orwell would've called Bloom's insistence on a strict avoidance of political partisanship as just another political position.

It wasn't that Bloom lived too long - though it may have looked that way to him. He went down fighting, which explains the coolness of so many of the eulogies. It has been sad, but also a little funny, to watch how so many of the people who wrote notices of his passing had to stand on their own necks trying not to seem to praise him. I can't see how not praising him is possible. He hurt people's feelings, people who were trying to forge new standards by smelting all the old ones. Some of them were so cheapjack that they didn't survive a single generation. But I doubt that Bloom took much satisfaction from watching them fall by the wayside. He called out the ignorance he saw all around him because no one else would. He didn't have to alert some of us about the poverty of popular fiction, but he would never have taken up the subject if some intellectuals who should've known better hadn't gone slumming. He only punctured overblown reputations because he wanted, above all, to be clear about what was good in the midst of everything that was plain bad. 

Is it even possible for a wise old man to not come across to some as patronizing? I think that our feverish fidgeting for total equality may not have much room for teachers - people who know more than we do and who are appointed, even if only by nature, to help us up to their knowledge. The erosion of literature has a strong American streak of anti-intellectualism. Bloom deposited entire libraries in his own head and was free with the expression of his knowledge, solicited or otherwise. He was opinionated and he held firm to his opinions. Someone I knew in the Army paid me what I took to be a backhanded compliment - he told me that I had probably forgotten more than he'd ever know. Harold Bloom probably held in his memory, to the last, more than the rest of us will ever forget.

The Magician

Ingmar Bergman's films roughly classifiable as comedies were rare but sometimes marvelous. Think of Waiting Women (1952), little known though sometimes splendid, in which four women wait for their husbands to join them at a summer lodge. While they wait, each of them tells a story from their married lives which the film then shows us. The last story features Gunnar Björnstrand and Eva Dahlbeck getting stuck in a stalled elevator. Björnstrand and Dahlbeck were experienced at comedy and decades later Bergman wrote: "For the first time, I heard an audience laugh at something I had created."

When she reviewed The Seventh Seal, Dylis Powell wrote "Whenever Scandinavian cinema has five minutes to fill, it burns a witch." Ingmar Bergman doesn't show the witch in The Seventh Seal being burned. Blok, the knight played by Max von Sydow, stops to question her before a monk tells him to clear off. When The Magician was released to audiences hungry for more from Bergman, it took them by surprise. It is as close as Bergman got to real gothic. Here was a film that played out as a black comedy, but that opens with mystery and ambiguity. We meet what appears to be a troupe of players travelling by coach in a forest shot with much chiaroscuro (supplied by Gunnar Fischer). Looking at the scene in a high contrast print, it's only figuratively dark. Despite everyone acting frightened by the strange noises and their inability to make out what is spooking them, the whole scene is well enough illuminated: the coachman Simson halts the horses and jumps down from his seat, joining the others inside the coach. Only Albert Emanuel Vogler (Max von Sydow) is unafraid, and he leaves the coach to investigate. He finds a man on the ground with tattered clothes and a broken hat who identifies himself as Spegel (the same Bengt Ekerot who played Death in The Seventh Seal) admittedly incapacitated from drink. "Brandy is my disease, but also it's cure," he tells Vogler, who gives him a dram from his flask. Spegel claims to be near death, and lying back (after falling in the water) he says, "I have always yearned for a knife. A blade with which to lay bare my bowels. To detach my brain, my heart. To free me from my substance. To cut away my tongue and my manhood. A sharp knife blade which would scrape out all my uncleanliness. Then the so-called spirit could ascend out of this meaningless carcass."

Vogler helps him to the coach. Vogler, the "magnetist" in The Magician, is as troubled at the meaning of it all as Blok in The Seventh Seal. Inside the coach, when Spegel announces that he feels the approach of death, Vogler looks intently at him. But just as he is telling him, "Death is ..." Spegel - seemingly - expires. Disappointed, Vogler leans back in his seat, another opportunity to discover the truth about life and death missed. The troupe arrives at a border crossing, where the coach is stopped and redirected into the courtyard of a grand house. Vogler and his entourage are ordered out of the carriage and into the house where a local dignitary and the chief of police are anxious to meet the famous magnetist. Also among them is Dr. Vergerus (Gunnar Björnstrand), who seems determined to debunk the supposed "powers" of Vogler.

Bergman's title for the film was The Face - Ansiktet. The Magician is a more descriptive title, perhaps too programmatic, but it's an improvement, I think, on Bergman's, which makes it sound like a horror film.(1) Bergman admitted that he intended to make a much funnier film, "but then during the filming I suppose I must have gone rancid." The film is generally regarded as a statement about the role of the artist in society. Bergman advanced the argument that the respectable, unfriendly audiences he directed plays for in Malmö in the Fifties were represented in The Magician by Consul Egerman (who becomes alarmed when his wife throws herself at Vogler), the police chief occupied the place of his critics, the worst of whom was Harry Schein, on whom Bergman took his revenge by representing him as Dr. Vergerus, who antagonizes Vogler to the extent that Vogler takes his revenge on him by ripping off his smug rational face and terrifies him with his "hocus-pocus."(2)

Bergman placed great emphasis on the ambiguous role played by Ingrid Thulin. When we first meet her she is "Aman," Vogler's apparently male assistant. She is, in fact Manda, Vogler's wife. When Vergerus catches her with her hair down (so to speak), and tries to blackmail her, Vogler thrashes him. Bergman so subtly stages what appears to be Vogler's death when the "stableman" Antonsson reacts violently to Vogler's attempt to mesmerize him and he tries to choke him, that some inattentive viewers actually believed that Bergman was suggesting that something supernatural has occurred. Vogler's concentration on Antonsson is interrupted by a chiming clock. Vogler's momentary "spell" broken, Antonsson grabs him by the throat. Vogler falls, Antonsson tears out of the room, Vergerus's wife screams and faints, and when everyone leaves the room, Simson, on cue, locks the door. A handy coffin is moved beside Vogler, lying motionless on the floor and Tubal and Manda begin to strip his "body." The coffin is the giveaway. Earlier, Spegel, who wasn't quite dead, sneaks into the house and finds Vogler in his room. Holding Vogler close, he delivers one of Bergman's telltale lines: "Step by step by step we go into the dark. Motion itself is the only truth." Then Spegel steps dutifully into the trick coffin that Vogler uses as a prop for his act and dies. When Antonsson strangles Vogler, the same coffin, containing Spegel's body, is slid beside Vogler. We don't see them do it, but Manda and Tubal switch Vogler with Spegel's dead body before Simson unlocks the door and Vergerus enters. Vergerus examines the body and pronounces him dead. Starbeck orders an autopsy - with Vergerus presiding, and Bergman has successfully - cleverly - set us up to witness the undoing of Vergerus. Later, left alone with the corpse of Spegel, which he selectively dissects, Vergerus is astonished when he is confronted with a living Vogler - and scared half out of his wits.

Bergman satirizes not just the sometimes impossible feats that we expect from the artist, but he satirizes the artist as well, who performs his tricks knowing how stupid the audience is, but goes on performing them, all the same. When Vogler plays with life and death to scare Vergerus, he fails again because Vergerus refuses to admit that he was taken in by Vogler's illusion and that he was genuinely afraid. We - the viewer - saw the terror in his eyes and laughed. But it was nothing but smoke and mirrors. Bergman spoke eloquently about the illusions that the filmmaker exploits:

And even today I remind myself with childish excitement that I am really a conjurer, since cinematography is based on deception of the human eye. I have worked out that if I see a film which has a running time of one hour, I sit through twenty-seven minutes of complete darkness - the blankness between frames. When I show a film I am guilty of deceit. I use an apparatus which is constructed to take advantage of a certain human weakness, an apparatus with which I can sway my audience in a highly emotional manner - make them laugh, scream with fright, smile, believe in fairy stories, become indignant, feel shocked, charmed, deeply moved or perhaps even yawn with boredom. Thus I am a conjurer. I perform conjuring tricks with (an) apparatus so expensive and so wonderful that any entertainer in history would have given anything to have it.(3)

Yes, Bergman is Vogler - but a Vogler whose conjurings have given us so much more than facile laughs and frights. He has shown us with the film apparatus the truth about human beings. Through artists like Bergman, the film medium is fulfilled.



(1) Think of the schlocky Fiend Without a Face, but also the art-film creepshows like Franju's Eyes Without a Face and Teshigahara's The Face of Another.
(2) Images: My Life in Film (New York: Arcade Publishers, 1995).
(3) Four Screenplays: Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Magician (New York: Touchstone, 1969).

Are you talking to me?

What is cinema? is suddenly a question on people's lips. But how many of the people asking it really want to know the answer? Last weekend Martin Scorsese opined that the superhero movies released by Marvel Studios don't meet with his definition of cinema, prompting a backlash that was surprisingly overblown, revealing just how sensitive filmmakers and fans of the Marvel films are to accusations that, while they're phenomenally popular, they're far from what cinephiles would call art.

Now another old cineaste, Francis Ford Coppola, has joined the fray with comments that are more blunt: "When Martin Scorsese says that the Marvel pictures are not cinema, he’s right because we expect to learn something from cinema, we expect to gain something, some enlightenment, some knowledge, some inspiration. . . . I don’t know that anyone gets anything out of seeing the same movie over and over again. Martin was kind when he said it’s not cinema. He didn’t say it’s despicable, which I just say it is.” 

What Scorsese actually said was part of his David Lean lecture hosted by the British Film Institute: "Theatres have become amusement parks. That is all fine and good, but don’t invade everything else in that sense. That is fine and good for those who enjoy that type of film and, by the way, knowing what goes into them now, I admire what they do. It’s not my kind of thing, it simply is not. It’s creating another kind of audience that thinks cinema is that.”

In 2017 Woody Allen made similar remarks in a Deadline interview: "I think movies have gone terribly wrong ... And the big blockbusters for the most part are big time wasters. I don't see them. I can see what they are: eardrum-busting time wasters. I think Hollywood has gone in a disastrous path. It's terrible."

I noticed the trend as far back as 1977, when George Lucas's Star Wars was released. Lucas and Steven Spielberg, whose Jaws was an enormous hit in 1975, were two filmmakers who, ironically, were working diligently to establish their independence from Hollywood studio interference. They founded production companies of their own, Lucasfilm in 1971 and Amblin Entertainment in 1981. Even then, however, Hollywood recognized there was a difference between what sells and what was good: while Star Wars (budgeted at $11 million, box office of $775.4 million) was nominated for the 1978 Best Picture Oscar, it was beaten by Woody Allen's Annie Hall (budgeted at $4 million, box office of $38.3 million). The success of Lucas and Spielberg created the blockbuster syndrome, that became the dominant practice. Instead of spending $100 million producing ten movies whose revenues would offset losses and show an aggregate profit, the blockbuster syndrome taught producers the lesson that a single movie budgeted at $100 million could potentially bring in several times the initial outlay. But those nine other modestly budgeted movies never got made.

The volume and shrillness of the reaction to Martin Scorsese's statement proved at least one of the points that he was trying to make (Coppola contributed nothing to the conversation and probably did his side a great disservice). He was expressing his concern that the Marvel films were cultivating an audience that has had no contact with the films that have come to define what he calls "cinema" and that their ignorance is of a hardness and unwieldiness that cannot admit dissent. The filmmakers who have rushed to Marvel's defense must know that they are on the winning side, that Scorsese picked a fight that is grossly unfair and that they are punching down at him.

I went back to the summer of 1981 when Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark was in release. I was 23 and I hated it. Stanley Kauffmann, who was in his 60s, saw it and wrote his review of it. What he wrote needs repeating:

I won’t pretend that I got no thrills or tingly laughs out of Raiders, but the more it happened, the more it irritated me. (Bernard Shaw said it happened to him when he found himself laughing at certain comedies.) Raiders, as bruited, is the Saturday-afternoon serial in excelsis. It was directed by Steven Spielberg (Close Encounters of the Third Kind), and one of the executive producers and authors was George Lucas (Star Wars)—two of the brightest young successes in Hollywood. But the more spectacular the sweep, the more stunning the special effects, the more ingenious the editing, the more my irritation grew until it toppled over into depression.

What’s depressing me most in all this is the future. I mourn no lost paradise of film. I know that, in a good year, 95 percent of the world’s films were trash, four percent plus were good entertainment, and there was a small fraction of seriously good films. In a good year. But that small fraction seems to be shrinking. Economic and cultural conditions all conduce to shrink it. What’s grim in the film world, as Raiders attests, certainly in the US and gradually becoming so elsewhere, is that the stringency of filmmaking conditions is making the talents with the best possibilities want to revel in the movie-ness of the past. Yeats worried that "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” But Spielberg and Lucas, as far as ability goes, are among our best, and they are full of passionate intensity.

Another irony. Thirty years after Kauffmann wrote this, George Lucas sold the rights to future Star Wars sequelae - and prequelae - to Disney and retired from making blockbuster films. Shortly after that, however, he began to object to what Disney was doing to his creation, prompting many to effectively disenfranchise him from the franchise. 

Via Instagram, James Gunn responded to the objections raised by Scorsese and Coppola by referring to clueless grandfathers and great-grandfathers. I don't know how tall Gunn's grandfather is, but Gunn would have to stand on his shoulders to be big enough to kiss Scorsese's arse.

A Moveable Manhattan

Woody Allen was seen recently in France where his latest - and 48th - film, A Rainy Day in New York just opened in theaters. Regardless of its distance from Manhattan, the place where he has lived for most of his 83 years and the setting of so many of his films, France has had to function as Allen's base of operations because of the rising tide of opposition to him and to his films in the U.S. One by one, actors who have appeared in one or more of his films have come forward, because of allegations made by his adopted daughter, Dylan, that Allen sexually abused her when she was seven years old, to announce their regrets for working with him or to affirm their continuing support for him. The MeToo movement has cost several prominent figures in the entertainment industry their careers, and Allen could be another one. Allen, however, has continually protested his innocence and he even expressed the view last month that he should be the "poster boy" of the MeToo movement:

“I’ve worked with hundreds of actresses, not one of them has ever complained about me; not a single complaint. I’ve employed women in the top capacity for years and we’ve always paid them the equal of men. I’ve done everything the MeToo movement would love to achieve.”

Allen has enjoyed a quite unique position in American film. He has had a prolific career making what are by definition "little" films (now known as "niche" films); character-driven comedies whose only distinction is their avoidance of virtually everything that would attract a larger audience. Allen knows his audience better than anyone, and they have rewarded him with an independence that very few filmmakers have ever enjoyed. This time, however, Allen is embroiled in a lawsuit against Amazon, who agreed to finance four new films written and directed by him. A Rainy Day in New York is the first of the four films to be released, but it may not be released in the U.S. because of Amazon's decision last year to back out of the agreement due to all the negative publicity around Allen. Undaunted, Allen has since completed production of his second film under the agreement, Rifkin's Festival, and is suing Amazon for $68 million, the amount of the original deal. (Try to imagine any other famous director delivering four films for just $68 million.)

Allen insists that it doesn't matter if his film isn't released in the U.S., that even if he is prevented from making films and writing plays and books, he would continue doing what he's been doing since he was sixteen - writing. Europeans have always welcomed his films, and A Rainy Day in New York is no exception. The French have been rather resistant to the MeToo movement, with some famous French actors announcing their opposition to it as yet another aspect of the politically correct American Revenge Culture, which recently condemned John Wayne for statements unearthed in a 1970s interview that were decidedly unWoke. But Allen is beginning to resemble that ultimate European exile from Hollywood, Roman Polanski, the man who defected twice - first from Communist Poland and the second time from capitalist America when faced with extended jail time after being found guilty of sexual misconduct with a 13-year-old girl. Polanski has managed to keep his career going for forty years without ever setting foot in the U.S. or any other European country that might arrest him and extradite him back to American justice. It doesn't seem to have seriously impaired his ability to attract audiences and win awards.

When I watched Polanski's The Ninth Gate twenty years ago I noticed the early scenes in the film that were set in Manhattan and wondered what subterfuges Polanski had to employ to incorporate in his film shots of New York City locations in which he can no longer set foot. Allen doesn't suffer from such a disadvantage, but the drift of public opinion is making it harder for him to persuade well known actors to appear in his films. Writing about A Rainy Day in New York in Le Monde, a French critic noticed a bitter note in the film's ending: “As if the director had a premonition that he was on the verge of being banned from a city that he might have filmed for the last time."

Rachel Donadio, the author of an article in The Atlantic about Allen's new film, wondered about how the French insist on a separation between the artist and his work: "there’s something cartoonish about how the French cultural establishment, or at least part of it, tends to celebrate art as if it were totally divorced from the artist."(1) Yesterday, The Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Peter Handke - for his sometimes superb writing and not for his often appalling politics. The Swedish academy was clearly acting on their conviction that an artist and his work are separable. Writing about Robert Frost's treatment at the hands of one of his biographers, Clive James commented: "Luckily not even America—still a puritan culture in which an artist’s integrity must be sufficiently unblemished to impress Oprah Winfrey—has proved entirely devoid of critics and academics who can handle the proposition that the creator of perfect art might be a less than perfect person."(2)

The last Allen film I've seen was Wonder Wheel (2017). I thought it was pretty awful. Hearing Kate Winslet struggle valiantly with Allen's stilted dialogue underneath her coached Brooklyn accent was sometimes painful. The last of Allen's films that I remember with pleasure was Everyone Says I Love You (1996). That doesn't mean I wish that he hadn't made the twenty-four films he's made since. Every artist, even the greatest, if they live long enough, goes into decline. Ingmar Bergman, whom Allen has always revered, fell into a sharp decline after his last great flourish in the '60s (Persona, A Passion). Allen's nostalgia is understandable, but it's not for the '70s or '80s when his work was the most challenging. I still think his masterpiece is Zelig (1983). But that film was looking back to a time before Allen's birth, to the era of his favorite jazz music. A Rainy Day in New York will make its way in some form - probably online streaming - to America. The back and forth about Allen's alleged abuse of his adopted daughter, not to mention the new revelations of his possible, as yet unsubstantiated, ties to Jeffrey Epstein, will never be settled in court. So the only thing that matters is the number of people who haven't settled the case of Woody Allen in their own minds.


(1) "The Disparate Reactions to a New Woody Allen Film," The Atlantic, September 26, 2019.
(2) "The Sound of Sense," Prospect Magazine, January 23, 2014.

Revenge of the Superheroes

In my last post I mentioned how Martin Scorsese had made dismissive comments about the slew of superhero movies that threatens to engulf the American movie industry. Not surprisingly, his comments weren't taken by the makers of those movies with much magnanimity. I'm fairly certain that Scorsese made his comments offhandedly, not meaning them to be taken as a final word on the subject. The way they're reported makes him sound rather apologetic, as if he were sorry he had nothing positive to say.

However Scorsese intended his comments to be taken, they have provoked a surprising furore in the official movie industry. Samuel L. Jackson, who, I suppose, feels obliged to act as the spokesman for them, remarked: "that’s kind of like saying Bugs Bunny ain’t funny. Films are films. You know, everybody doesn’t like his stuff either. I mean, we happen to, but everybody doesn’t."

James Gunn, director of some of the superhero movies, tweeted: "Martin Scorsese is one of my 5 favorite living filmmakers. I was outraged when people picketed The Last Temptation of Christ without having seen the film. I’m saddened that he’s now judging my films in the same way." This statement is ridiculous. Scorsese was expressing his opinion, not telling anyone else to think the same way. What bothers Gunn is how much authority Scorsese's opinions command. The picketers outside The Last Temptation were puritans who were trying to deprive potential viewers of the film of the pleasure Scorsese's film would've provided them. Scorsese has neither the time nor the inclination (not to mention the ability) to deprive any of the millions who stand in line to see Gunn's movies of their pleasure.

Some of the other directors who have made movies for Marvel also felt the need to chime in. But the uproar over Scorsese's comments sounds exactly like a similar fracas inspired by comments made last July by the Irish novelist Colm Tóibín when he was asked what he thought about detective fiction. Without knowing what a hue and cry his opinion would provoke, he said, "I can’t do thrillers and I can’t do spy novels. I can’t do any genre-fiction books, really, none of them. I just get bored with the prose. I don’t find any rhythm in it. It’s blank, it’s nothing; it’s like watching TV." This was taken as a direct insult by the writers of detective fiction, along with the legions of fans who devour it. As I recall, Tóibín didn't retract his statement or apologize for it.

I don't believe that Scorsese, like Tóibín, intended his remarks as a kind of sneer at fantastically successful movies - the kind of success that Scorsese can only dream of. His interviewer at Empire Magazine could just as easily have asked him what he thought of K-Pop. But the fact is that Scorsese and James Gunn belong in two different worlds of movies: Scorsese's is one in which talent is committed to the realistic portrayal of characters and situations that resemble, as close as his talent is capable, real life and Gunn's is another in which talent is committed to the engineering of imaginary and/or fantastic creatures that seem to exist in our world, but only as long as it takes them to destroy it piece by agonizingly realistic piece. People like Gunn throw every bit of their energy into devising ways to make the impossible somehow possible, if only for the duration of a movie. But the impossible for them is making the ultimately shallow, juvenile inventions of comic books so realistic that we might take them seriously. The problem is, the shoddiness of the superhero characters' conception is increased by the care with which they are recreated on screen. And the more money that's lavished on special effects only exposes the hollowness of the underlying ideas.

James Gunn and his colleagues simply cannot have it both ways. Their films can guarantee enormous box office returns but they can't guarantee critical approval. If they don't know this simple fact by now, they don't know anything about film. Are they even aware of the fact that the greatest American film ever made - Citizen Kane - was a box office flop? And that its failure to attract an audience commensurate with its artistic greatness effectively wrecked the rest of Orson Welles's career? The producers who backed Scorsese when he made The Last Temptation of Christ knew what they were getting into, but they got into it anyway, knowing full well they would probably not make money. Ask the producers of Scorsese's Silence what they expected their box office returns would look like. But Scorsese made the film anyway. He also made a string of films with Leo DiCaprio that made substantial profits, but that contributed nothing to Scorsese's prestige as a gifted filmmaker. Orson Welles once said that every discussion of film art is compelled to bring up the subject of money. Any discussion that didn't was a waste of his time. But no one mentions how much Federico Fellini's net worth was at the time of his death. What was the total value of Bergman's estate? His house on the island of Fårö was sold for €3-4M in 2009. But it's only because it was Bergman's house, with enormous cultural and now historical value in Sweden. In contrast, Roland Emmerich, director of a slew of forgettable blockbusters, now inhabits the palatial home of Hollywood pioneer Thomas H. Ince. I seriously doubt that "Roland Emmerich slept here" will be one of the selling points when the property is again up for sale.

It is true that many - if not most - filmmakers aspire to one day be established professional Hollywood film directors. François Truffaut once admitted in an interview that what he wished most was to have been a Hollywood director like Raoul Walsh, making hundreds of films entirely on assignment, finishing a movie on a Friday only to find the script for his next film delivered with his Sunday newspaper.

But what puzzles me - and probably puzzles Martin Scorsese - is how some filmmakers who attain complete independence from financing worries (I'm thinking of someone like George Lucas) never seem to take advantage of that independence by making films that are in any way different from the ones on which their financial independence is based. As more than one critic has pointed out, there are two Steven Spielbergs: the one who makes Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park and the other who makes Schindler's List and Lincoln. There was once another George Lucas - the one who made American Graffiti (which I think is his best film). But that filmmaker got lost in the Star Wars franchise and was never seen again.

Movies are a business, as everyone must know by now. They have made some people extravagantly wealthy, and they have left some others dead broke. But some have managed to produce a film that, in a hundred years, will be remembered and talked about and celebrated. Scorsese, I think, has accomplished this against incredible odds. What it comes down to is: what do you want a film to do for you? A few days ago I watched Eddie Murphy in Disney's The Haunted Mansion. It was inspired - if that is the word - by a Disneyland ride. If you want a ticket to anywhere but here then you can't be interested in art - which is based on human beings living on a terrestrial earth, in Brooklyn or Tokyo or Rome. When Scorsese called a superhero movie a "theme park" he was being rather perceptive. He had given the subject some thought, which is far more credit than I can give the movies' makers or their fans.

Between Two Worlds

Here we are again. Yesterday, The Guardian reported that Martin Scorsese, arguably the greatest living American filmmaker, was asked what he thought of the Marvel pantheon of superhero movies that lately have so dominated the American movie industry. “I tried, you know?" he said. "But that’s not cinema. Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.”(1)

The Guardian report then pointed out what it need't have, that
"Earlier this year, Avengers: Endgame became the highest grossing film in history after topping $2.8bn at the global box office (fifth highest after adjusting for inflation). Eight other titles from the same studio feature in the Top 30 (when factored without inflation)."

Dragging in the head of Marvel Productions, Kevin Feige, to - feebly - defend his studio's lack of genuine critical approval and the conspicuous absence of any awards, the Guardian quoted him: “Maybe it’s easy to dismiss VFX or flying people or spaceships or billion dollar grosses ... I think it is easy to say that you have already been awarded in a certain way. Hitchcock never won best director, so it’s very nice, but it doesn’t mean everything. I would much rather be in a room full of engaged fans.” Feige may as well have said that his billions in profits are a far different kind of award for his studio's products.

It always amuses me when, no matter how stupefyingly wealthy people have been made by their work, whether it's the makers of superhero movies or J. K. Rowling or Andrew Lloyd Webber, they not only make occasional attempts to defend the quality of their work, but they also do something utterly counter intuitive: they do something they aren't at all good at - creating something radically different from their usual work. For instance, in 1982, Andrew Lloyd Webber interrupted his boring routine of writing one smash hit West End and Broadway musical after another by composing, of all things, a Requiem. It was inspired, so Lloyd Webber explained, by the death of his father. It premiered in New York in 1985, conducted by Lorin Maazel, with featured performances by Placido Domingo and Sarah Brightman, Lloyd Webber's wife at the time. New York magazine music critic Peter G. Davis set the tone for the critical reception that Lloyd Webber's Requiem received: "I never found much musical merit in Lloyd Webber's Evita or Cats, but at least those shows never had the nerve to masquerade as high art. The Requiem does, and it is depressing to see so much money and media hype squandered on such a pretentious and crushingly trivial hunk of junk."

More recently, in 2012, J. K. Rowling's novel The Casual Vacancy, her first post-Harry Potter work and the first directed at adult readers, was published. She told an interviewer (also at The Guardian): "I just needed to write this book. I like it a lot, I'm proud of it, and that counts for me... And, to an extent, you know what? The worst that can happen is that everyone says, 'Well, that was dreadful, she should have stuck to writing for kids' and I can take that. So, yeah, I'll put it out there, and if everyone says, 'Well, that's shockingly bad—back to wizards with you', then obviously I won't be throwing a party. But I will live. I will live."(2)

Of course, none of the reviews were completely negative, even if most of them implied that they wished Rowling would return to her wizards, because it was what they wanted from her. The book sold phenomenally well - for a "serious" novel, but far below the bar set by the Harry Potter series. So why did she need to write the book? Why is there this strange desire in commercially successful writers, composers, and filmmakers, for critical acclaim?

Now, Martin Scorsese, as critically revered as he is today, had to occasionally stoop to making a commercial film every now and then - if only to convince nervous producers that he was bankable and that it wouldn't kill them to allow him to take risks and make a personal, serious statement in the medium he loved. Scorsese knew that if he hadn't made The Color of Money in 1986, he couldn't have made The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988. Or if he hadn't remade Cape Fear in 1991, The Age of Innocence would never have been green-lighted. He's made a few more commercial films (The Aviator, Shutter Island), along with a few long-awaited, cherished projects (Gangs of New York, Silence). At least Scorsese knows the difference, knows that movie audiences are mostly cattle that follow the herd wherever it goes.(3) He has learned the hard way what George Orwell pointed out seventy years ago, that "POPULAR success ... does not seem to have any connection, positive or negative, with critical acclaim." This doesn't signify that the coincidence of critical and popular success is impossible. When it does occur, as when Saul Bellow's novel Herzog became a national bestseller, it's a happy accident. I applaud Martin Scorsese for using his position to speak out against the prevailing appetite for crap and stand up for cinema - a word that has a completely different meaning for him than it does for technicians like Zack Snyder and James Gunn. Let them cry all the way to the bank if they don't like what Scorsese has to say.

But ask Kevin Feige (who is, after all, a businessman who uses movies to make his fortune) if he would exchange a few of his billions for some of the hard-won prestige that Martin Scorsese now carries. We're all much better off that he sticks to the mechanics of his superhero movies and not dabble in serious waters. "There is one advantage to being shallow," Thomas Hardy wrote. "You cannot drown there."



(1) "Martin Scorsese says Marvel movies are 'not cinema'", Catherine Shoard, The Guardian, 4 October 2019.
(2) "JK Rowling: 'The worst that can happen is that, everyone says That's shockingly bad'". The Guardian, 22 September 2012.
(3) The irony is that there is a middle range of films that Scorsese makes, like Goodfellas and, from the looks of it, The Irishman that manage to be both excellent and popular.

The Fallen World of Appearances

With two novels behind him, Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947) Saul Bellow applied for a Guggenheim grant three times before it was accepted in 1948. The Victim, published by Vanguard Press, sold just 2,257 copies. He spent the next five years moving between Europe and America writing The Adventures of Augie March. His story, "Looking for Mr. Green" was published in the magazine Commentary in March 1951. Commentary had been founded in 1945 by the American Jewish Committee as a successor to the Contemporary Jewish Record, whose editor had died in 1944. Norman Podhoretz characterized the periodical as one that would usher the American Jewish intelligentsia "out of the desert of alienation ... and into the promised land of democratic, pluralistic, and prosperous America."

The year before "Looking for Mr. Green" was published Bellow wrote an unpublished essay, "The Sharp Edge of Life," that presented what was, for him, the central problem for the novelist:

The great issue in fiction is the stature of characters. It starts with something like the psalmist’s question, “What is man that thou art mindful of him?” Responses range from “a little lower than the angels” to “a poor, bare, forked animal.” The struggle of the novelist has been to establish a measure, a view of human nature, and usually, though not always, as large a view as belief and imagination can wring from observable facts.(1)

Bellow's short stories come at the reader the same way his novels do - there is no apparent effort to be concise or control the exuberance of his language. At 8,500 words, "Looking for Mr. Green" concerns George Grebe, St. Olaf’s College, instructor in classical languages, Fellow, University of Chicago, now employed, thanks to the Great Depression that reached all the way to academia and back, in delivering public relief checks in Chicago's West Side. In his mid-thirties, Grebe isn't bitter at all about his new line of work. Like everyone else who has a job, he knows its essential value when so many have no work at all. His boss, who passed the bar exam and makes twelve dollars more a week than Grebe calls it "the fallen world of appearances":

I’ll tell you, as a man of culture, that even though nothing looks to be real, and everything stands for something else, and that thing for another thing, and that thing for a still further one—there ain’t any comparison between twenty-five and thirty-seven dollars a week, regardless of the last reality.

Grebe's boss asks him what his education could possibly have prepared him for, and sends him to "the Negro district" with a pocketful of relief checks. It's a part of Chicago he doesn't know, between Cottage Grove and Ashland, and he's told to expect no one to trust him or help him to find any of the people he's carrying checks to, because he's white. He sets off, at first responding well to the leg work. But "it was dark, ground-freezing, pre-Thanksgiving weather ... He could find the streets and numbers, but the clients were not where they were supposed to be, and he felt like a hunter inexperienced in the camouflage of his game." One name in particular stubbornly refuses to yield up the man who owned it - Tulliver Green.

After searching all day and past 6 o'clock when he should've quit and gone home, he doesn't give up searching for Mr. Green. Looking at the ruins of the city around him, Grebe is driven to wonder what all of it means:

Okay, then, Grebe thought further, these things exist because people consent to exist with them—we have got so far—and also there is a reality which doesn’t depend on consent but within which consent is a game. But what about need, the need that keeps so many vast thousands in position? You tell me that, you private little gentleman and decent soul—he used these words against himself scornfully. Why is the consent given to misery? And why so painfully ugly? Because there is something that is dismal and permanently ugly? Here he sighed and gave it up, and thought it was enough for the present moment that he had a real check in his pocket for a Mr. Green who could be real beyond question. If only his neighbors didn’t think they had to conceal him.

In Bellow's 1950 essay, "The Sharp Edge of Life," he wrote:

I believe simply in feeling. In vividness ... Only feeling brings us to conceptions of superior reality ... A point of view like mine is not conducive to popular success. I believe with Coleridge that some writers must gradually create their own audience. This is, in the short run, an unrewarding process. The commercial organization of society resists it, and let us face it, there is widespread disgust, weariness, staleness, resistance, and unwillingness to feel the sharp edge of life.

We have for hundreds of years had an idolatry of the human image, in the lesser form of the self and in the greater form of the state. So when we think we are tired of Man, it is that image we are tired of. Man is forced to lead a secret life, and it is into that life that the writer must go to find him. He must bring value, restore proportion; he must also give pleasure. If he does not do these things, he remains sterile himself.

Philip Roth wrote: "The backbone of 20th-century American literature has been provided by two novelists: William Faulkner and Saul Bellow. Together they are the Melville, Hawthorne, and Twain of the 20th century. Bellow's special appeal is that in his characteristically American way he has managed brilliantly to close the gap between Thomas Mann and Damon Runyon." Not Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Faulkner and Bellow.

Last week, I stumbled on an essay by novelist Michael Chabon in The Paris Review called "What's the Use?". Chabon wondered if art was of any use whatever in a world as terrible as ours has become (notice Chabon's use of the word "blade."):

Maybe the world in its violent turning is too strong for art. Maybe art is a kind of winning streak, a hot hand at the table, articulating a vision of truth and possibility that, while real, simply cannot endure. Over time, the odds grind you down, and in the end the house always wins... Or maybe the purpose of art, the blessing of art, has nothing to do with improvement, with amelioration, with making this heartbreaking world, this savage and dopey nation, a better place.

Maybe art just makes the whole depressing thing more bearable. I don’t mean that we should think of art solely as offering a kind of escape from the grim reality of reality, though personally I can’t think of higher praise. To experience the truth in art reminds us that there is such a thing as truth. Truth lives. It can be found. And there is no encounter more powerful than the encounter between the slashing, momentary blade of truth and a lie-entangled mind.

And what is that truth, the truth of art, that freeing blade, that slaking drink in the desert of the world? It’s this: You are not alone. I am not I; you are not you. We are we. Art bridges the lonely islands. It’s the string that hums from my tin can, over here looking out of my little window, to you over there, looking out of yours. All the world’s power over us lies in its ability to persuade us that we are powerless to understand each other, to feel and see and love each other, and that therefore it is pointless for us to try. Art knows better, which is why the world tries so hard to make art impossible, to immiserate artists, to ban their work, silence their voices, and why it’s so important for all of us to, quite simply, make art possible... We are each only one poem, one painting, one song away from another mind, another heart. It’s tragic that we need so much reminding. And yet we have, in art, the power to keep reminding each other.

I don't think Bellow wondered so much about being reminded. To him, art was there to reconcile us with life. Reading his glorious fictions reminds us what a glorious thing it is to be alive.


(1) In 2012 "The Sharp Edge of Life" was included in There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction, edited by Benjamin Taylor.