This summer, I’ve taken some time to help young conservatives learn how to write about the movies they love, or at least are taken with, to be part of the bustling online public conversation & also to learn how to think about what cinema reveals about America, modernity, & the human drama, our unceasing interest in ourselves, our worry that we are not able to deal with the problems facing us… Here are the things I’ve learned in the process of teaching, which will form the basis of what I will be teaching by way of criticism in future.
Conservatives usually don’t much involve themselves in pop culture, so that they almost invariably have opinions that derive from the preferences & even the prejudices of the liberals who have what might be called a natural monopoly on criticism. This is not merely because liberals mostly make America’s pop culture & then also curate, not to say censor its morals & manners, so that whoever’s part of pop culture, even as a fan, is likely to recur to the thoughts & even the phrases popular at any moment—the deeper cause is blindness to, or a perverse opposition to, the call & claims of human greatness. Cinema is a form of poetry, telling stories, making images of the human beings we know best or most admire. It cannot but involve our passions & our beliefs about human greatness, the most important subject in human affairs. Uniquely, however, we now have a nearly unanimous denial among the elite that there is such a thing as human greatness, which has served not only to mislead audiences, but also to corrupt artists, or at least lead them into exile. It is the job of the conservative to conserve the best in poetry & to care for the national memory, nor has this job been more urgently needed.
The End Of Cinema
Cinema dominated the 20th c., but it lost that influence in favor of TV toward the end of that century; in the 21st c., TV itself has become streaming & social media—you are your own TV star, as well as producer, executive, & marketer…—leading not only to the corruption of the audience, but to a misunderstanding of what cinema & TV can or should be doing.
Briefly speaking, cinema was driven by plot, in the tradition of European poetry that goes back to Greek comedy, tragedy, & epic poetry—it accordingly focused on the greatest events concerning the greatest protagonists. TV was driven by character & social events, in the tradition that goes back to the European novel—great length, through serialization, & even a large cast of characters could all accommodated on TV. This difference in focus made cinema great, not just the big screen, & TV modest, not merely the small screen. The great ambition of cinema was to inspire an entire nation, to lead to an identification of & with a political community; the great ambition of TV was to educate & accordingly the concern has always been to identify with one or more characters. Cinema presumed some familiarity on the part of the audience with important events & men, on the basis of which it could educate judgment. TV presumed only an interest, on the basis of which it could educate character in a society that lacked institutions that would do the job.
Cinema collapsed because of its aristocratic claims. Once America won WWII, democracy triumphed & spread through every domain of thought, not merely of action. Hollywood was once famous for its stars—beings whose beauty is inseparable from being out of reach—both of which are signs of the permanent things. Democracy, in a progressive mood especially, has no patience for the permanent & is easily insulted by being presented with what is out of our ordinary reach. The greatest achievements in Hollywood, the work of a small number of writers & directors, were swept away & are nowadays preserved for the pleasure of nostalgia, ending up as the private fantasy of the people least likely to be interested in learning from poets who were touched by greatness.
TV collapsed because it turned out that without stars, nothing dignified can be said. TV accordingly imitated the novel more & more, since the protagonists of novels don’t need to be very impressive if at least their private lives are involved in impressive social transformations, but it did so on a democratic basis—without great writers & without the belief that the political transformation of the community which was brought on by democracy was in need of guidance.
Accordingly, it has become almost impossible to make movies; it’s not merely that there are fewer & fewer studios which produce fewer & fewer movies; it’s that movie-makers have mostly disappeared—talented young people cannot find it in their hearts to love what people loved before & they take their talent elsewhere. Movies demand, more than money, rare talents, or a rare mix of poetic talent & a talent for popularity… Most of what are called movies have, for decades, really been TV, but this only became obvious to the vulgar, though still denied by critics, when Disney became the only real studio, putting out episodes of a show, on regular schedule, & thereby dominating the box office; most of the movies that are comparable to the movies that defined cinema in the 20th c. are derivative of those older products & do not stir the passions of the young audience. TV, however, has collapsed because it is everywhere—its very democratic character has led to overproduction & the accompanying debasement, & therefore an almost complete loss of any claim to importance. TV is just part of the competition to produce identities for a people who no longer have clear, persuasive ideas what to do with Progress, liberalism, or America.
The End Of Criticism
Criticism is therefore primarily oriented to the past in our times. There are very few masters of cinema at work in our generation & they hardly arouse the passions of critics, much less of audiences. The worthwhile directors who are not masters suffer because they are primarily dedicated to audiences of the previous wave of liberalism; given the strong passions aroused by shifts in technology, generation, & fashion, they now seem relics in a way the masters do not, they appeal to nostalgia… Cinema & TV, which replaced drama & the novel in the 20th c., seem to share the fate of those other forms of poetry—they now merely supply formalities & content for computer games, far & away the biggest entertainment industry in wealthy countries. There are worse fates for talent in search of an audience—consider opera, which seemed of greatest importance in the 19th c., very much connected with nationalist politics, only to be relegated to a sign of genteel decadence among the wealthy or eccentricity among others... This orientation to the past requires an education—today, the critics who matter are those who have received at least some important parts of their education from masters of cinema, from the greatest practitioners of the art.
To learn from great movies, however, one first has to free oneself from the prejudices of the various liberal elites whose ideas of poetry & technology we are now in the process of rejecting. Briefly, as liberalism gradually took over cinema, it imposed the idea that stories of interest are primarily about individuals oppressed by society & the secret evils that make society oppressive. Strangely, it was after liberalism triumphed politically that it began with these silly, vulgar, sentimental stories turning the ideology of elites into the supposed struggle for life & affirmation of worthy victims of injustice. Perhaps this shows a pettiness, a defect of soul that affected liberalism even three generations back. In different modes, liberalism thus turned cinema into raising consciousness or winning hearts & minds—into a moralistic pretense of revealing ugly truths & edifying the audience. This could not but gradually corrupt talent & forbid the rise of masters, since it shifted the business from the revelation proper to poetry to something that’s more of interest to advertisers—social relevance, shocking things, & an appeal to ever more vulgar passions.
Thus, the major interest of cinema shifted to mediocrity, ultimately in order to ensure that there could be no challenge to liberalism. This is even worse in criticism, which is more ideological & activist than Hollywood’s products. Where there were great movies occasionally, liberalism made it a secret what made them great by burying them in arrogant ignorance; where there were artists looking to achieve something great, the various corruptions of ideology & business stifled them. The result has been a catastrophic marriage of liberal piety & ambitious trash. The mediocre artists left who manage to inspire audience seem to thrive on being childish, though not innocent. This has been the influence of criticism, as part of the moralism of liberalism, on cinema.
In the next installment, I will talk about the typical problems with criticism.
Fascinating and Informative essay. Thank you!
Glad you liked it, Cathy!