It occurred to me after writing this posting that I’d used the phrase “Man cannot live by masterpieces alone” in print before, so I Googled it. Sure enough, I found it in a review of Spider-Man that I published in Crisis four years ago. Some of what I wrote then is very much to the point now.
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Criticism, it seems, is a risky business. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, several reviewers who panned Star Wars: Episode II–Attack of the Clones received death threats via e-mail, along with sundry other communications of somewhat lower voltage. This one caught my eye: “The mere fact that you actually get payed [sic] to write movie reviews is the last shred of proof I need to rule out the existance [sic] of God.”
Not wanting to shake anybody’s faith, I decided I could live without seeing Attack of the Clones, but I went out of my way to catch Spider-Man. The tug of nostalgia proved irresistible: I have fond memories of reading “Spider-Man” comic books as a boy. More recently, I taught a course in criticism at a large Eastern university this past year, and I was struck by how many of my students were interested in writing about today’s comics and had smart things to say about them. Having praised Ghost World last year, I figured I should give Spider-Man at least as fair a shake.
On top of all this, I felt it was time to make a preemptive strike on snobbery. The other day I gave a talk about movies to a roomful of priests, one of whom asked me if I reviewed only “highbrow” movies. Considering that I’d just showed them Comanche Station, a Randolph Scott Western, the question seemed a bit odd, but I happily explained that I liked and wrote about all kinds of movies. In fact, my guess is that I’ve spent more time watching popular movies than art films–and gotten more pleasure out of them, too….
Spider-Man is a movie to which you can safely send the kids, and even accompany them without sentencing yourself to two hours’ worth of agonized squirming. But I’d never pretend for a moment that it’s anything more than a piece of pretty good, morally unobjectionable trash, and as I left the theater, I couldn’t help but ask myself: is unobjectionable trash really the best we can hope for out of American popular culture circa 2002?
“As if you could kill time without injuring eternity,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden, a book I judged to be a masterpiece not long after I put aside my comic books. I know better now, and I also know that there is a great deal to be said for pure frivolity. Man cannot live by masterpieces alone, not even bona fide ones.
On the other hand, take a look at this list of non-highbrow movies released a half-century ago: The African Queen, The Bad and the Beautiful, The Big Sky, Five Fingers, The Greatest Show on Earth, High Noon, Hangman’s Knot, Kansas City Confidential, The Lusty Men, Monkey Business, The Narrow Margin, Pat and Mike, The Quiet Man, Ride the Man Down, Singin’ in the Rain, and Son of Paleface. The only things these films have in common are that they were all made in Hollywood and that I happen to like them. Not one opened in an art house (though several are now regarded as classics and can be seen on museum series). If they are representative of what Americans regarded as routine movie-house fare in 1952, then what does that say about America in 2002? Nothing very good, I fear.