Put in the DVD of “Vertigo” or any of the other top-ranking films in the 2012 Sight & Sound critics poll—“Citizen Kane,” “Tokyo Story,” “Rules of the Game,” “Sunrise,” “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “The Searchers,” “Man with a Movie Camera,” “Passion of Joan of Arc”—and fast-forward ahead randomly, then watch for five minutes. Those five minutes won’t show you everything you need to know about these movies, but they should suffice to do the essential thing: to arouse admiration, astonishment, and love, as well as the hunger to see the whole movie and anything else that Hitchcock, Welles, Renoir, Dreyer, and company have to offer. In fact, any five minutes of such movies would show something fundamental about movies themselves, about the essence of the art.
That’s equally true of “Moby-Dick” and “The Lover” and “Portnoy’s Complaint”—reading a few pages of any really good book should astound and delight, and send a reader to the beginning to devour the book whole. Without knowing anything about the story, the characters, or the setup, one will likely be hooked. Any aria from “The Marriage of Figaro,” a few bars of a solo by Charlie Parker or John Coltrane, one painting by Van Gogh or Rothko, one line sung by Billie Holiday—opening the eyes and ears in their presence may well give an instant contact high. Synecdoche is the fundamental experience of art, the sense that a random fragment contains a lifetime of experience and suggests the depth of a soul. That’s because this is the fundamental experience of life—no one knows anyone completely, and no one comes in at the start. But the person you see for an instant and can no longer live without, and whom you can imagine spending a lifetime getting to know, is pretty much what makes life worth living.
That’s why I was surprised to see my friendly sparring partner, Emily Nussbaum, in her splendidly polemical post last week, offer up my passing remark on the subject. Emily wrote:
It has nothing to do with craftsmanship and everything to do with beauty. Five minutes are, of course, not enough for a substantial and informed judgment, but they’re enough to stoke desire or to inhibit it. Five minutes are indicators, not proofs. Distinguishing their qualities and merits is a matter of aesthetics—or, rather, simply, beauty, and I understand why the very notion of beauty may get in the way of appreciating many TV shows. Yet I confess: I’m immensely sympathetic to Nussbaum’s enthusiasm for contemporary television, and all the more so for her efforts to define aesthetic standards for the medium—for the art form—that distinguish it from the other arts and that distinguish it as an art. That’s because movie love itself is the result of similar critical exertions on behalf of overlooked artists working in a despised medium.
The title of Nussbaum’s post, “Cahiers du Buffy,” alludes to it, and she mentions the source: the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. It was there, in the nineteen-fifties, when most Hollywood movies were derided as commercial throwaways, that those young critics and future filmmakers (including Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol) and their elder statesman-slash-godfather, Maurice Schérer, a.k.a. Eric Rohmer, recognized the marks of genius and the souls of artists—as, for instance, in the films of Alfred Hitchcock, which were widely considered, at best, successful vulgar showmanship.
The Cahiers critics praised a movie such as “Strangers on a Train” not as a successfully enjoyable slice of pop culture but as an absolute work of art. They argued that there was no difference between mass media and high culture, that Hitchcock was the peer of ostensible art filmmakers such as Dreyer and Eisenstein, and that all of them were the peers of the greatest artists in other forms, whether Picasso or Dostoyevsky. They made big claims, and those claims prepared the ground for their own epochal films, which went even further to sweep away the high-low distinctions. It’s why, as funny as movies by Howard Hawks often are, nobody laughs when they’re discussed in the same breath as Ernest Hemingway’s novels, or when Jared Hess’s “Gentlemen Broncos” figures alongside Corneliu Porumboiu’s “Police, Adjective” in a year-end list. Movies made their own popularity, but the French New Wave, as critics and as directors, made movies the art form of the century—and of this one, too.
Looking back at 1964, when the Beatles first appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” it’s odd to note the near-total dearth of rock criticism. At the time, the performances were widely reported, but there was no critic of the stature of Greil Marcus or Ellen Willis or Robert Christgau or Robert Palmer or Lester Bangs writing about them yet. I’m grateful that we have Nussbaum, and Matt Zoller Seitz (whose post got the ball rolling), and other insightful writers to guide readers through the labyrinthine landscape of television land.
The personal question, however, is different—why my experience of television has virtually nothing to do with theirs, or those of other TV writers. I’ve read vigorous and nuanced praise for such series as “The Sopranos,” “The Wire,” “Breaking Bad,” “Mad Men,” and now “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” and am wondering: if these are the summit of the medium, the “Vertigo” and the “Citizen Kane” and the “Tokyo Story” of television, and I look at them for five minutes—and then for an episode or two or three—and find more or less nothing of the virtues that the critics are describing, am I simply perversely immune to the shows’ merits? Or are the critics pleading on behalf of a form—open-ended serial television shows—that simply, for the most part, doesn’t thrive as audiovisual creation? And is that why it invites redefinition in terms of business plans, broadcast schedules, genre tweaking, social history, interactive viewing by chat-room participants, everything in sight except what’s actually in sight?
The very definition of the audiovisual—of the conjuring of a world, by means of images—is an enduring mystery, one that every good movie or TV show renews and illuminates. There’s more to say about the differences, and the similarities, of movies and television (curiously, the original title of the French magazine, when it was founded in 1951, was Cahiers du Cinéma et de la Télévision); about the use and abuse of stories in television akin to the calibration of salt, fat, and sweetener in fast food to result in binge viewing; about the journalistic enthusiasm for serial TV as it relates to journalism itself (the sheer volume of information, of stories and substories, as a perfect fit for reportorial curiosity).
In any case, I would—without irony and without sarcasm—be delighted to discover and embrace the pleasures and the insights that I’m currently missing in widely praised series. Discovery is a joy, and there’s no pleasure in displeasure—though, as the poet Paul Valéry wrote, “Taste is made of a thousand distastes.” I’ll force myself to keep watching.
P.S. If eyes and appliances were metered, I’d bet that my number of lifetime television-viewing hours would match those of most TV critics, because of my childhood spent, in the sixties and early seventies, as a television omnivore growing up in a household where the set was almost always on, from the time someone got up in the morning until the time the last watcher went to sleep. During dinner, conversation was supplanted by reruns of “I Love Lucy” and whatever preceded or followed it on Channel 5 (lots of Andy Griffith); mornings before school, “Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse”; after school, science-fiction movies on Channel 7 and “The Match Game” and “The Dating Game.” The floodgates of memory open. At night, we would watch whatever was on—often sports, with my father, but, of course, “Ed Sullivan” and “Laugh-In,” “My Favorite Martian” and “Get Smart,” “The Jackie Gleason Show” and “The Honeymooners,” “Petticoat Junction” and “Mr. Ed” and “Hazel,” “All in the Family” and Jack Benny and Red Skelton, Patty Duke and “The Flintstones,” whatever the hell I understood of David Susskind and John Bandy, and the prime-time game shows such as “What’s My Line?” and “To Tell the Truth.” Sick days and vacation days meant “Dennis the Menace” and “Leave It to Beaver,” “Concentration” and Gale Storm, “Queen for a Day” and “Art Linkletter’s House Party”—in other words, really, anything. The attempt to suss out the influence of such primordial audiovisual promiscuity is the work of a psychoanalytical pile driver—in other words, more about this later.
