The Books of My Life: Its Only a Movie

Raymond Haberski's doctoral dissertation cum book, Its Only a Movie: Films and Critics in American Culture (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), is a rather odd if far too frequent kind of hybrid one finds in the world of academe these days. Haberski’s book is, as befits a work of history, generally descriptive. It explores how film, which was initially seen as a dangerous dumbing down form of capitalism by Progressives and Mass Culture analysts, came to be seen as an art form, movies, in the 1950s and afterwords thanks to the Cahiers crowd, Andrew Sarris, and academic film studies.

Then, unfortunately, the reader of Its Only a Movie arrives at chapter seven, the chapter on the film and movie culture war between "pragmatist" Pauline Kael and auteurist Sarris in the 1960s. In chapter seven, It’s Only a Movie suddenly morphs into something far more polemical and apologetic than descriptive, far more ideological than historical. 

Haberski’s apologetics and polemics seem to revolve heavily around the orbit of Pauline Kael. Kael, with her intellectual anti-intellectualism, her anti-elitist elitism, her messianism, her theoretical anti-theoreticism, her anti-historical historicism, her fetishisation and romanticisation of her own emotional responses to films, her narcissistic belief that she could make a movie better than many of those she reviewed, a trait she shared with a number of rock critics of the era, and "borrower of research without citation, is a rather strange saint to hang one’s icon on since the auteur policy of Cahiers and Sarris has won the day in contemporary film studies and film criticism to such an extent that even the anti-auteurist crowd write books about directors like David Lynch. Haberski, the historian-critic-polemicist-king, seems, on the basis of evidence in Its Only a Movie, to want to be a little bit Pauline Kael, a little bit Andrew Sarris, and a little bit Arthur Schlesinger, Junior, for the 2000s. As a result, Haberski champions a revival of a middle way or vital centre form of criticism that seeks to preserve and conserve a criticism that has set modernist standards in a postmodernist world lost in a hallucinatory and foggy maze of demagoguery and simulation.

There are a number of problems with Haberski’s history of American film criticism. First, as Its Only a Movie implies on several occasions, film criticism has been an international practise and particularly an Atlantic world practise as Iris Barry and the influence of Cahiers du Cinema on film criticism in the Anglo-American world in the 1960s and 1970s points up and to which Haberski makes mention. Haberski doesn't explore the influence of another film journal, the British film journal Movie, and Robin Wood, who was associated with Movie, on American film criticism. Movie, in fact, had a major influence on film criticism and film studies in the UK, the US, and Australia. Haberski is far too selective in his exploration of American film criticism. Critics like John Simon and Stanley Kaufmann, at best, reside in the very dark shadows cast by Kael and Sarris in the book. Haberski takes a far too functionalist approach to criticism largely ignoring the process by which critical standards and critical canons are established by elites and elite institutions. A conflict approach to criticism would seem to promise a more fruitful way to approach the manufacture of cultural standards and values. Finally, Haberski's book is full of mistakes. Peter Biskind becomes Bisking in the index. The title of Roland Marchand's essay is missing in action from the bibliography. These, by the way, are only the tip of the mistake iceberg in the book.

There were some things I liked about Haberski’s history of American film criticism. I agree, as Haberski implies, that much contemporary film studies is problematised by its crystal ball textualism, its belief that everything you need to know about a movie or film can be found in its final textual form, and its increasingly esoteric if not occult reliance on psychoanalysis as a tool in deciphering the finished film text, something that, in the process, has, as Biblical Studies did before it, detached the academic study from the broader audience and isolated academia from the general public in the process. I agree with Haberski that economic factors--the decline of the studio system and the rise of television--demographic factors--the coming of age of the baby boom generation--and cultural factors--the advent of the director star--created a space that gave rise, if briefly, to the new American cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. That creative space disappeared very quickly, however, as Hollywood found the answer to its economic woes in the blockbuster and its multiple ancillary economic products.

So, to sum up, Its Only a Movie is an interesting book marred, in my opinion, by a shift from descriptive analysis into polemics and apologetics overdrive in chapter seven. The book on the history of film criticism in the US remains, in my opinion, to be written.

Haunted by the Past: The BBC's Case Histories

PopMatters Critic Lesley Smith recently criticised the BBC adaptation of Kate Atkinson's mystery novels, Case Histories, for turning Edinburgh detective Jackson Brodie (played by Jason Issaacs) from an existential figure adrift in the world and who briefly impacts the lives of others into a standard TV detective who doesn't have much of a head for business. I have not read the Atkinson novels so I can't compare the two. All I will say here is that adaptations for different media are adaptations for different media and as such have to be judged as such even though there obviously is a connection between the "adaptation" and the "original" and the former is indebted to the latter in some way, shape, or form.

But back to critic Smith's assessment of the BBC adaptation of Case Histories, I have to disagree with Smith's assessment of the show. I very much liked Case Histories. At the time that Smith wrote her review--just after PBS broadcast the first of the three episode series (PBS stitched together two of the original six episodes transmitted by the BBC to get three episodes), I wrote this: I have only seen two episodes of Case Histories so I obviously have to reserve full critical judgement, as any self respecting critic should, until I have seen the third. It is not clear, however, contrary to Smith's claim, exactly where the relationship between Brodie and D.I. Louise Munroe (Amanda Abbington) is going at the end of episode two in this arc driven show which is why judgement should and must be withheld at least for the moment.

Now that I have seen all three episodes I can expand on these brief remarks. I particularly enjoyed the sense of melancholy that haunted almost every character in and almost every aspect of Case Histories. Brodie is haunted by the death (accidental?) of his sister Niamh and the subsequent suicide of his older brother who apparently feels responsible for Niamh's death. Brodie's melancholy associated with his sister, the death of whom along with the suicide of his brother replays themselves in Brodie's mind almost every day, is paralleled in the present by his relationship with his daughter Marley. Marley and Brodie have a close relationship that has put into jeopardy in the present when Brodie's ex-wife moves Marley from Brodie's Edinburgh to New Zealand where she has taken a job at the end of the second episode.

Other prominent and minor characters in Case Histories are equally haunted by mental scars from their pasts and their presents and these past and present ghosts impact the random chance encounters that almost all of them have with Brody and sometimes with each other in the Case Histories universe. D.I. Munroe is haunted by her feelings for Brodie, wondering, until the end of episode three, whether he has the same feelings for her that she has for him. He does. She is haunted by her difficult relationship with her teenage son, a relationship that is the antithesis of the one Brodie has with Marley. Lily Rose, who Brodie happens upon in an Edinburgh park by chance when he asks her to call for an ambulance while the person who hired him in episode one is writhing on the ground in pain, turns out to be the niece of someone who later hires Brodie to find her, Lily Rose, Shirley. Shirley turns out to be the sister of someone who supposedly killed her husband, Cheryl. Cheryl is the mother of Lily Rose who, after she was convicted of murdering her wife beating husband, a murder she did not commit, asks her sister Shirley, who did commit the murder, to care for Lily while she is in prison. Shirley, who seduces Brodie, abandoned Lily Rose and may carry this scar with her every day of her life. Reggie, the young girl who chances upon Brodie in episode three after he has accidentally been hit by a train while trying to save the life of Reggie's teacher along the railroad tracks, saves Brodie's life after the train accident. Reggie, it turns out, has a difficult relationship with her drug running brother and has had to drop out of school to work in order to take care of herself and her brother while trying to do some studying on the side. She has mental scars, in other words. Reggie's boss, Joanna Hunter, who has disappeared and who Reggie has asked Brodie to help her find, turns out to be famous because, when she was a teenager, she saw her mother brutally murdered by Gary Moore. She, of course, has lived with the scars of this murder ever since. Fearing that Moore, who has just been released from prison, is intent on murdering Joanna, Reggie and Brodie desperately seek Joanna eventually discovering that she has been kidnapped and held for ransom by mob "business" partners of Joanna's husband and has never been in danger from Moore. If the relationships in this paragraph seem labyrinthian that is because relations in Case Histories are labyrinthian.

From this brief summary of the complexities of Case Histories I hope one can see that the television adaptation of Atkinson's novels has indeed been faithful, assuming critic Smith has characterised the books accurately, to the existentialist and random chance encounters aspects of the original books. Many of the people Brodie encounters and tries to help he comes upon by chance. And most of those he comes upon through chance encounters and who he tries to help are deeply scared by their difficult and disturbing existential pasts, just like Brodie himself.

Thank you BBC for giving this viewer in the US, the land haunted by TV and film juvenalia, a thoughtful and adult television show.
\
Bibliography
Lesley Smith, Case Histories is Left With a Faint Echo of a Delightful Original, 19 October 2011, PopMatters, http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/150136-case-histories/