Self Made Son Decries Expertise: Podhoretz clan edition

I guess it’s appropriate that in this 50th anniversary week of C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures lecture, I find via Bora‘s Twitter feed this bit of lazy snobbery from John Podheretz.:

This deprofessionalization is probably the best thing that could have happened to the field. Film criticism requires nothing but an interesting sensibility. The more self-consciously educated one is in the field–by which I mean the  more obscure the storehouse of cinematic knowledge a critic has–the less likely it is that one will have anything interesting to say to an ordinary person who isn’t all that interested in the condition of Finnish cinema.

Amateurism in the best sense will lead to some very interesting work by people whose primary motivation is simply to express themselves in relation to the work they’re seeing–a purer critical impulse than the one that comes with collecting a paycheck along the way.

The Snow connection comes through the interrupted friendship between the English novelist/physicist and the American old leftie turned founding neocon, John’s father Norman.  Snow broke with Norman over what he perceive as the American’s aloofness during the Two Cultures controversary.  Via the University of Virginia’s Guy Ortolano, speaking at Harvard last Friday, I learned that Snow reconciled with Norman when the two came to agree on the need for privileged, elite knowledge in the wake of what both men saw as New Left excesses during the sixties.

So what to make of fils John’s game anti-elitism?  Or of his admission that he’s been stealing his paychecks of late from The Weekly Standard, where  he serves as movie critic.

Well, unsurprisingly it all starts with an unsupported, and pretty near certainly wrong claim: “Movie criticism has been a feature of American newspapers for a century, and sadly, one can count the standout critics throughout that time on maybe two hands.”

Really?  How does he know?  To give just one example of a fine, working reviewer whom most outside of his newspaper’s ambit would not have heard of, my agent introduced me to the work of a Canadian critic of whom I’d never heard when she represented his posthumous volume of reviews: Jay Scott was a standout, though I doubt that he had a huge currency w/in the bubble.

But such flatulant vamping is not the meat of the issue.  Rather, it’s the claim that criticism requires feeling but not knowledge.  It’s the “I don’t know much about art but I know what I like” school of criticism — and it is a view that is held only by those who (a) believe there is nothing more to the experience of art (or anything) than first impressions and (b) have such contempt for their audiences that they assume that the unwashed masses agree.

Hence Podhoretz’s assertion that there is nothing that knowledge can add but pilpul. It may be so in his case.  But great critics — hell, good ones — create for their readers the ability to experience more than just a first impression — and usually manage to avoid gratuitous references to Finnish cinema.  Consider Scott again–the Toronto Globe and Mail‘s critic, lost long ago to the first wave of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, here standing in for generations of movie-loving working-stiff newspaper critics.

Scott’s reviews meet one of the measures of Podhoretz’s disdain — they are daily paper fodder, a few hundred words each.  And Scott certainly burdens them with the knowledge accumulated by watching and writing about thousands of films.  And yet, somehow, in that concision, for all that experience, and faced with the task of plot summary and swift judgment, he still manages to convey meaning — lightly, with grace and humor, but with precision.  Take this lede to his review of Risky Business:

What if Benjamin Braddock, the hero of The Graduate were to get out of high school this year?

There’s another movie out there, Scott tells you in those eighteen words.  It was a good one, he implies, memorable.  It had a moral stance –that’s what the question leads to next.  And that moral stance and the sociological context in which it was expressed have changed, a lot — enough to evoke a movie that answers Scott’s question in an interesting, perhaps important way.

That’s knowlege, worn lightly I’ll agree, and sophistication, and a concern for what the movie he is reviewing might actually be saying that is deeper than just the pleasure that we may (and Scott did) take in what he accurately called “an adolescent oriented farce.”

More deeply, what Podhoretz rejects, and what people who experience an art form as more than simple sensation demand, is the depth of experience, the layers that come from being able to have a first impression informed by the tradition from which a new work emerges.  To take just one example, that of my wonderful colleague,  Junot Diaz:  reading him without knowledge of Tolkien and Salinger and a host of others does not eliminate the power and joy and fierceness of his language — but you won’t get much of what he’s trying to say if you don’t recognize that he’s speaking to you surrounded by the clamor of other writers to whom he’s also saying somehting and from whom he is stealing (he’s a pro, after all) whatever he can get…and so on.

In other words, Podhoretz is hiding an incredibly impoverished ability to see and hear and listen and understand within his coccoon of fake populism.  How do I know? There’s a tell…there’s always a tell.

Here the betraying tic is comes when he claims that sensibility is a purer critical impulse than the expectation of getting paid for one’s work.  That’s what gravels him:  that while anyone can watch a movie, and lots of people can express their reactions to such experiences, some people actually think that such expression is worth something.  God forbid that anyone but the scions of famous right wing parents should be paid for naval gazing.

This is not an argument about the future of journalism.  It is an argument that journalism as unnecessary.  Now I will not try to claim that today’s MSM is not a deeply wounded beast (self inflicted, a lot of it).  I won’t say that news like this makes me despair of defending anything to do with existing institutions. But Podhoretz does not want better media; he wants a popular culture undisturbed by historical memory.

I remember what happens when ideologues valorize feeling at the expense of expertise.*  To put this in an another context: some readers of this blog find this same trope troubling indeed in the context of the ID “debate” (sic).  This is one place where for all the problems I have with C.P. Snow’s formulations, I find myself in full agreement with Podhoretz-pere‘s old friend.  You sacrifice hard-won skill in any field at your peril.

*Self restraint required to avoid Godwinizing this link.

Image:  Poster for Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid, 1921.

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