The New School

How many critics—of the theater, movies, music, contemporary fine arts—wake up each morning with the uncomfortable feeling that someday they will be wrong in their critical judgment? After all, what is a critic’s deepest fear? To have erred in judgment, to have made the wrong call, to have missed the boat. Certainly, no movie critic wants to miss the boat—to have critically underestimated, or what’s worse, to have dismissed the next Citizen Kane (1941), for instance—so in order to avoid making such an unwitting mistake, the critic engages in what Robert Ray, employing a term taken from Max Ernst, calls critical overcomprehension (How a Film Theory Got Lost, Indiana University Press, 2001, p. 82). Ray writes:

 Aware of previous mistakes, reviewers become increasingly afraid to condemn anything....Hence ... [one] ... of modern criticism’s ... great dangers, what Max Ernst called “overcomprehension” or “the waning of indignation”.... (82)

 

No critic, of course, can see beyond the curtain of Time. Time is the ultimate critic, and the critic’s limited perspective doesn’t allow him to see beyond his own pitifully narrow moment in history. Critical overcomprehension—the act of giving every new movie an equally glowing reception—is a result of the critic’s deep fear that history may prove him wrong. No one wants to be, for instance, television critic Jack Gould, who reviewed The Milton Berle Show appearance of Elvis Presley for the New York Times in 1956:

 

Mr. Presley has no discernible singing ability. His specialty is rhythm songs which he renders in an undistinguished whine; his phrasing, if it can be called that, consists of the stereotyped variations that go with a beginner's aria in a bathtub. For the ear, he is an unutterable bore, not nearly so talented as Frank Sinatra back in the latter's rather hysterical days at the Paramount Theater. (qtd. in Robert Ray, 80)

 

However, as Ray points out, Gould’s kind of critical misjudgment has its own unintended consequences: such gross critical mistakes have led to “rejection and incomprehensibility as promises of ultimate value” (82). For instance, if a record album sold poorly, or the artist who recorded it was given little or no attention—or worse, completely neglected in his or her own time, the record must therefore be great, perhaps even a masterwork. The initial neglect of 1967’s The Velvet Underground & Nico serves as a useful example. Ignored upon release, it is now considered a classic. Initial neglect as a sign of greatness is a powerful myth and governs much of modern criticism of the arts.

 

According to Self-Styled Siren (critic and film historian Farran Smith Nehme), whose knowledge of silent era Hollywood is nothing short of encyclopedic, the practice of critical overcomprehension is currently being applied to Babylon (2022), a box-office failure upon release last year that also divided critics (“Bye, bye Babylon,” August 23, 2023). While the Siren believes it is a “lousy movie,” nonetheless she has noticed that there are “ongoing attempts to enshrine last year's Babylon as some kind of masterwork,” which is to say, for some, the movie's initial rejection is a surefire guarantee of its ultimate value. The myth serves to shield such movies from negative reviews.

In addition, the Siren refers to a recent New York Times article about the new phenomenon of “MovieTok” influencers. The Times calls them “the new school of film critic,” observing that “some tenets of the profession—such as rendering judgments or making claims that go beyond one’s personal taste—are now considered antiquated and objectionable.” Critics of the new school are never going to make an egregious mistake like Jack Gould made with Elvis Presley. More than that, by insisting that the tenets of a previous generation of critics have become antiquated—meaning they are too old to get what’s really going on—the new school of film critics seeks to shield itself, not simply certain films, but from criticism as well. The new school influencers have little concern for the movie itself. Instead, they are far more interested in the multiple ways they can attribute significance to the movie, e.g., “outrageous,” “extravagant,” “over the top,” “mind-blowing,” “thought-provoking,” on and on. Criticism is simply a form of publicity, and the film itself a commodity.

Timbre

According to Wikipedia, there are well over a thousand cover versions of “Louie Louie.” Question: Given the many hundreds of versions available, why is it that the Kingsmen’s cover version the one most widely known? As we all know, Paul Revere & the Raiders recorded the song a week or two after the Kingsmen, but the Raiders’ version failed to become a hit. Why did the Kingsmen’s version succeed and the Raiders’ version fail? After all, it’s the same song. Or is it?

In Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock, Theodore Gracyk asks a relevant question: Why  do rock fans “listen again and again to the same records”? Why did a student that Gracyk knew wear out “a new Neil Young cassette in a month”? In answer to these questions, Gracyk writes:

What is needed is a plausible account of how “Louie Louie” can retain its impact when the record is played over and over. The answer must be that song structure is often an incidental framing device for something further; a “coathanger,” as John Sheperd puts it, upon which other qualities and “significant personal statements” are hung. Alan Durant proposes that recording shapes listening by locating the corresponding pleasure in “precise recollection and anticipation: knowing sounds, movements, and instrumental textures by memory and familiarity, rather than by extrapolation from perceived patterns, symmetries and learned musical structures.” But why should this anticipation please us? (58)

The short answer to this question, Gracyk says, is timbre (“what makes a particular musical instrument or human voice have a different sound from another, even when they play or sing the same note”). The problem is that timbres “fade” after a short period of time, “becoming more imprecise with the passage of time” (60). In other words, our auditory memories, when it comes to musical timbres, are poor. We can’t remember a song’s timbres precisely, so we want to hear it again (and again). So why is the Kingmen’s version of “Louie Louie” the one that became the most widely known? The short answer is the song's timbres.

In film studies, the closest analogy to timbre is mise-en-scéne, that magical dimension of a movie that is generated by the gap between a director’s (auteur’s) intentions and the camera’s automatism (André Bazin). When discussing the role of the music producer in the creation of a record, music critic Michael Jarrett writes:

When Owen Bradley produces Patsy Cline’s massive hits, he records a sonic concept just as much as he records an artist. In the vocabulary of film studies, the producer’s purview is the mise-en-scéne, in all of that term’s mystery. (Producing Country: The Inside Story of the Great Recordings, 37).

My Huckleberry Friend

Search the web, and you’ll find various meanings attributed to “My huckleberry friend,” the penultimate line from Mancini and Mercer’s “Moon River.” For the sake of convenience I reproduce the lyrics in question here:

Two drifters off to see the world

There’s such a lot of world to see

We’re after the same rainbow’s end

Waiting round the bend

My huckleberry friend

Moon river and me

As sung by Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn) in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the song reveals her rootlessness, her yearning to take flight, to get away—unusual characteristics for the heroine of what is essentially a romantic comedy with a few screwball elements. Childlike and often childish (as the heroines of this genre frequently are), “free-spirited,” she has escaped an unfulfilling life in rural Texas, abandoned her husband and step-children, and moved to New York City. Her reinvention takes the form of a revolt against conventionality—defying social convention is a characteristic trait of the screwball heroine. Subject to whims and tantrums, impulsive, a “kook” (derived from “cuckoo,” late 50s-early 60s lingo for someone who flaunts convention, individuality expressed through eccentricity), she seeks to avoid the confines of responsibility and in order to maintain her independence she avoids commitment, seeking to prolong her adolescence as far into adulthood as she possibly can. 

Perhaps this is why Breakfast at Tiffany’s has that wistful, melancholic mood that I identified in my last post. After thinking about this movie for several years, it seems to me that the ending, in which Holly and Paul famously kiss in the rain as the music swells, cannot conceal what seems to me to be a hint of sadness. Why? Because inevitably, like Huckleberry Finn, Holly is going “to light out for the Territory.” Critic Judith Crist expressed a similar idea (without invoking Huck Finn) during an interview in 2009:

But what’s clever about the way they ended Breakfast at Tiffany’s—this is, of course, my own feeling—is that you don’t get the sense that the two of them will last forever. About George Peppard’s character, I remember thinking, ‘Well, he’s not long for it. Just because you’re going to give the cat a name doesn’t mean that the cat isn’t going to go back to the alley.’ (Quoted in Sam Wasson’s book on the making of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Fifth Avenue, 5:00 a.m., p. 168)

Like Judith Crist, I can’t shake the feeling that the couple’s relationship will not last, either. Perhaps Crist felt that Paul Varjak (George Peppard) wanted to control Holly, to suppress her, that he isn’t the “right” match, rather like having the wrong couple end up married at the end of a screwball comedy—imagine Johnny Case (Cary Grant) married to Julia Seton (Doris Nolan) at the end of George Cukor’s Holiday (1938). Yet the sadness I’m trying to identify isn’t simply an issue of compatibility, or certain hesitations about George Peppard’s performance (it is no secret that director Blake Edwards was strongly against casting him in the role), but something deeper than that, having to do with the underlying motivations of Holly’s character. Leslie A. Fiedler wrote about Huck Finn in a way that is applicable to Holly Golightly:

[H]e does not know to what he is escaping, except into nothing: a mere anti-society, in which he is a cipher, a ghost without a real name. “All I wanted was to go somewheres,” he tells Miss Watson, “all I wanted was a change, I warn’t particular.” Huck is heading for no utopia, since he has heard of none; and so he ends up making flight itself his goal. He flees from the impermanence of boyhood to that of continual change; and, of course, it is a vain evasion except as it leads him to understand that no society can fulfill his destiny. (Love and Death in the American Novel, pp. 464-65)

Perhaps Fiedler’s observation is more applicable to the Holly Golightly as portrayed in Truman Capote’s novel rather than the Hollywood adaptation. Nonetheless, the diegetic use of “Moon River” requires an explanation, and there is nothing in the movie that interests me more.