PARTISAN REVIEW
265
once again, An Event. Both the hype of the distributor and the over–
praise of the film critic condescend to the audience; the only differ–
ence is the nature of the goose to action. And don't both fit some–
where on the same continuum with the kind of decision poor ma–
ligned Bosley Crowther used to make, exaggerating
his
praise of
say,
Cleopatra,
"for the good of the industry." Kael's taste is better,
her instincts finer, and her intelligence more acute. But she has let
her didactic impulses lead her astray, and as a result she warps the
audience's ability to respond just as fully as lesser beings with less
refined or more callous motives.
The treatment of
Last Tango
shows once again the ease with
which films are made into commodities- critical, commercial, cul–
tural- and the aesthetic damage that results. When individuals dis–
agree about a film, as they often do, there is always a possibility that
one or the other may not have connected with the combination of
intellectual and emotional experience that forms the core of the film.
From that sense of insufficiency can often issue a certain tentative–
ness, a respect for the different structures of another's experience, and
a feeling, increasingly keen in light of recent films, that intellectual
acuteness might require an emotionally complex response as well for
full appreciation. Movies contain both emotional experience, the
total effect, and intellectual experience, the need to found the emo–
tional experience by explicating the interrelations of its elements. But
because movies are so palpably
there,
we may tend to divert the emo–
tion and destructively urge our minds to cannibalize the movies for
their parts, even while claiming to serve a larger understanding. Over
valuing a film to make sure people see it cuts off the potential for
emotional connection and wholeness; it makes the film an object
that contains a series of objects, and gives us only a commodity rela–
tion to the work. To decide, as film reviewers are always straining to,
that a particular film is a classic, or the greatest ever, or the first, or
the best, sprinkles the movie pages and the marquees with only the
most obvious examples of the general urge of the film critic to pre–
program the audience's response. Treating films as objects is the basic
hazard of the film reviewer's occupation. Books, paintings, plays - all
survive being talked about much more than movies. But when movies
are overpraised, they turn out necessarily to underexist. To create the
