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PARTISAN REVIEW
tion and extinction of originality, invention, and imagination
by cultural entrepreneurs masquerading as representatives of the
popular will-distracting our attention from political and
economic inequities by insisting on democratic consensus in the
realm of art.
Let me try to describe this pattern by means of an image
borrowed from a work of high art in popular form-Stanley
Kubrick's movie,
2001.
There, you may remember, t-he spaceship
Discovery on its way to Jupiter is controlled by a heuristically
programmed algorithic computer nicknamed HAL, which is
capable of supervising not only the progress and apparatus of
the ship, but also the life functions of four hibernating astro–
nauts. Those functions-hearts, lungs, kidneys , brains, etc.–
are measured and monitored on a scanner screen, depicting
lively blips and sparks and patterns, until the moment when
HAL-having a computer's version of a psychotic episode–
murders the sleeping men by cutting off their oxygen supply.
The bouncing blips are transformed into single, unchanging,
unbroken lines, while the screen announces that " Life Func–
tions Have Been Terminated. "
HAL's murder of these astronauts strikes me as a perfect
metaphor for the neutralization of high art by the mass media,
and the deadening of gifted artists by cultural entrepreneurs.
Continually on the alert for any sign of novelty in the avant–
garde, these media profiteers are dedicated, not to helping new
artistic expression develop and grow, but rather to packaging it
for instant delivery to the mass market, with the result that they
transform this unpredictable vital blip into a single predictable
impulse:
Life Functions Effectively Terminated.
Anyone can supply his own examples: mine come mostly
from the theater. Marlon Brando comes to public attention
playing Stanley Kowalski in the stage version of
A Streetcar
Named Desire.
Despite the fact that he is a sensitive character
actor, subordinating his own personality to the part of a muscu–
lar ethnic paf, Brando is immediately whisked off to Hollywood
to repeat his characterization countless times, accompanied by
countless imitators, until he is old enough to play the God–
father.
