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PARTISAN REVIEW
thusser, jameson, and contemporary Marxist theory in general, and he is
as blatantly biased in favor of certain forms of cinematic
agitprop,
as Sit–
ney, the Pateresque Romantic, is indifferent to politics.)
One might be able to overlook these shortcomings if james were
content to function as a social and intellectual historian (and were
willing to confine himself to the value-neutral comparative procedures of
such writing). But the problem is that james fancies himself a critic, an
analyst of works of art, and in the course of
Allegories
of
Cinema
confi–
dently issues a series of grand, Olympian critical pronouncements and in–
terpretations. That's where one's real reservations begin. As a critic james
can be called only embarrassing. He is clearly unqualified for the part, al–
most completely lacking in ability to tell good work from bad, origi–
nality from derivativeness, complexity from superficiality. james's idea of
criticism is to subject a film to a series of purity tests for "politically cor–
rect" values, searching for (and, needless to say, where he needs to, always
finding) ideological "contradictions," "tensions," "fractures,"
"inconsistencies," or "equivocations" to demolish fUms he doesn't like.
In one of the more egregious instances, john Cassavetes's delicate, tenta–
tive, semicomic
Shadows
is judged to be, by turns, manipulative, deceptive,
prevaricating, fraudulent, and (in the key phrase that sums everything up)
"politically equivocating," more or less entirely on the basis of the fact
that a white actress was cast to play the part of a light-skinned black
woman (who passes for white in the story). For the flat-minded james,
that represents an act of political cowardice and a damning indictment of
the work.
Of course, the issue is not whether we like or dislike a particular
film. What gives one pause is the adequacy of political loyalty tests as
ways of grading works of art. What james's writing (and most other
ideologically based criticism, unfortunately including most feminist analy–
sis) fails to understand is not only that the greatest art works
will
never
be reducible to schematic political agendas, but that not to be
summarizable in such a way is an aspect of their greatness. james occa–
sionally writes about pop culture in film magazines, and his literal-mind–
edness about ferreting out hidden political significances might work
with
schlock, but it won't do for something like
Shadows.
Methods of analysis
that suffice to dissect "political equivocations" in the evening news aren't
adequate to appreciate the expressive subtleties of an art work, precisely
because works of art function so much more complexly than Dan
Rather's scripts do. james just doesn't understand how works of genius
make meanings. He is oblivious to the special ways of knowing that
art
works induce as alternatives to the very social and economic categories
he invokes. He can't appreciate how the greatest works cultivate com–
plex, shifting states of consciousness and awareness that will always defy
