Thinking About Movies: Watching, Questioning, Enjoying, by Peter Lehman and William Luhr

When I was an undergraduate at USC, one of my friends was initially a film criticism major at the prestigious film school there, and he found it an immensely distressing experience, so much so that he was despondent to the point of being suicidal before choosing a more healthy major. As it happened, he found the professors of his major spent so much of their time tearing down films that little time was left to enjoy them. Even though this book includes enjoying in its subtitle, the enjoyment the book advocates is the enjoyment one gets from putting oneself in a position of superiority by criticizing and critiquing a movie and demonstrating that it falls short of a particular standard of Progressive perfection, which, since such a standard can never be reached, always means that there is something to criticize. While the sort of criticism this book engages in may be enjoyable to its writers, who seem to be deconstructionalists at heart, it probably is not likely to be good for most people who go to films to enjoy, and look for reasons to like something rather than look for reasons to dislike something.

In terms of its contents, this book is divided into fifteen chapters, dealing with such topics as: narrative and formal structure, authorship, genre, series, sequels, and remakes, actors and stars, audiences and receptions, the relationship of film to other media like literature, radio, and television, realism, gender, race, class, and sexuality, and an entire chapter devoted to a critique of Citizen Kane. Besides that classic film, the authors, mining heavily from their own work, the authors critique a wide variety of films, including blockbusters like Jurrasic Park, art films like The Crying Game, foreign films like Rules of the Game, Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, and Rashoman, horror films like The People Under The Stairs, and many more. Although the writers of the book do their best to be critical throughout, it is clear that they have their biases. For one, the filmmakers love the fact that Rashoman eschews any sort of ultimate truth and does not even reveal what “really” happened, pointing to the similar denials of the writers of any sort of ultimate truth in either art or life. The authors also delight in tearing down what is high and building up what is low, taking the prerogative of God to do such things without having His elevated or noble view of morals and decency.

In thinking about this book and its message, my feelings are very mixed. On the one hand, as someone who critiques a lot of different aspects of writing, movies, and music, it is clear that I have an interest in and a certain ability in criticism that is not completely remote from that of the authors. On the other hand, this book demonstrates the excesses of art criticism, in the attempt to have it both ways–to present ideals (if abhorrent ones) but without presenting those views as a target for deconstruction, only seeking to respond critically to the creations of others without showing one’s hand and thus being treated with the same degree of critique. The fact that this book, as dishonest as it is in terms of its approach and perspective, is designed to be the only sort of book that its readers are likely to see as part of a general education film appreciation course, makes it all the more troublesome. There is much to critique in this world, but ultimately, we are in the position of having to make a defense of what we believe and where we stand, not the authorities whose job it is to lord it over and deconstruct everything else. If we spend too long critiquing and not enough time creating, it is easy to forget that.