This morning a friend wrote about my just-posted Last Movie review, to wit: “I especially enjoyed your analysis of what’s so wrong with the natives-as-primitive-idiot-filmmakers part. In the ‘70s, at campus film societies, that was always treated as the basic premise of the movie — the noble natives turning the tables on Hollywood. All very p.c. to the extent that it makes sense, which is barely.
“The one thing I was a little surprised at, now that you’ve seen it, is that you didn’t circle back to address the Bilge Ebiri/Eric Kohn masterpiece claims. I’d love to see you riff on what THAT’S all about…”
Dennis Hopper in The Last Movie.
HE response: “Eric and Bilge, brilliant as they basically are, are often generous to a fault. The ‘reassessment of a once derided or under-appreciated film’ template was set by Robin Wood‘s Hitchcock reassessments (particularly his explanation of the thematic undercurrents in North by Northwest) and then F.X. Feeney when he wrote his big forgiving reappraisal of Heaven’s Gate. Since that point guys with F.X.’s temperament — generous, obliging, film-wormy, mildly compassionate, butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths — occasionally scout around with an idea of becoming the next F.X. in terms of the next re-discovery.”
Critic friend: “I hold a much less charitable view of this whole aggressive-reassessment-of-indulgent-‘70s-messes-as-works-of-genius phenomenon than you do. I think there’s an intensely jejune left-wing narcissism to it — these works that were ‘too pure’ for the system, now ‘rescued’ by fearless-knight critics who are the only ones with a vision pure enough to see the truth (since I’m convinced that 90 percent of the people who seek these films out today, based on what writers like F.X. or Richard Brody or Bilge are saying, are STILL going to end thinking, ‘What the fuck was that about?’).
“And there’s such a perverse logic to it. Namely: Of COURSE these noble-soothsayer critics are the only ones who can ‘see the truth’ about these films. That’s because ‘the truth” of these films — i.e., that their epic flaws are actually topsy-turvy virtues — exists only in the critics’ self-glorifying heads.