On the Work of the Critic

In his Laws, Plato decrees:

In regard then to every representation, whether in drawing, music or any other art, he, who is to be a competent judge, must possess three requisites: he must know in the first place what the imitation is, secondly, he must know of its correctness, and, thirdly, that it has been well-executed in words and melodies and rhythms.  (669 a, b)

Several aspects of this declaration deserve further consideration.  In Plato’s dialogues, the work of the artist, particularly the poet, is disenfranchised and, even, regarded as potential inimical to the well-being of the City.  The sensuous world is already a copy of the invisible Ideas or Forms.  Therefore, the artist or poet operates at a second remove from reality – he copies what is already a copy.  His activity is superfluous and a distraction from the political and metaphysical realities that Socrates endorses: human participation in the city as a place in which justice is enacted and the ascent from the shadow realm of every day existence toward the radiant domain of the Ideas.  (In this scheme, the critic would operate at a third remove from the Truth – he contemplates and describes a copy of a copy: that is, his criticism is representation of what is already a representation of a representation.)  Plato’s prescription as to the work of the critic in his Laws seems much more benign.  Unlike Socrates, Plato seems to think that there is a valid place for the arts in the City and that the critic, further, has an important role in assessing the work of artists.

The critic’s first order of business is “recognizing” what is being “imitated” – Plato uses the word gignoskein for this cognitive activity.  Second, the critic must assess whether the representation is “true” – he uses the word “orthos” for this faculty.  Finally, the critic must assess whether the work’s form is beautiful and properly tailored to the thing imitated – the Greek prefix eu is here deployed as in eurhythmic (beautiful rhythm).  Observe that these three canons all relate to “imitation”.  All art “imitates”.  We might question this fundamental assumption: what does music imitate?  What does a painting by Jackson Pollock imitate?  But, I think, these objections can be readily met: music imitates the motion of the soul or spirit as it progresses through various intellectual states and emotions – music imitates, therefore, ecstasy, resignation, sorrow, joy and the various transitions between these states of being.  Similarly, one might observe that an abstract painting is, also, a depiction of the artist’s state of mind, his or her emotional response to physical or spiritual stimuli.  Therefore, the concept of imitation, probably, is elemental to the arts.

Also problematic, I suppose, is the distinction between the first two cognitive faculties that the critic is required to exercise: what is the difference between “recognizing” the imitation and determining if the imitation is “true”?  Presumably, if the imitation is not true, the critic won’t be able to recognize the subject of the imitation.  Thus, on first analysis, the notion of “recognition” and orthos (or truth) seem be so closely aligned that it may be difficult to draw an exact distinction.  But I think recognition has a different broader meaning.  In my view, recognition is categorical.  The critic must determine the category of thing offered to his analysis by the artist.  In a sense, I think this consideration involves genre.  What type of art work are we presented: is the play a tragedy, a satyr-play, or a comedy?  Are we dealing with an opera or a musical comedy?  Is the canvas a nude or a history painting or a still life?  Are we dealing with a lyric poem, a sonnet, or epic verse?  Accordingly, I think, Plato means that the critic must initially discern the generic category to which the art object belongs as a predicate for considering whether the representation is “true” or “orthotic.”

In this context, the final category seems clear and readily understood: once we know the genre into which the art object fits (that is, we understand how it acknowledges and embodies the historical tradition of this sort of representation), then, we can assess the truth of what we are shown, and, finally, how the form and stylistic parameters of the work embody its meaning.  Viewed in this light, the three species of cognition that Plato urges are (1) historical (how does the work conform or differ from previous works of the same general sort) (2) moral – is the work true? Or does it lie in some way? and (3) stylistic – how does the way the work is made embody its genre and meanings?

Let’s apply these criteria to an art work: consider the 1956 Western, The Fastest Gun Alive, a modest and relatively low-budget B-movie starring Glenn Ford. 

If I am right that the first element of criticism is categorical, then, we must ask: What is the nature of The Fastest Gun Alive?  What is its genre?  Of course, the film is a Western and must be understood within the grouping of films (and writings) of that kind.  Westerns share family resemblances – that is, no two Westerns are identical, but many of them will demonstrate similar themes and bear a resemblance to other works of that kind.  Fundamental to the Western is the distinction that these films draw between the wilderness and civilization.  The mountains and the desert, inhabited by outlaws and Indians, besiege the enclaves of villages – in the wilderness, men must be self-reliant and ready to defend themselves and their kin without recourse to the law.  Conflict arises when the wilderness encounters the village – that is, at the intersection between the wilderness and the town.  The settled land represented by the town is peopled by women, children, nuclear families – the periphery is where bands of outlaws and tribes of warriors roam.  Women and children represent civilizing forces.  In towns, people pursue commerce and live according to economies involving money, wages, and exchange of goods for currency; in the wilderness, people forage for gold and treasure and rob one another.  The town represents community; the wild territory is inhabited by nomadic outlaws, stoic, aloof, and dangerous individuals.  Of course, from the outset, the definitions informing wilderness and civilization, and the moralities associated with the two places, are mutable – in fact, in later Westerns, that mourn the passing of the wild country, the values invert: the city is corrupt, dangerous, full of cowardly bourgeois who lack the means to defend themselves (for instance the  in High Noon or the politicians in Peckinpah’s later films); by contrast, the wild places of desert and high sierra are pure, suffused with the old virtues of self-reliance and pioneer rectitude.  It doesn’t matter whether town or wilderness is morally privileged.  The essence of the Western is the clash between the values of the frontier and the self-reliant morality of the wilderness.

The Fastest Gun Alive begins with a shot of a angular peak bisecting a wedge of cloudy sky.  It’s black and white and an image of the wilderness.  Next, we see three bad hombres riding across the desert after emerging from behind the ridge of the mountain.  The bad men enter a town, threaten one of the people there, and the leader of the bandits shoots the man down, after invoking the archaic code of the West to force his victim to draw his gun.  George Temple, the gunslinger in retirement, is a man of the town.  He has been civilized by his wife, a beautiful statuesque woman who announces that she is pregnant in the first scene between man and wife.  Like innumerable frontier hamlets, from the village in William S. Hart’s Hells Hinges (1916) to the mining camp in McCabe and Mrs. Miller,(1971) a church with steeple occupies the center of the town.  The church symbolizes both the blessings and discontents of civilization: the church signifies organized religion and community spirit, but can also represent hypocrisy and the herd mentality of the town-folk.  George Temple precipitates the film’s crisis when he demonstrates his virtuosity with his six-gun – he has become bored with his profession as a dry goods merchant, a job that requires him to sell candy to children and respond to the petty complaints of female customers.  Genre exists so that the artist can reverse polarities with respect to fundamental values and devise variations on well-established themes.  For these ingenious complications and fugue-like reiterations of themes to be effective, however, the critical eyes must recognize that the film operates within the parameters of the classical Western.

One sequence in The Fastest Gun Alive demonstrates how far a film can stray from its genre while still remaining rooted in the Western form.  About fifteen minutes into the film, the narrative pauses to incorporate a spectacular dance number performed by a minor character, really a figure who has no real role in the narration at all, a young man (Russ Tamblyn) courting a woman at a barn dance.  The dance sequence involves elaborate gymnastics, trampoline-like effects implemented courtesy of a see-saw, and a stomping hoe-down executed by the young man perched atop stilt-like shovels.  This sequence can’t be reconciled to the generally earnest and psychologically acute tone of the rest of the film – this was an adult Western and involves speeches in which characters agonize over earlier psychic trauma.  The scene is like an archaeological artifact embedded in the movie – it reminds us that Westerns, even those with pretensions toward seriousness, were intended as entertainment for all categories of viewers.  Thus, the form admits song and dance numbers – anything is admissible, more or less, so long as it entertains the viewers.  In the comedy Western, Way out West (1937) with Laurel and Hardy, there are carefully choreographed song and dance numbers; many Western heroes play guitar and sing around the campfire (think of Gene Autry and Roy Rogers); even some John Ford Westerns feature musical interludes, ballads and lullabies sung to restless herds of cattle.  With their overdetermined and stylized elements, and the generally fantastical mood that prevails in many Westerns, these inserted song and dance numbers remind us that the Western is not fundamentally realistic but, in fact, derives from ballads and bears some kinship to the movie musical – in fact, the athletic dancer in this scene, Russ Tamblyn had earlier achieved fame for similarly muscular dancing in the Western musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954).  The elaborate dance scene in The Fastest Gun Alive reminds us that genre films are never pure:  they can incorporate any number of extraneous elements so long as the basic requirement – that the audience be continuously entertained – is achieved.

Having recognized The Fastest Gun Alive as a Western, we, then, turn to the question of truth.  Is the movie “truthful”?  Since the film is a genre picture, there’s no point in asking whether the movie is true to the historical realities of the old West.  The old West establishes a system of oppositions and clashing value systems that define the film’s narrative.  But no real claim to historical authority or accuracy is made – in fact, this picture remains self-consciously vague as to where it is set.  Nothing really defines the year in which the action takes place, nor does the plot or script tell us where the town is located.  We are shown a map but this is merely to establish that the bad outlaws are close to the village where the story is set and will arrive there shortly.  The imminent arrival of the murderous bandits (and, then, the posse that is determinedly chasing them) set up a “ticking clock” – the action has to be compressed into the time represented by the film (which is essentially an Aristotelian “real time” during the last hour of the movie; in other words events unfold without edits suggesting the passage of time – this is made manifest when a crisis is announced and a threat made to burn down the village “in five minutes”.  The screen time that lapses is, then, in fact, five minutes.)  The need to create urgency that will impel the action to its climax explains the shots showing a map and the progress of the bandits across the open spaces between the little isolated village.  But the map doesn’t tell us where the action takes place or, even, the State or territory where events are happening.  We aren’t shown anything to explain why the town exists in the middle of nowhere or how its economy works.  Details as to date, time, year, and location are left conspicuously ambiguous.  We know generally that the action occurs after Wyatt Earp and other famous gunmen clashed in Dodge City – but, beyond that vague reference, no effort is made to correlate the film to any of the truths that history might establish.

So how should truth be defined in the context of this film?  With respect to The Fastest Gun Alive, the notion of truth has a psychological inflection.  Truth means a truthful representation of human emotion and impulses.  More broadly defined “truth” here means fidelity to group dynamics – the movie purports to show us not only psychological truths but also truths that are descriptive of how men and women in a community act in forming a moral consensus and, then, implementing the values that they proclaim themselves to hold in common.  The truths explored in the film relate to how psychological trauma if not resolved leads to violence – George Temple has witnessed his father’s death and failed to avenge him; he has suffered psychic violence and bears the scars of that trauma, scars that constrict and limit his ability to act.  Even the vicious gunslinger suffers from past trauma – his wife left him for a gambler and the film suggests that the bad man is motivated by sexual insecurity: he has replaced his phallus with a gun.  Those to whom injury has been done, do injury in turn.

The villagers are pious and conventional in their thought processes.  The film shows them swearing a vow to God to never invoke George Temple’s deadly prowess with his gun.  But when the villains threaten to burn down their town, almost everyone reneges on their earlier oath and urges Temple to duel with the villain.  Group rectitude only goes so far before being sacrificed on the altar of the common good.  Groups are fickle – they can be undoubtedly sincere and well-meaning, but, when threatened, the group reverses course and shows itself willing to traduce communal oaths taken only a few minutes before.   This jaded view of group dynamics is one of the elements of “truth” that the film explores.

Finally, the movie dramatizes how competition becomes obsessive and, even, deadly.  The bad hombre played by Broderick Crawford is desperate to show that he is the titular “fastest gun alive” and is willing to sacrifice everything to this end.  Male competition has a dark side – men will compete to the death unless they are prevented by more rational people from killing one another.  The awful logic of competition is that there can be only one winner – and the man who sets out to prove that he is “the fastest gun alive” is willing to insanely sacrifice all of his ill-gotten treasure (the loot from the robberies), the safety of his outlaw henchmen, and, ultimately, even his own life to demonstrate proficiency and superiority in a pointless, even futile, pursuit – pulling a gun out of a leather holster and firing it as quickly as possible.  The bizarre dance number that intrudes on the movie’s first half-hour illustrates the madness of male competition – Glenn Ford reportedly was outraged that Tamblyn was allowed “to do a Donald O’Connor all over (my) movie.”  Tamblyn’s not the hero and has a small part and he doesn’t get to fire a six gun, but for five or six minutes he takes over the film to the complete exclusion of Glenn Ford.  Accordingly, the dance number rips a hole in the fabric of the film – it’s a like shotgun blast tearing open the movie’s narrative.  Who owns this film?  The ostensible star, Glenn Ford, or this upstart kid with the fantastic dance moves?  The notion of competition, accordingly, is highlighted as a truth integral to the film – providing an extra-narrative (or supra-narrative) commentary on the destructive nature of masculine competition.

Thus, the film addresses certain themes as truths: Men are competitive and will compete to the death; trauma makes men violent; sexual betrayal and jealousy can be displaced into destructive and, even, lethal competition; the townspeople are never better than a mob – a mob can be good or bad or indifferent, but it is always sublimely fickle.  (It should be said that Glenn Ford’s problematic performance is inadequate to the film’s depiction of psychological truth.  Ford imitates James Dean, an actor whose style and emoting are wholly inimical to Ford’s stalwart, sober, and staid persona.  Thus, Ford’s performance, designed to highlight the emotional truths that the film presents, fails – Ford seems to be straining for melodramatic effects and pathos beyond his ordinary range and timbre; the inauthenticity of his performance, therefore, undercuts the canon of truth as it applies to the psychological issues that the movie embodies.)

Finally, how does The Fastest Gun Alive embody the ideas that it dramatizes in its artistic form?  The clarity of the film’s fundamental conflicts are established by clear, carefully focused, and authoritatively posed compositions, all lucidly presented in austere black-and-white.  The film is abstract and, even, geometric. in the sense that it avoids any form of expressionism – action is rendered clearly and efficiently by an objective camera placed inevitably in a position with the best, and most informative, perspective on the events staged.  There is nothing colorful, artistic, or, even, particularly personal about the way the film is made – art is a feminine indulgence in a world that is starkly masculine.  Although people behave ambiguously, there is no ambiguity in the way the film is shot and edited – we are not forced to discern events through webwork of shadow or chiaroscuro.   Everything is clearly presented within a clearly defined, even Cartesian framework of space and time.

The psychological grace notes intrinsic to the new adult Western require tight close-ups.  The audience must see the character’s faces so as to scrutinize them for traces of inner turmoil.  Thus, close-ups are interpolated into the shots showing groups of people interacting.  Even the villain, played by Broderick Crawford, is exposed as conflicted, even, fearful at the film’s climax – he is accorded his fair share of angst and the camera focuses on him tightly to show the sweat on his forehead and the worry in his eyes.  Since most of the group shots are prosaic, the score by Andre Previn is over-emphatic: sound cues trumpet conflict and anxiety.  The score dramatizes what the film maker and actors do not.  These cues are particularly excessive with respect to images showing George Temple’s pregnant wife – the actress, Jeanne Crain is profoundly inexpressive, even inert, with a limited range of expression: she’s more a mannequin than a performer and, so, explicit musical emphasis must be used to express emotions that are beyond her range.  The climactic gun battle is intentionally obscured by a flurry of Soviet-style montage – guns being drawn, pistols fired in close-up, with no long or master shot to show us what is happening.  This technique is designed to create suspense about the outcome of the duel and, later, to even misdirect the audience.  Finally, a sweeping crane shot lifts the camera up above the graveyard at the side of the church, providing us with an aerial perspective on the village – George Temple is now just another member of the community, men, women and children that we see walking on the town’s street.  This contrasts with the opening scenes in the film in which George is alone, blazing away at a targets, in the wasteland of the desert.  The film ends with him integrated into the village that he has saved. 

Analysis never ceases.  Works of art, even, rather humble ones are inexhaustible.  Once, the critic has directed his thought about the art work through the three inquiries mandated by Plato – recognition of type, truthfulness, and style – then, the process can (and, probably, should be) repeated.  Our tentative responses to those three inquiries can be cycled back into thought about the art object under consideration.  Hermeneutics is circular – what we have learned or proposed as a hypothesis can now be used to refine our thinking as to genre, an analysis that will likely reveal additional truth-propositions in the work, and, that will more clearly illumine the technical and stylistic devices used to embody those propositions in the art under consideration.

A noteworthy element of this analysis is that, consistent with the New Criticism, the intentions of the artist, his or her quirks and obsessions need not be central to this interpretative work.  In other words, the Platonic system for criticism outlined in this essay represents an alternative to the auteur theory – auteur analysis compares individual works by one “author” or film-director for the purpose of establishing signature traits.  These traits may be linked, then, to the auteur’s obsessions or psychological characteristics.  The Platonic mode of interpretation treats the work as defined more exactly by its genre – that is, the phase of recognition – than by the unique personality of the creator.

In a 1979 lecture at the Museum of Modern Art, Manny Farber comments on his critical practice.  Farber seems idiosyncratic in that, contrary to the auteur analysis then current, he regards film as more anonymous – film, Farber, argues is more the product of the cultural environment of its time, than it is a system of intentional meaning inscribed by a specific auteur.  The film-author’s intentions may are registered on the surface of the work, readily visible and mostly intelligible, but always superficial – the deep strains and stresses in the art work are cultural and historical.  A script may proclaim a timeless truth, but the make-up, hair styling, the costumes, and set design are always rooted in a specific period and, indeed, undercut the claim to timelessness or eternal verity that the dialogue may propose.   The film critic should approach the work as an archaeologist, excavating down through ideology and surface appearance to discover the cultural substrate in which the art object is located.

Considering a lurid crime film from the early seventies, The Honeymoon Killers, Faber says:

(W)hat I’m trying to suggest is that you can read a movie differently.  If we get rid of the aesthetic pursuit, the arty pursuit, finding what is artful and what is continuous in artfulness and read them as though they were something that wasn’t produced by artists.  They’re just products... and all of society is based on building a priceless item and making people feel that they live through products and good products are the things to have, good bodies are the things to have and so everything has been distorted away from reading a movie just plain, reading it the way you would read a sports story in the newspaper, or the way you would see a TV show...The Honeymoon Killers is like a transparency of your own life, a transparency of the period, which was 1970, right on the money.  It wasn’t later than 1970; it wasn’t earlier.  And it was exactly on the money in relation to what other artists were doing at the moment.  In a sense it was too good for its time, but who cares?  I’m not interested in what was good.  It should have been read as a period movie, as what it was sociologically, politically, in terms of women, in terms of sex, in terms of mortality, killing sadism – whatever.  It should have read in that way, and I don’t think it was...

Farber is arguing on the “recognition” axis in the three-fold system that I endorse in this essay.  He says that we must recognize what the film reveals, inadvertently in many respects, as opposed to what it’s creators think that it is telling or showing us.  The Fastest Gun Alive is showing us the exhaustion with the Western that prevailed in the mid-fifties, the anxiety about heroism in the wake of the World War and the subsequent futile conflict in Korea; the film suggests that the generation of men raised on war (and experiencing war through the lens of their own private cowardice) is about to explode, that these men are no longer satisfied with peace and that they are ready, now ten years after the fighting, to turn away from their families and escape into empty displays of virtuosity and alcoholism.  The film uses the Western to express discontent with the life of selling and buying, commerce and advertising.  But the film also demonstrates that this discontent simmers in a highly conventional and ideologically constrained society – the group is omnipresent and governs the options available to the hero.  No one knows whether to duel to the death and dance insanely, ricocheting off the square corners of the box in which everyone is trapped.  What does it mean when the Western quietly goes mad?