My Blog Week: January 2 to January 8

A Word on the Week

Critical Lapses (part three)

More from John Simon’s review of Star Wars (1977):

“The film […] has nowhere near the romantic invention, say, of the Edgar Rice Burroughs Martian novels”

“Here it is all trite characters and paltry verbiage, handled adequately by Harrison Ford […] uninspiredly by Mark Hamill, and wretchedly by Carrie Fisher, who is not even appealing as Princess Leia Organa (an organic lay).”

“John Berry’s set design is compelling…”

Critical treatments of movies need to be persuasive arguments; the reason for this furnishes itself. The review is aimed at the person who hasn’t seen the film. Opinions can be agreed with only if the recipient has shared the experience. Otherwise, has reverence for (or terror of) the person giving them.

Simon’s adverbial style amounts to only a series of implied, and unsupported contentions. In a sound argument, the beginning of any contention is a definition of terms, and terms are established by points of reference mutually understood. In other words, you can argue about which actor played the most effective Dracula, but you can’t win your case, unless you and the other party first agree on what a Dracula ought to be.

Reviewers offer their arguments one-sidedly, to a general audience that mostly doesn’t respond. But when we consider bad argumentation’s place in our cultural decline, we can see it’s high time for higher standards, and—on the principle that those who can dish it out, should be able to take it—no passes.

What makes the handling of a role adequate, vs uninspired, vs wretched—or what makes a human being “appealing”, in the case of Fisher, is never defined by Simon, or supported. We might say Ford is a taller man with a deeper voice, male qualities that communicate authority. We still need reason to believe Han Solo has to convey authority, as opposed to sneakiness, or imperiousness, or anything else. That requires placing the character in movie history; determining what type of character this is. Which actor in which role, in which film, gives us an exemplar that Ford’s performance can be compared to?

A good match between actor and role should yield adequateness at a minimum. The character Luke Skywalker, in this story, has his life upended by a murderous attack; then he receives a chance at a mission, which—from a sense of failure to have prevented the attack—may redeem him. It’s a fairly complicated transition from callow to heroic, but what would make the playing of this role inspired? Why does Simon perceive it to be uninspired?

In Fisher’s case the crude joke, and Simon’s reputation for ugly insults against women’s looks (he wrote that Barbra Streisand’s nose “zigzags across our horizon like a bolt of fleshy lightning”, objectively, not a relatable experience, if in Simon’s view, a possible one; and as humor, milked), suggest he meant “appealing” in the basest sense—that Carrie Fisher was not conventionally pretty. The same Washington Post obituary that supplies the parenthetical quotation on Streisand, also quotes him as saying: “I believe that unless a major part on stage or screen explicitly calls for an unsightly person, it is better filled by a performer who is, besides being talented, prepossessing.”

In Simon’s work we see the outlines and trappings of critical thought. He makes references, but doesn’t link them to any point he seems to be making. Humor is engaging; Simon pseudo-engages with bullying jokes. He has a facility for wordplay “…equaling comic strips […] or even outstripping them…”; “…the distressing thing called the Force, which is not a flat-footed allusion to New York’s finest…”

He has, in this review, one good conceit, that C-3PO and R2D2 resemble a teaming of Edward Everett Horton and Mickey Rooney, though Horton may not have been known even to 1977 audiences (try Sing It and Like It, with ZaSu Pitts, 1934).

Now, because Burroughs is in the public domain these days, I give you an excerpt from Thuvia, Maid of Mars, 1920.