Links

From January 1964.

For all its no-nonsense masculinity, Hawksian cinema has always been very stylized. His array of adventures make their stoical gestures in an enclosed world where such gestures are sufficient unto themselves. Unfortunately, about half of “Red Line 7000″ consists of real footage of apparently suicidal stock-car racing in America, and it is harder to believe in the validity of stylized stoicism as a direct statement on the modern world. Hawks, unlike Preminger, has taken his studio-conditioned out-look out into the real world and there is consequently a fatal disharmony between the old movie myths he seeks to perpetuate and the insistent iconography of the modern world he is unable to ignore. Unlike Antonioni, Hawks believes that the sentiments of 1935 are appropriate to the cybernetic ’60s, but “Red Line 7000″ fails to establish his thesis. If Hawks has represented much of what I like in the cinema, Warhol represents much of what I resist. We live in an era when many people are as pathologically frightened of being put on as of being put down. Magazine articles are written to warn us of the perils of alleged artists who do not take their audience seriously, and Warhol is usually cited as the worst offender. I have found in the past that with me a little Warholian cinema goes a long way, but it suddenly strikes me that I have never seen anything by Warhol entirely lacking in interest. I happened to stumble into the Cinametheque one night in search of his Fire Island opus which is reportedly too salacious even for the American Civil Liberties Union. As a last minute replacement for the mysteriously unavailable Fire Island film, the management reprised “The Life Story of Juanita Castro,” which I had never seen, and it shook me up considerably simply by making me laugh for long stretches of time, not so much at it as with it. –“Clip Job : Sarris Considers Warhol,” Andrew Sarris, The Village Voice, from December 1965

Marx never wrote about cellulite, though I am quite sure he suffered from this “unsightly condition.” He endured several excruciating physical ailments throughout his lifetime: carbuncles, insomnia, bronchitis, a bad liver, pleurisy and haemorrhoids. If he were alive today I am sure he would definitely have a few more “backaches” to contend with, the current cellulite epidemic being one of the many. It might be very much lagging in order of importance, but nevertheless an examination of this modern phenomenon vividly illustrates the manipulative powers of both advertising and marketing, two wasteful and exploitative processes which are an integral part of capitalism…. Advertising and marketing constitutes part of the modern system of production and consumption. Advertising in particular is the dominant cultural form in capitalist society. It mimics and subverts every genre of art and cultural practice to enhance and alter the meaning of lifeless objects. But advertisements do more than exaggerate the basic function of a product. They imbue products with all kinds of social abilities. Marx called this process the fetishism of commodities. But surely people buy a particular soft drink or breakfast cereal because they like its taste and are thirsty, hungry or want to keep regular: they are not hypnotised into thinking that they are going to be or have the beautiful woman in the TV commercial? But advertising does not adhere to such a crude formula. Utilitarian items such as food or drink become exaggerated props in advertisements that subtly portray or imply an ideal lifestyle. This ideal is not an outlandishly glamourous way of life. It is a comfortable and customary one which we can all realistically aspire to, one which the product will bring us nearer to. But some commodities bring us nearer to this coveted lifestyle than others. –“Marxism and Cellulite: A consumer’s guide to marketing,” Catherine Lyons, Red Banner: A magazine of socialist ideas

Although shepherds and shepherdesses have been in short supply in the United States, versions of pastoral have flourished here. The cult of the Noble Red Man, or, as Mark Twain derisively labeled it, “The Fenimore Cooper Indian” (a type given to long speeches in mellifluous and extravagantly figurative English), is an obvious example. So is the heroizing of simple cowboys, farmers, and miners in the western stories of writers like Bret Harte, the movies of John Ford, and the art of Frederic Remington, Charles M. Russell, Maynard Dixon, and Thomas Hart Benton. Both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Grapes of Wrath might be read as pastorals in Empson’s sense. The chief loci of American pastoral have been the rural South and the Far West, while most of its practitioners have been sophisticated easterners for whom the South and West were destinations for bouts of adventurous travel. They went equipped with sketchpads and notebooks in which to record the picturesque manners and customs of their rustic, unlettered fellow countrymen. –“American Pastoral,” Jonathan Raban, The New York Review of Books