Rien à dire

Well, it has gotten hot again (hot by Seattle standards), and I'm feeling sluggish on about every level. Not that I haven't been crossing things off my To Do list. I've done some yardwork, mostly watering thirsty plants. I've done the laundry. I finished a piece of writing for a fanzine. I've looked at hotel possibilities for the first few days of the Montréal trip. (I see that they have a YWCA hotel. Sharee and I have stayed at the one in Vancouver a few times.)

Now I'm just killing time until the Mariners game starts at four. Yes, I'm wasting my time and your time too. So sue me.

This Island Earth (1955)

This Island Earth has everything against it. It's a fantasy, it's science-fiction, it's slanted at adolescents, it's a routine product from a studio with no intellectual pretensions, it has no auteurs, its artistic 'texture' is largely mediocre -- and for all that, it has a genuine charge of poetry and of significant social feeling. It's not cliché; with its sense of inner tensions, of moral tragedy, its myth.

Our suggestion is that academic criticism is condemned to misunderstand the film, to dismiss it as routine trash, because its psychology is straightforward, its terms melodramatic, and so on. 'High culture' is preoccupied with what Henry James called 'density of specification' and what F.R. Leavis calls 'texture', with the question: 'Does it work on my level?' But such criteria are irrelevant to this as to most movies. The question must be, rather, 'Does it work on its level?' (for people who freely respond to simpler textures).

The temptation then is to swing to the other extreme, and fall into the studiedly uncritical acceptance of any and every form of popular art as 'myth' and 'folklore of the twentieth century'; or, at a slightly more aware level, to abandon oneself to the ironic relish of 'camp'. Too often this is both a studied falsity and a (completely unnecessary) surrender to the (supposed) naivety of popular thought. Our implication is that some pulp-movies are very much more considerable than others, that the mythic can be distinguished from the cliché, that, through the myth, movies communicate with people's real doubt and feelings, that such movies are in a very real sense 'good' art as opposed to others which are in a very real sense 'bad' art. This isn't to elevate the subversive possibilities of entertainment above its reinforcing of social attitudes; This Island Earth isn't subversive, for most of its spectators. But its tragic sense of moral tensions is very different from the comic-strip images which many 'pop-artists' prefer to plunder.

-- Raymond Durgnat, Films and Feelings (1967)