The New Yorker:

Sixties Hollywood ushered in a tidal wave of commercial romantic slop, and now bad movies are more popular than good books. Can independent criticism save the day?

By Pauline Kael

Is anyone surprised that the critics and journalists who only a few weeks ago were acclaiming the new creative freedom of young American moviemakers are now climbing aboard the new sentimentality? The press may use the term “romance” for this deliberately fabricated regression in recent movies, but in Hollywood the businessmen talk more crassly. They say, “We’re going back to heart.” The back-to-heart movement is accompanied by strong pressures on reviewers, who are informed that they have lost touch with the public. Reviewers are supposed to show their heart by puckering up for every big movie.

As part of the Pop impulse of the sixties, movies have been elevated to a central position among the arts—a dominant, almost overwhelming position. Those who grew up during this period have been so sold on Pop and so saturated with it that they appear to have lost their bearings in the arts. And so when they discover that, of course, Pop isn’t enough, and they want some depth and meaning from movies, they head right for the slick synthetic. Those who have abandoned interest in literature except for the à-la-mode mixture of Pop and sticky, such as Vonnegut, Hesse, Tolkien, Brautigan, and a little I Ching, are likely to have comparably fashionable tastes in movies. To the children of “Blow-Up,” movies that are literary in the worst way—movies that superficially resemble head books and art films—can seem profound and suggestive. Every few months, there is a new spate of secondhand lyrical tricks.

Robert Redford is impaled, like a poor butterfly, in frozen frames at the end of picture after picture. Directors have become so fond of telescopic lenses that any actor crossing a street in a movie may linger in transit for a hazy eternity—the movie equivalent of a series of dots. The audience accepts this sort of thing in movies that not only are without the vitality of Pop but are enervated and tenuous—like the worst of what earlier generations of college students fled from when they went to the movies.

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