February 7–14, 2002

books

High and Low

New York intellectual Robert Warshow split his regard between the erudite and the entertaining.

by Frank Halperin

The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre, and Other Aspects of Popular Culture

By Robert Warshow
Harvard University Press, 320 pp., $18.95

When Robert Warshow died in 1955 at the untimely age of 37, he left behind a daedal body of criticism incomparable in sheer profundity and contemplative discernment. As a member of the New York Intellectuals, a longhaired anti-communist coterie of left-wing thinkers that included such writers as Dwight MacDonald, Lionel Trilling and Mary McCarthy, Warshow reflected the group’s aesthetic of erudite, modernist sophistication that manifested itself in a series of fiercely interpretive essays. What distinguished him from his colleagues was his devout mission to articulate the concept of experience and society’s relation to it within the context of mass culture, a force he found impossible to ignore. He believed that the cinema was the most fully realized medium of popular culture and the best vehicle for him to pursue his study of the spectator’s response to a contrived reality — an exercise in which he professed to participate wholeheartedly, forsaking any pretense of removed objectivity. "A man watches a movie," he once wrote, "and the critic must acknowledge that he is that man."

The Immediate Experience, an anthology of Warshow’s pop-cult criticism that first appeared posthumously in 1962, has now received a deluxe reissue, featuring thoughtful appreciations by David Denby and Stanley Cavell, along with eight previously uncollected essays. In addition to Warshow’s extensive film writing, the book includes analytical discourses on subjects ranging from Arthur Miller and Clifford Odets to Franz Kafka and Gertrude Stein, to George Herriman’s comic strip Krazy Kat. The selections were originally published in such magazines as The Nation, Partisan Review and Commentary (for which the author served as an editor).

For those who prefer their movie criticism distilled to star ratings or thumbs-up/thumbs-down summations, be forewarned: The Warshow method will induce cognitive exhaustion. His work was remarkably complex in its scope, and the incessant pontification evident in these critiques often borders on the esoteric. Yet this is not to deny the overall brilliance and heightened perceptiveness of these involving pieces. "The Gangster as Tragic Hero" and "Movie Chronicle: The Westerner" are compelling deconstructions of each respective genre; equally substantial is his take on The Best Years of Our Lives ("The Anatomy of Falsehood"), where he proficiently contrasts the superficial populist power of the film with what he opines as its subtly disingenuous treatment of political realism. Perhaps most illuminating are his two meditations on Charlie Chaplin, "Monsieur Verdoux" and "A Feeling of Sad Dignity," both of which evaluate the transcendental societal relevance of Chaplin’s work. Aside from the film essays, there are several disparate treatises in The Immediate Experience that deserve considerable attention. "The ‘Idealism’ of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg" dissects the doomed couple’s prison correspondence and theorizes that their delusional musings are related to the corrupted tenets of communism. "Paul, the Horror Comics, and Dr. Wertham" is a refreshingly animated, semi-personal narrative in which a psychiatrist’s polemical tirade against comic books and their threat to children’s morality is juxtaposed with Warshow’s ambivalent feelings regarding his 11-year-old son’s unceasing fascination with them. And "E.B. White and the New Yorker " pointedly lambastes the magazine’s antiseptic, genteel outlook on life with a curt Andy Rooney-like tartness.

Five months before he succumbed to a fatal heart attack, Warshow applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship in reference to a proposed book on film; this application functions as the author’s preface to The Immediate Experience. In the last sentence, he writes of his hope that "the volume may possibly be a contribution to literature." One can now imagine him nursing mint juleps with James Agee and Pauline Kael in a heavenly screening room, content in the knowledge of his groundbreaking achievement. The Immediate Experience is not only a paradigm of trenchant film criticism, but also a fundamental text in the discipline of cultural studies.