By A. O. SCOTT
“A man watches a movie, and the critic must acknowledge that he is that man.” So wrote Robert Warshow, almost exactly 60 years ago, setting down what would become an unofficial motto for the profession. The idea that movies and other forms of popular culture could be subjected to serious critical scrutiny was a new and controversial notion in American intellectual circles at the time, and Warshow wanted to make clear that any such criticism would have to take account of its origins in everyday experience. Wherever your thoughts and judgments might take you, you always start out as a consumer, a member of the audience, a fan.
By now, the idea that criticism starts with what Warshow called “the immediate experience” seems inarguable, at least in principle. Sometimes, though, a critic may watch a movie and wonder, “Man, what am I doing here?” The blithe sexism of Warshow’s formulation is very much to the point here. In our own era, the universalism implicit for Warshow in the words “movies” and “man” can no longer be taken for granted. The entertainment industry does business through careful demographic sorting, dividing its potential public by age, gender, region and race, and hoping to hit as many of those disparate targets as possible. At the same time, members of the public are accustomed to looking at themselves and one another through various lenses of identity, and to spotting the biases and blind spots in what they read.
So a critic may still be — speaking strictly for myself — a man watching a movie, but he doesn’t want to be that guy, the one who either sets himself above the common experience or remains clueless about the different impressions a movie can make. Let me put it another way: I’m still kind of hung up on “Fifty Shades of Grey,” a movie that stirred up all kinds of curious feelings and that continues to exercise a strange power over my innocent mind.
Sorry to get all confessional. The “Fifty Shades” phenomenon has inspired a widespread loosening of inhibitions. Long before the film opened on Feb. 13, E. L. James’s trilogy of novels about the romance between a naïve college student named Anastasia Steele and a handsome billionaire named Christian Grey was a topic of discussion in book clubs, online forums, and (a bit later) among opinion writers and literary critics. The global popularity of the books — 100 million copies is the number most frequently bandied around — has seemed to open a window into an often hidden zone of the collective psyche, adding a voyeuristic thrill to the dreary work of deadline-driven cultural analysis.
Aspiring wizards awaiting “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” in Zanesville, Ohio, in 2001.
SCOTT MACDONALD / ZANESVILLE TIMES RECORDER, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
And also providing an irresistible opportunity to moralize on the subject of women’s sexuality. There were objections to the way Christian and Anastasia’s affair seemed to blur the line between consensual B.D.S.M. and abuse, and debates about whether the popularity of the books represented an advance for feminism, the durability of traditional gender roles, the terminal decadence of Western civilization or a boon for the sex-toy industry.
The film’s release, and its domination of the Valentine’s Day box office, revived these questions and raised some new ones, including about the differences between what happens on the page and on the screen. The books go as far as Ms. James’s and her readers’ imaginations can take them, detailing the things Christian likes to do with Anastasia and Anastasia’s sometimes confused, sometimes ecstatic responses to them. (“Orgasm! Another one!”) Sam Taylor-Johnson’s film version, constrained by the decorum of the multiplex-friendly R rating, takes a softer-core, more indirect approach. And while this discrepancy is hardly surprising, it brings up an especially vexed issue in this era of promiscuous cross-franchising. How much fidelity do readers require from film. NYtimes.com
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