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Truth is not smog from quick jet planes
I feel it is unfair of me to refer to Richard Brody only on occasions for disagreement, but then he does something like open his review of The Brutalist (2024) with the assertion that "the definition of an epic is a subject that the author doesn't know firsthand: it's, in effect, a fantasy about reality, an inflation of the material world into the stuff of myth," which is so much not the definition of an epic that it short-circuits me on the rest of the critique. It may be true that very few singers of tales nowadays are likely to have personal knowledge of the Late Bronze Age Collapse, but I wouldn't call the most important element of the epic that it didn't happen to the teller, since the same is true of most of human history, not to mention just about every narrative mode beyond the autobiographical, and the assertion that it is a supersizing of myth from reality strikes me as a reductively euhemeristic approach to take to material that has more to do with how a culture tells itself than the necessary veracity of the incidents through which it does the telling. Sure, four thousand years of Troy towns lay under Hisarlık, but if you are disappointed by the lack of a lapis-browed statue of Enkidu among the black-on-buff potsherds of Uruk XVIII, I don't know what to tell you any more than if you expect science fiction to print out the forecasts of the future rather than describe our hopes and anxieties for it. It's a cute sentence, it's nicely balanced, it reads well and it doesn't work even when applied strictly to films of ambitious scope rather than culture heroism. I will grant the notion of a received story, even if Brody makes it sound like the distance is the important thing rather than the tradition: Phoinix in Book IX of the Iliad, remembering the deed of long ago to tell it to those assembled, his near and dear. (μέμνημαι τόδε ἔργον ἐγὼ πάλαι οὔ τι νέον γε / ὡς ἦν· ἐν δʼ ὑμῖν ἐρέω πάντεσσι φίλοισι.) If he meant that the supercharged scale of the epic can be used to examine intimate human truths, it isn't what he said, but it is one of its functions. Fantasies about reality, though, are not epic by definition. Most of the time they are just called art. Or being human, story-making.
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Honestly, arbitrary nonsense is deposited on readers with sufficient regularity that I'm drawn to the possible explanation that the column exists not a good faith effort at criticism, but is perhaps instead a covert conceptual art project with the intention of mocking the idea that film is worth serious consideration.
It'd be amusing if someone were to call this silliness out ala Alder's Perils of Pauline, but despite the New Yorker perch Brody is no Kael, and not really worth the effort.
By the by, I love the concision of I don't know what to tell you "if you expect science fiction to print out the forecasts of the future rather than describe our hopes and anxieties for it" and hope you'll allow me to quote it while moderating a panel at Arisa on the topic of "AI" in tech today, and AI in speculative fiction.
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I can see how you sprained your disbelief with that one.
Honestly, arbitrary nonsense is deposited on readers with sufficient regularity that I'm drawn to the possible explanation that the column exists not a good faith effort at criticism, but is perhaps instead a covert conceptual art project with the intention of mocking the idea that film is worth serious consideration.
He loves Ida Lupino! I give him credit as a booster for her films! And every now then I discover that he championed some movie which I too would love more people to know about, most notably The Well (1951). It's just that the majority of the time he seems not to like anything he writes about, and even when he does I can still find myself disagreeing with him factually. And I am sure that I have said any number of boneheaded things about movies, but I don't get paid by The New Yorker.
It'd be amusing if someone were to call this silliness out ala Alder's Perils of Pauline, but despite the New Yorker perch Brody is no Kael, and not really worth the effort.
I can disagree with Pauline Kael, but I really only ever wanted to fire her out of a cannon once.
By the by, I love the concision of I don't know what to tell you "if you expect science fiction to print out the forecasts of the future rather than describe our hopes and anxieties for it" and hope you'll allow me to quote it while moderating a panel at Arisa on the topic of "AI" in tech today, and AI in speculative fiction.
It would be an honor! Thank you for asking. And good luck with the panel!
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Like you, I'm certain I've the occasional boneheaded things about films--but attributing wildly implausible motives to a director, with calm assurance, as if one had some brain scanning device for establishing this truth, seems like a rather large failure for anyone writing for the New Yorker, or editing it. (And where was the editor regarding epics?) But perhaps the job is mainly about expressing strong opinions, rather than true ones.
Thanks for letting me quote you--if I can't listen to at a panel at Arisa, at least I'll get to bring a small spark of your light to this one.
I'm on five panels this year, which should be pleasantly tiring. Especially glad to be able to burble enthusiastically on "Wicked Good Cinema: Boston's Art House Theaters"