In Defense of Theory

Yet another review of Philip Lopate’s American Movie Critics popped up this weekend, this time in the NYT book review. Clive James approaches the book with the question of whether or not it’s better to have “a theory,” a la Sarris, and comes out definitively in the negative. James writes:

It quickly becomes obvious that those without theories write better. You already knew that your friend who's so funny about the "Star Wars" tradition of frightful hairstyles for women (in the corrected sequence of sequel and prequel, Natalie Portman must have passed the bad-hair gene down to Carrie Fisher) is much less boring than your other friend who can tell you how science fiction movies mirror the dynamics of American imperialism. This book proves that history is with you: perceptions aren't just more entertaining than formal schemes of explanation, they're also more explanatory.

Interesting, although not entirely convincing (the best critics are both pithy and academic). James even agrees that this might just be personal preference:

[I]t could be that I just don't like it when a critic's hulking voice gets in the way of the projector beam and tries to convince me that what I am looking at makes its real sense only as part of a bigger pattern of thought, that pattern being available from the critic's mind at the price of decoding his prose.

In a sense, James is attempting to apply a theory to criticism. His article tries to fit everything into a bigger picture of theory and non-theory based, and claims that, overall, theory-based is better. But if his dichotomy—between structured, patterned reviewing that churns a single idea over many films and fragmented, observational essays aimed at capturing a single film without an ongoing context—is somewhat useful, his assessment of perception-based reviews as being better is perhaps not.

The two major categories he sets up aren’t bad. Clearly, some critics write intending to filter all their observations through a larger idea (or a few). Others simply string together clever, disconnected thoughts, some throwaways, some with more heft. But the division between the two isn’t quite as clear as James might like. If not all critics have a theory to back them up, many have a particular aesthetic or recurring idea. David Edelstein is a sensualist with a knack for pop-culture allusions. Dave Kehr is a hardened formalist with an encyclopedic knowledge of film history. Manohla Dargis pines over wild visuals, often preferring charged cinematic stylization over content. These are not explicit theories, per se, but they’re ongoing ideas that shape a critic’s viewpoint and connect his or her observations to some larger pattern.

Perhaps the bigger problem is that though theory may be less explanatory, as James claims, that is only true about individual films. Entertaining or no, it is still useful, both for accessing broad swaths of cinema and larger cultural patterns. Theory is what ties film trends together; it notates and explains repetition. It can help us see what ideas are dominant in the filmmaking community, and it can offer up explanations as to why. Theory is also useful for tracking that which lies beyond the frame. As our most dominant narrative medium, cinema plays a pivotal role in representing (and, some would argue, shaping) culture. But this is rarely done one film at a time. Theory helps us see these ongoing patterns, helps up put them together into a single, coherent idea. Yes, it is imperfect. There are uncertainties. There are pieces that don't quite fit. Sometimes theory is imprecise. But then, that’s why it's called a theory.