One of the questions that fascinates me about American society is this: Why do American critics and writers on culture generally so strongly resist any moral or spiritual interpretation of writing and films whose context is the here and now? I won't bother giving particular criticisms of these films. Anyone can find them by just googling them. It was Paul Tillich, the Protestant theologian, who said that white anglo-American culture is strongly resistant to metaphor. When I read reviews of the two additions to my list - "Into the Wild" and "Little Children", I was struck to see no one saying anything at all about moral or spiritual issues, which both films clearly are dealing with. In my view, these "representatives" of the culture miss the point of the films they are discussing. Without getting to into a long discussion, I do believe with Pope John Paul XXIII that there is a strong fear of transcendence in American culture in particular. Resistance to seeing possible psycho-spiritual references in pop culture is, I think, a manifestation of this fear. What bugs me about this is that American "intellectuals" end up reinforcing certain aspects of the larger culture that they in particular should be challenging.

What I observe is that critics in the US resist any non-literal interpretations of films that have as their context, precisely, the here and now. These two films are about the here and now. There is the usual tendency to psychologize everything human and over-stress style or the way the film is made. In these interpretations, a "safe" reduction of the characters to various components of their psychology, viewed as solely about subjectivity, takes the place of serious criticism. Generally, there is a consistent avoidance of talking about the films as if they could be about spiritual or moral ends which are deeper or qualitatively different than the run of the mill kinds of things sought by characters in most films. It seems that one requirement of "career success" for a critic in America, (dare I say "American critic"), then, is that he relentlessly avoid any talk about meaning, morality, or purpose, and in general religious or spiritual issues as possibly reflected by some artist or writer, where the artist means to say something about this society right now. The critic in this society has a need to act as if he is just visiting from another planet, where his job is to "neutrally describe" what he "sees". Unwillingly, our intellectuals add to the soullessness of the larger culture, which comes increasingly to resemble a factory whose purpose is to make machines whose purpose is to make machines, ad infinitum. He gets his ideal not from Socrates or any real saint, but from Descartes and Marx, and dismisses anything that cannot grasped with the five senses or explained by the profit motive. The American critic strangely confuses and conflates objectivity with the odd belief that art and film that takes places in American culture now is morally and spiritually neutral, void of any content essentially.

In this particular sin of omission on the part of those who claim to speak for our culture, I argue that there is something very "off". The problem in American criticism is not with the content of American culture - that is, the problem is not in what is being reviewed, but in something much more subtle. It lies in our society's resistance to reflect deeply on itself. Why this compulsive need to "stay shallow" when we talk about ourselves collectively? This pervasive shallowness in American criticism is consistent with what I have claimed is the most pronounced trait of the American psyche - the need to see ourselves as morally better than non-Americans. The American critic, in relentlessly avoiding talking about moral and spiritual issues, or treating them only when they are about non-Americans, remains consistent with a deep need we seem to have to avoid ever look deeply at moral and spiritual issues "in our own collective house", so to speak. Perhaps this gets us back to that fear of transcendence alluded to by all robust spiritual practices. What we might conclude, then, is that this phenomenon points to something - a quality - in our own culture that heightens this fear relative to other Western countries. I have a hunch that fear of transcendence in America is in direct proportion to the public language used to talk about a very specific understanding of happiness. Core to this understanding is an intense fear of death. This fear will entail as well a fear of "dying to self" said to be necessary for true spirituality.

The unspoken ethical value on the part of American critics, then, seems to be: Thou shall not talk about art or writing as if the creator(s) had the intention in mind of saying something about the moral and spiritual state of American culture. Thou shall never suggest that a writer or film maker might be using his work as a metaphor to convey something about the moral and spiritual state of the culture. Thou shall not incline the American to even glance at his own mortality.

If anyone comes across a criticism in this country that is not like I describe above, I'd love to see it! I did see one, in "Intercollegiate Review" about five years ago, concerning the film maker who did "Barcelona" and "Metropolitan"!

T. Hoyt
1/11/08