There are times when an interpretation cannot match the thing itself, and others when the mere attempt will prove an embarrassment. No elegy, however triumphant, can equal the event it celebrates. To have fought on St. Crispin’s is greater than to sing of it, as even the bard would concede. In 1976, Albert and David…

How many artists are successful in two different mediums? I don’t mean proficient; I mean as good in one as in the other? There’re lots of musicians who write middling to horrible poetry, and God save us from all the lame “novelist rock bands,” especially those comprised of ever-infantilized baby boomers. Okay, Shakespeare—plays and sonnets—but…

Fond of firearms as I am, liking war movies as I do, and following Mark Wahlberg’s transformation from rapper to thespian with awe (as who could help but be), I rented Shooter not long back. There I beheld the latest depiction of a pervasive attitude in modern Western culture, one that applies to all institutions,…

It’s said that stories help clarify the stupefying succession of years we call life—so that we see it truly, live it honestly, face it nobly. Even tales of the grimmest matter are not meant as prose fugues, as lyrical anesthesia for the meek or desperate. Literature is equipment for living, said Kenneth Burke, and a…

We’re all astronauts, encapsulated voyagers peering out through windshields at the vast, perilous universe beyond. From these places inside our heads, we steer our ships, sending out probes as necessary. The command center seems far away from the engines and manifolds, a mind/body dissociation that’s long been a philosophical quandary—the proverbial “ghost in the machine.”…

Any project done in collaboration with twenty-one people is almost certain to be abysmal. Joint efforts are hard to manage, unless they’re in name only: a de facto leader and a troop of “partners” who can be told to shut up and get to it. Purpose, focus, execution—all rebel at too much participation, making “consensus…

Among oxymorons in common usage, one of the most popular is “victimless crime.” It would seem that if an act is criminal in nature, it must have a victim. If there is no victim, then the act cannot be a crime in any real sense. When the phrase is used, a larger point is being…

“I always believed it was the things you don’t choose that make you who you are: your city, your neighborhood, your family.” Patrick Kenzie, the main character in Dennis Lehane’s Boston-based detective series, forms this observation in the opening credits of the latest film to be made of the novels, Gone Baby Gone (the first…

In a film without words (or more precisely, with only two minutes of them), it’s a tautology to say that the visual experience overwhelms all other cinematic considerations. If the cinematographer doesn’t do his job here, then the experience is no better than thumbing through a very long coffee table book. But after the first…

There is something wrong with the bourgeoisie, at least in American film, and there are no small or large charms that can possibly redeem the fault—discreet or otherwise. The middle class is caught in a maelstrom of pettiness, trapped in an imagined propriety, and made heir to a grubby little enterprise meant to stuff its…