If You’re Going To Be Pretentious, At Least Be Right

I suppose pointing this out at this late date is as futile as complaining when people misuse “begging the question,” but apparently Roger Simon’s deployment of concepts he doesn’t understand doesn’t stop with politics:

Are we in the Age of the Actor? For several decades the auteur theory ruled the cinema with the writer-director (Fellini, Truffaut, Scorsese) king.

Ack–this always annoys me. Leaving aside the oddity of calling Scorsese a “writer-director”–his major films have generally been written by other people–this gets “auteur theory” exactly wrong. Auteur theory had no idea how to deal with the Fellini/Bergman-style writer director, because the theory was about rehabilitating the artistic reputation of Hollywood directors who worked for studios and filmed whatever script they were handed. The point of the theory was to focus on the tensions between a director’s personality and the material he was working with, in order to demonstrate that even directors generally considered hacks lent a coherent artistic personality to the material. You may think this is of somewhat limited value, and being suspicious of grand theory in all fields, I certainly do. (As Pauline Kael said about one application: “Sarris has noted that in High Sierra (not a very good movie) Raoul Walsh repeated an uninteresting and obvious device that he had earlier used in a worse movie. And for some inexplicable reason, Sarris concludes that he would have not have had this job of discovery without the auteur theory.”) But if Simon is right that this is an “age of actors,” this would lead to the renewed relevance of the auteur theory, not a move beyond it.

But thank god we have XFL Media (TM); how often can you find third-rate film critics handicapping the Oscar races in the “MSM”? Advantage: Blogosphere!