Maura Spiegel’s approach simultaneously favors the intimate and the sensational, painting a portrait of America’s most unassuming cinematic auteur that emphasizes both his workaday normalcy and the rarified place he occupies in the nation’s artistic and cultural landscape. It is an unabashedly hagiographic work.
How exactly the world was killed might be a mystery, but the who seems all-too-obvious: men. Men and their consuming hunger for more power and more speed.
Warner Bros is at its most stimulating when it regards the studio’s movies, stars, and filmmakers as both passive reflections and active agents of a monolithic American cultural identity.
The Big Picture has a broad yet unmistakable viewpoint regarding the artistic fallout of the trends it chronicles, and that outlook is despairing.
It was not the box office hits, the Oscar-winners, or even the overtly druggy cinematic curios of 1968 that had the clearest sense of where the Age of Aquarius might be heading. Rather, it was the smaller American and British horror features—most of them overlooked today—that seemed to discern the looming end of the Revolution.
In every decade since the Sheol, the films that resulted reveal wider, prevailing attitudes toward Jewishness, history, memory, and psychological trauma.
The Common Reader, a publication of Washington University in St. Louis, offers the best in reviews, articles and creative non-fiction engaging the essential debates and issues of our time.
The real Elvis is American, remember, and America is a consumer society. The desires we project, the stuff we buy—that is what feels real to us. It lets us have any Elvis we want. He left plenty of kitsch in his wake, plenty of pseudo-religion, plenty of Elvis jokes—but he was not, is not, a joke. He lived our contradictions, released our inhibitions, and lost himself in the process.
