Jean Rivard - University of British Columbia

Books in Review
High and Low
Timothy Murray
Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy on Screen,
Camera and Canvas. Routledge, US$ 49-95/$i7.95
John Gray
Lost in North America: The Imaginary Canadian
in the American Dream. Talonbooks, $17.95.
Reviewed by Mark Harris
If nothing else, the increasing marginalization
of serious intellectual debate in North
America has given rise to an interesting
critical sub-genre diagnostically devoted to
the reasons behind this worrisome decline.
For Andrew Ross, Camille Paglia and the
other interns of this postmodern cultural
dis-ease, the widening gulf between journalistic
and academic writing is perhaps
the worst and least necessary of "No-Brain"
culture's aggravating factors. Things were
better, they assert, when arguments were
lucid and cogent rather than abstruse and
citation-choked. Freelance urban intellectuals
of the Irving Howe variety are
favourably compared, in such polemics, to
the inward-looking eggheads and mindless
popularizers who have arisen in their wake,
while the New York magazine culture of the
1940s and '50s is fondly remembered as a
vanished Golden Age of almost Athenian
splendour.
While it is easy to make fun of some
aspects of these critiques—particularly
their anti-theoretical slant, which often
contain a thinly-veiled "No Nothing" suspicion
of those wily foreigners, the
French—the greater part of their complaints
are not only valid but—pace, poststructuralists!—true.
Nowadays, few
general interest magazines soar above the
level of People, while academic journals are
typically as narrowly-focussed and hermetic
as a plumber's newsletter.
Big Capital couldn't have organized
things better if it had tried—which, to a
certain extent, it did. Even so, the greater
share of the blame clearly belongs to those
of us on either side of the populist fence
who allowed culture to be polarized out of
any viable relationship with quotidian reality.
What's lacking on both sides is passion,
the natural desire to impart something significant
to a second party and thereby make
a difference, a feeling as alien to most literary
academics as it is to the paid corps of
publishers' flacks. Consequently, most of
the cultural criticism being written in
English today reflects this woeful lack.
If not for this Manichean split, it would
be impossible to discuss the latest books by
Timothy Murray and John Gray in the
same review. Although both authors are
concerned with contemporary culture, they
are basically writing for entirely different
audiences. Murray's Like a Film: Ideological
Fantasy on Screen, Camera and Canvas is
aimed at an exclusively academic readership,
while Gray's Lost in North America:
The Imaginary Canadian in the American
Dream reads like a 200 page Op Ed piece
published in a middle-of-the-road
Canadian newspaper. The first shudders at
the very thought of slipping into easy readability,
while the second cheerfully absolves
the peruser of any need to acquire prior
knowledge of the world.
Although its eight chapters are all composed
by the same person, Like a Film
unfolds like a series of essays by different
scholars on related topics. In his introduction,
Murray informs us that he wishes to
reflect "on the broad impact of the cinematic
apparatus on interdisciplinary experimentations
in the arts... on social and
political narratives... on representational
and visual theory... on perceptions and
articulations of history.. . and, ultimately,
on the subsequent return of the procedures
and results of interdisciplinary experimentation
itself to the cinema and its language."
Describing himself as a critic who is
"sensitive to [his] own subject position as a
heterosexual, white male," Murray then
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