In Defense of the House Republicans

Posted: Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Like most people of the chattering classes, I was unthinkingly in favor of the bailout when it was first proposed. But then the insistence of its proponents that the economy would collapse became just a little too strident.   [Full Story]

Annie Hall
Introductory Remarks
Posted: Thursday, August 7, 2008
But if you de-couple love and sex, which was the first order of business in the sexual revolution, then you could privilege the formerly discreditable and unrespectable feelings of lust, yearning to breathe free, over the constraining and binding tendency of love. The trouble is that, as in the case of so many other manifestations of immaturity, people wanted it both ways.  [Full Story]

When Harry Met Sally
Introductory Remarks
Posted: Thursday, August 7, 2008
Tonight's film, When Harry Met Sally, was written by Nora Ephron and directed by Rob Reiner and was released in 1989, when it seemed to many to be little more than a kinder, gentler version of Woody Allen's Annie Hall of more than a decade before, which we saw last week. Caryn James, who reviewed Harry in The New York Times, said that it was "often funny but amazingly hollow" and "like a sitcom with too much canned laughter."  [Full Story]

The Apartment
Introductory Remarks
Posted: Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Up until now, all of the films we have seen in this series, except for The Shop Around the Corner, have imagined love and romance to some extent in terms of class. The rich and privileged are those whose lives we -- or at least the movies -- naturally think of when it comes to romance. This is partly for the reason that I mentioned last week in connection with An Affair to Remember, namely that, with any suitor less wealthy and socially prominent than the Prince, Cinderella would lose a lot of her fascination for us.  [Full Story]

An Affair to Remember
Introductory Remarks
Posted: Thursday, July 17, 2008
Character is of course what keeps Alec and Laura from consummating their passion, and I think it is not possible to understand the film without understanding that this is meant to be a good thing. But their self-denial is part of a much wider complex of social obligations that includes everything from their respective marriage vows to the manners required by their brief encounter with Dolly.  [Full Story]

Brief Encounter
Introductory Remarks
Posted: Monday, July 14, 2008
This adaptation of a one-act play, "Still Life," by Noel Coward, is something different -- not a soap opera but a melodrama, as the lush score of Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto in the background constantly reminds us. But its romance is cut short and unconsummated on account of the married lovers' sense of duty to their respective spouses. If there is also a kind of romance of self-denial, which is just hinted at in The Philadelphia Story in the character of Liz, it comes out in full-blown form in Brief Encounter.  [Full Story]

The Philadelphia Story

Posted: Wednesday, July 2, 2008
[Full Story]

The Shop Around the Corner

Posted: Wednesday, June 25, 2008
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It Happened One Night
Introductory Remarks
Posted: Thursday, June 19, 2008
Romantic love is, like the masculine sense of honor that was common to so many of last year’s heroes, a Western invention born of the Christian tradition. Just as Christianity’s adversarial stance versus the traditional honor culture -- at the heart of which was enshrined the vendetta -- created a new sort of gentlemanly honor, so the Judeo-Christian tradition of monogamy created the medieval European romance and the long line of romantic fiction which has grown out of it.  [Full Story]

Defining Definitions Down

Posted: Tuesday, April 29, 2008
In 1976, the British Marxist critic Raymond Williams published Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. It was a work of genuine scholarship, tracing the semantic histories of certain words that have specialized political meanings. Now comes Keywords for American Cultural Studies, modeled on Williams's work, except that editors Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler have dispensed with the scholarship and the humor.   [Full Story]