Once a month, cultural critic Camille Paglia publishes a lengthy assessment of the current moment in pop culture at Salon.com. This month’s installment went live today, and the meat of it is an Antonioni/Bergman inspired elegy for the art film. The whole piece is, as is the norm for Ms. Paglia, terribly quotable, but the part where she appears to elevate the entire Star Wars series to the status of those late Europeans’ “masterpieces” is probably the most controversial:
On the culture front, fabled film directors Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni dying on the same day was certainly a cold douche for my narcissistic generation of the 1960s. We who revered those great artists, we who sat stunned and spellbound before their masterpieces — what have we achieved? Aside from Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather series, with its deft flashbacks and gritty social realism, is there a single film produced over the past 35 years that is arguably of equal philosophical weight or virtuosity of execution to Bergman’s The Seventh Seal or Persona? Perhaps only George Lucas’ multilayered, six-film Star Wars epic can genuinely claim classic status, and it descends not from Bergman or Antonioni but from Stanley Kubrick and his pop antecedents in Hollywood science fiction.
A lot of bloggers are reading this and doing a double-take, as if to say, “Did she just say George Lucas is as good as Bergman? OHNOSHEDIDN’T!!!” Example, from The Opinion Mill: “Only in the mind of Camille Paglia can Jar-Jar Binks push aside Antonius Block to play chess with Death on the stony beach. I’d always considered the mutual starfucking between George Lucas and Joseph Campbell to be the last word in intellectual vacuousness, but one should never underestimate Camille.”
This is not how I read Paglia’s statement at all — I read it as, “The only films of the last three decades that may in the future be considered classics are the Star Wars films, and that’s evidence of how far from the art house golden era we’ve fallen.” But maybe I’m wrong. For all I know, Paglia really did mean to equate Antoniennui with (let’s all make this joke at once) the travails of Jar Jar Binks. Later, in the very same column, Camille suggests that Kelly Clarkson has the potential to singlehandedly “revive…the American fine arts.” I’m all for being contrarian, but at some point, doesn’t the polemic start to strain credulity?
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