Robin Wood,
Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond.

New York: Columbia University Press, 1998
ISBN: 0-231-07605-3
352pp
$US22.50 (pb)

Uploaded 1 July 1999

This book has two authors: a clever, worm-catching Robin and a very thick Wood. Robin is a shrewd analyst of other critics’ logic and an attentive, informed observer of a wide range of films. Wood thinks that Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death, that embodiment of ’60s radical cant, is a profound analysis of what he insists on calling ‘our culture’. Robin can see what is in a movie. Wood sees what he wants to see. For most of this book, unfortunately, you can’t see the Robin for the Wood. Where Robin is visible, this is a worthwhile book. He provides us with detailed and observant readings of, for example, Rules of the Game, Celine and Julie go boating, and Before Sunrise. It is difficult for me to dislike a critic who rejects arid formalism, insists on the continuing validity of classical narrative, stresses the primary importance of the social content of movies, and recognises that the Linklater film and One Night Stand are among the best and most appealing films of the last few years. Difficult but not, I now realise, impossible.

This is a book afflicted with a grand vision and an urgent purpose, both of which regularly override the author’s intelligence. In the terms Wood has lifted from Brown, the ‘death forces’ of our world – basically male heterosexuality and its supposedly inevitable off-shoots: capitalism, monogamy, and fascism – are not only at war with life but on the verge of final victory. With “the overwhelming and irresistible power of a juggernaut . . . capitalism . . . is destroying on all levels of society every possibility of a creative response to life, sweeping ineluctably on toward the physical destruction of life itself through the devastation of the planet”(5-6). In the face of imminent doom, you’ll be glad to know, “there are daily reports – none of which Wood bothers to identify – of the growth of protest and revolt” (7). Given this left-wing version of the Red dawn scenario, all art, indeed all criticism, must be mobilised for the final struggle. Wood is certainly willing to do his part: “This is . . . my last book of film criticism . . . I intend to devote my energies . . . to writing fiction” (5). Apocalypse, meow! I would pass over the ludicrous bathos of this response if it were not so entirely typical of the hand-wringing, self-regarding histrionics which make the book so maddening to read. (Instead I found myself imagining the hot-line phone call:

” -Bill? Tony. The situation is worse than we thought. Robin Wood is turning to fiction.

My god! What if we gave up our weapons of mass destruction? Would that deter him?

Afraid not. He also wants us to give up our wives and children.

Well, in my case . . . ” )

I’m willing to accept that Wood’s rhetoric may be at least momentarily sincere, but it is regularly contradicted as soon as another occasion arises. Capitalism is snuffing out all signs of creativity on p. 5; by page 9, however, Wood is insisting (rightly) that serious, socially critical art survives even in the capitalist environment of Hollywood. Near the end of the book Wood assures us that the young have been deprived of “any hope of radical social change, or even the least flicker of an authentic political idealism” (337), an assertion that sits strangely with the book’s pervasive celebration of the enlightenment wrought by the women’s and gay movements. As in Red Dawn, this sort of doomy posturing effectively prevents any kind of serious, complex, nuanced thinking. All conflicts are part of the same conflict, reducible to an image of the tank in Tienanmen Square advancing on the unarmed protester (who, in Wood’s version, brandishes a rolled-up copy of Sight and Sound). That conflict is pursued through a small but scattered selection of films, many of which, like Letter from an Unknown Woman, Wood has written about before – by Murnau and Renoir, Ozu and Mizoguchi, Leo McCarey, Richard Linklater and Gregg Araki, plus two obscure Canadian films – chosen mostly because they can be construed as being on the side of life. Since “the dominant ideological norms of ‘our culture’ – meaning any culture in which heterosexuality is a normative condition – are always evil, the business of art is always ‘resistance'” (9), which certainly puts paid to most of Dante and Virgil. Any ‘real’ resistance, it follows, must be humane; inhumane resistance, such as the Nazi assault on ‘bourgeois’ ideas of democracy and tolerance, cannot really be resistance. The source of evil is ever and always the same, even when Wood is discussing Japanese films: “the privileged figure of our culture, the white upper- or middle-class adult heterosexual male. Given the conditions of our culture . . . such a figure is inherently fascist” (18). A ‘fascist’, in the worst tradition of 60s street-demonstration rhetoric, is anyone advocating anything Wood doesn’t like: marriage, say, or romance or any form of institutionalised authority.

This is the humane bigotry of the left, characterised by the usual saloon-bar, ‘we all know’ mode of argumentation. All right-thinking people know, for example, that the patriarchal family is the source of nearly all misery known to humanity, a point of revealed truth to which Wood habitually returns. Fatigued by this polemic, I put the book down one Sunday, picked up the Observer, and found myself looking at the latest of many studies reporting the damage done to children by the absence of father-figures (‘New Lads to New Sads’, 14.3.99, p. 14). That sort of inconvenient social evidence never intrudes on Wood. No more does fair play. The dire critical reputation ofMandingo, a film he considers a masterpiece, is blamed on its original trashing by “the critical establishment (all white and predominantly male)” (265), and we all know what to think of them. No effort is made to substantiate the factual claim or the implications: only whites dislike this movie because disliking it proves you a racial bigot. Now that there are black film critics, surely Wood must be able to find some who like it? Instead, he offers us unsubstantiated ‘reports’ of black audiences applauding it, somewhere in London in 1975: proof by gossip.

The book’s reasoning is characteristically circular. Wood must be the only critic in decades to describe the phallic imagery of Triumph of the Will without noticing anything homoerotic about it. That is because he’s previously decided that Nazism is a heterosexual disease for which bisexuality is the cure. (There’s a stunningly offensive passage of competitive victimisation on p. 22 in which Wood tries to prove that the Nazis would have killed as many gays as Jews if they had just been able to identify them as easily.) The book’s fundamental pattern of argumentation is to assert an unproven social ‘fact’ (that marriage is a fascist institution, say); that fact is then ‘proven’ by analysing a film chosen because it says what Wood wants it to say; the film is then congratulated for revealing social truth. Given that kind of logic and the book’s self-servingly random selection of any films from anywhere in the last 75 years that share or can be made to share Wood’s ideology, there is nothing that cannot be proved. This is, of course, one of the recognised advantages of intellectual dishonesty.

That dishonesty, which on the level of specifics enables Wood to praise the ‘authentically subversive’ originality of The Doom Generation without mentioning that it is a knock-off of Stone’s Natural-Born Killers, encourages him to base the most sweeping generalisations about art and society on the most partial – in both senses of the term – and fragmentary evidence, then retreat into displays of false modesty in which he is only a film critic with no expertise in the real world (see p. 12). All he knows is the source of all injustice and what to do about it. At other times, the dishonesty shades over into simple, but self-serving, laziness. Leonard Maltin’s Movie and Video Guide is cited at least four times without making it into Wood’s index. In every case, it is offered as a “barometer of contemporary liberal-bourgeois ‘taste'” (265), which excuses Wood from doing any further critical homework. The critical opposition is habitually caricatured, while the absence of specific citations prevents a reader from finding out, say, who rubbished Mandingo and why. At still other times, of course, the laziness is simply laziness: the book has no bibliography, no filmography, and no adequate index. Virtually no quotation is properly cited. A disturbingly large number of the book’s muddy b/w illustrations have no specific reference to the text; hardly any are discussed. Columbia used to be a superior academic press with high editorial standards. Those standards have not, apparently, survived its rush to fashionability. This book is not just an embarrassment to Columbia UP, however; it is an embarrassment to serious film criticism and serious political commentary. The world is a dangerous place – I write in the second week of the bombing of Serbia and the ‘cleansing’ of Kosovo – and I am as anxious as Wood to identify and promote politically responsible, socially challenging films and film criticism. I cannot see that that purpose is advanced by social commentary that ignores social evidence or special pleading disguised as criticism.

Late in the book, Wood identifies the private occasion behind its public rhetoric: his experience of “the difficulties of extricating oneself from the ideological conditioning that begins at birth . . ., the influence of which, with all its protean transformations and subterfuges, is almost impossible to eliminate completely” (277). That point, the culmination of a pattern of (mostly coy) self-revelation that begins with prefatory tributes to Andrew Britton – student, mentor, and AIDs victim – to Wood’s partner of many years, and to his son and daughter-in-law for their “unhesitating acceptance of a gay parent and his lover” (x), gestures toward the better book Wood might still write. That book would deal directly and honestly with his sexual identities and their relation to his criticism. He married, fathered a child, and lived – we gather – as a married homosexual. At some point, he came out and – in some way – his marriage dissolved. How did these things change his perception of the sexual politics of film? How did they change his tastes and identifications? If he wrote that book, he might notice that there is a suppressed and dehumanised woman in his story as in so many of the films he loves: the one, never mentioned here, who gave birth to his son. He’s right, of course; women are silenced in ‘our culture’ – only it’s not always the heterosexual men who do it.