I was listening to NPR just now, and before David Edelstein delivered his review of two new movies by Scorcese and Polanski there was a public service message about the Princess Project, which donates surplus prom dresses to high school girls who cannot afford to buy their own.
Then Edelstein’s voice arrived, transfixing NPR audiences the way that Daisy’s did Gatsby, with the sound of culture replacing the sound of money.
Edelstein whittled away at Scorcese’s new movie, Shutter Island, with such a command of film vocabulary and history that it reminded me of what Saul Bellow’s Charlie Citrine said about being cut to ribbons by Humboldt — that it was a kind of privilege, like being the subject of a portrait by Picasso or an eviscerated chicken by Soutine.
Edelstein, “without giving anything away,” told us that Shutter Island was based on “a slight but engrossing doodle” of a novel by Dennis Lehane that is “a bit like Paul Auster, but more Freudian.” OK. Then he explained that Scorcese’s movie was “suffocatingly movieish” because it “visually invokes a score of movies from the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to Laura to Frederick Wiseman’s graphic asylum documentary Titicut Follies.”
And I thought, Oh David, what have they done to you? What have they done to us? This is what Seymour Krim railed against in 1960 when he swore off intellectualism in his essay, “What’s This Cat’s Story?” It’s what Bellow warned against when an interviewer asked if Herzog was a bildungsroman and Bellow said just the opposite. That to regain his humanity Herzog needed to de-educate himself. Mailer tried boxing it to death. James Atlas rent his garments over the cruelty he inflicted during his own years as a teenaged intellectual. And Bellow tried to mock it to death when with marksman accuracy he called it the “demented jargon of the educated.” Woody Allen also did what he could, skewering intellectuals in his movies and stories.
But it’s clear from Edelstein’s review, and this very post critiquing Edelstein — my brother veteran of graduate programs in the humanities, because whoever today uses an inflated vocabulary and a surfeit of references is my brother — that those Jewish writers failed to cure us. That the education surplus in certain communities (and you who know who I mean) is so vast, the riches so embarrassing, that their warnings were pipsqueak voices drowned out by the rumbling dump trucks packed with knowledge that ferry back-and-forth from the universities.
So I propose a new project, a New Deal, to cope with the overproduction — it is the last unexploded bubble! — of intellectuals that has contaminated even the light entertainment offered by Hollywood, comic books, and television. The nation must act before it is too late. Soon massive amounts of aimless brainpower will bear down on all the charming trivia that makes life worthwhile, bringing Hegel into the playground and Dostoevsky into the kitchen junk drawer. Like stiff-jointed Frankensteins these intellectuals may just be innocents, but they wreak havoc nonetheless.
Thus I announce a Princess Project for Intellectuals. I call out to everyone, but especially to those who find themselves living in university towns, to those who live in fear of asking for clarification of an obscure reference (Titicut Follies!), and to those in my own beleaguered Jewish community threatened by historical analysis of their kasha, an inquiry into the sustainability of their upcoming trip to a bat mitzvah.
If every over-educated member of our society would donate just a small portion of their unusable artistic/literary/filmic/multicultural knowledge to a national Knowledge Bank, a crisis can be averted. The National Knowledge Bank will control the flow of literary and other references to prevent a spike in the obscure reference inflation (ORI) index and, if the need arises, ensure liquidity by releasing adequate amounts of obnoxious name-dropping in times of scarcity.
This has been a public service announcement.
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