The B’s Have It: Bordwell and Boyd

In his most recent post, Glancing backward, mostly at critics, David Bordwell praises Gilbert Seldes “as a worthy critic not because of one-off reviews but in virtue of his pointed, sometimes daring ideas, his knowledge, and the zest they arouse in the reader.” He also quotes him generously. From The Great Audience:

The movies live on children from the ages of ten to nineteen, who go steadily and frequently and almost automatically to the pictures; from the age of twenty to twenty-five people still go, but less often; after thirty, the audience begins to vanish from the movie houses. Checks made by different researchers at different times and places turn up minor variations in percentages; but it works out that between the ages of thirty and fifty, more than half of the men and women in the Unites States, steady patrons of the movies in their earlier years, do not bother to see more than one picture a month; after fifty, more than half see virtually no pictures at all.

This is the ultimate, essential, overriding fact about the movies. . . .

Bordwell then observes that “what we’ve been told for years was characteristic of our Now—the infantilization of the audience—has been in force for at least sixty years.” In view of my recent remarks on universal kid space I find these observations most interesting. Most interesting. A bit later Bordwell quotes from Seldes’ best-known book (which I’m going to have to read one of these days), The 7 Lively Arts: “The daily comic strip of George Herriman (Krazy Kat) is easily the most amusing and fantastic and satisfactory work of art produced in America today.” Think about that one, folks, and think about cartoons and universal kid space. And, while you’re at it, dig out Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, which is, I believe, the best introduction we’ve got to an understanding of cognition and story-telling, by which I mean story-telling in general, not just cartoons.

Meanwhile, now that my review of Brian Boyd’s The Origin of Stories is well in the past, two passages from the book stand out. The first speaks for itself (pp. 16-17):

An evolutionary view of human nature, far from threatening freedom, offers a reason to resist the molding of our minds by those who think they know best for us. The cultural constructivist’s view of the mind as a blank slate is “a dictator’s dream.” If we were entirely socially constructed, our “society” could mold us into slaves and masters, and there would be no reason to object, since those would henceforth be our socially constructed natures.

The second provides a useful qualification to the notion that religion is one of the things that happened when this or that evolutionarily adapted mental module went wrong and started seeing things that aren’t there (pp. 202-203):

Science has improved immensely on the fictive agential explanations of the past—although even scientists find they cannot help anthropomorphizing causal factors; but science could not have begun without our persistent inclination and ability to think beyond the here and now, to invent agents and scenarios not limited to the actual or the probable but exploring also the merely possible or the eerily improbable.

Could it be that science has the same evolutionary roots as religion? (Pssst. Don't tell Richard Dawkins.)