Flapdoodle

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IN A PREVIOUS life I wrote movie reviews, a task to which I brought an enthusiastic biliousness I knew could not be sustained and that made no real difference, anyway, to the grand progress of the cinema. After a year, still enthusiastically bilious, I was fired (insufficient bile? too much?), and that made a difference only in the sense of coming as something of a relief to me. Movies, immense in their badness – the bobbing, gaseous cartoon-character floats in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade of American culture – go on and on no matter the explosive, amusing, dismissive hostility with which they are written about; they are at once unmissable and invulnerable, at least to words, no matter how sharp or passionately hurled. Movies are our gift, of a sort, to ourselves and to the world; they constitute our principal cultural artifact and export. They tell us, and others, who we are, or who we like to think we are, or who we really are while believing ourselves to be something quite different.

As movies – and television, a near relation – have risen like a volcano at the center of the culture, belching fumes and issuing flows of gorgeous, ruinous lava, the written word has stumbled, barefoot and ragged, to the cold, ashen margins. This is not news, of course, and it is not even, perhaps, generally accepted as fact. Publishers continue to bring out tens of thousands of new titles every year, book stores are well-stocked and -browsed, students flock to creative-writing programs: by certain statistical measures, we appear to be a nation of readers, or at any rate of writers. Most of us know in our hearts, though, that it just isn't so. Even our writers don't read much, while the vast bulk of the population spends most of its time seated in front of a succession of brightly glowing screens, passively absorbing dreams manufactured by one friendly corporation or another.

"Passive," I think, is the dividing line. Movies are corrosive and dangerous – to our cultural, political, and moral life – not merely because they are a nefarious media-conglomerate product (though by and large they are that) but because they ask the viewer to spend no imaginative energy. They demand no contribution or participation other than consumption. A picture show is fully realized: the faces, the settings, the music, the tones of voice. All we have to do is sit there and look. A moviegoer is a voyeur.

At parties I have sometimes found myself, having made this perfectly obvious and unremarkable point on the strength of a slug or two of Two Buck Chuck, in disputes with film intellectuals, who regard movies as an art form quite as worthy of honor and study as painting or sculpture or even literature. Naturally I love a squabble about the scope and meaning of art as much as the next crank, but whether movies are or are not art (and of course they aren't, if I may hint at my position) is not the real issue.

The real issue is, I would say, sloth. Reading is work, after all; it requires – it is – a capacity to imagine from abstractions. Little squiggles on the printed page must be interpreted by the reader's mind as words, which must in turn, and simultaneously, and by the same laboring mind, be understood as a version of reality. And why bother with such fearsome and difficult convolutions – why, among other things, disturb the slumbering demons of schoolyard memory – when we can see Jude Law in the movie on DVD?

The reason to bother is, of course, the same reason we go to the gym or go swimming or biking or running. The reason is that the mind needs exercise just as the body does: it needs to be pushed and used and challenged; its capacity for abstraction and imagination needs to be cultivated, lest it atrophy. Unchallenged minds – minds housed in bodies too often parked in front of televisions or movie screens – will turn to flab along with those bodies, and a flabby mind is an easily led, or misled, mind.

Much has been made in recent years of the obesity epidemic in America: the perfect storm of fat that has resulted from industrially produced junk food being scarfed in 40-ounce servings by what is politely called a "sedentary" population. But we are in danger of becoming cognitively and morally sedentary too, of abandoning the admittedly maintenance-intensive powers of intellection, awareness, and involvement that are indispensable elements of our system of self-government, because it is easier to gorge on predigested cinematic or televised imagery – Cheetos for the brain – than to do the reading. George W. Bush doesn't like and doesn't bother to read, and one could hardly make the point more succinctly than that.

Paul Reidinger