Introduction: Drawing the Boundaries of Art

ALTHOUGH FILMS occupy a central place in American popular culture, that place is also, paradoxically, difficult to understand and characterize. Watching movies has been a major leisure and cultural activity for Ameri­ cans for more than a hundred years. But for nearly the entire duration of their history, there has been an active debate about the movies and their merits. They have been criticized as dangerous, demeaning, dumb, and derivative, as regressive, blasphemous, sexist, racist, ageist, and ridicu­ lous, among other things. But they have also been praised as enriching, enlightening, and enjoyable, as glorious, spectacular, ingenious, moving, and imaginative. Both the detractors and supporters of films have made their arguments well known. The continuing disagreement concerning the place of films in American culture is a legacy of a number of monumental changes in the American film world over the last century. Some of these changes involve the meth­ ods of film production, while others involve the nature of the films them­ selves; still other changes involve the audiences for films. The primary subject of this book is the major historical change in the perception of films. By this I am not referring to revised opinions about particular films, though such revisions are also of interest. Instead, I mean the creation of an understanding of the medium of film as a legitimate and serious artistic medium, and of a body of film works as being legitimate and serious works of art. Moreover, in addition to this change in the perception of the medium of film, this book focuses more specifically on the changing perception of Hollywood films. Over time, a segment of the U.S. popula­ tion developed and put forth a conventional (to them) understanding that many Hollywood films were serious works of art. This understanding stood in stark contrast to the prior conventional wisdom about the funda­ mental nature of Hollywood films, as a whole, as light entertainment. It is thanks to this evolution in the perception of Hollywood films that we can now find among certain groups in society a willingness to intellec­ tually engage with Hollywood films and to experience them as art. For example, the following paragraph led the review in the New Yorker for the film Mystic River: