Word: middlebrows
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...similar bargains with Swan, juicily played by Paul Williams, who also composed the film's good score. Swan in turn owes his power to an earlier Faustian deal of his own, a pact that borrows a few wrinkles from Dorian Gray's compact. This repetition reduces contemporary middlebrow mythomania to absurd shambles...
...middle-class or middlebrow, even for those prop erly defined as belonging to either group, often seems conventional, complacent and confining, which may be why their tastes in books and movies run ? at a safe distance from reality ? to behavior or opinions more blatant than their own. Middle leads naturally to mediocre, a word that takes its roots from what is middling and therefore ordinary. Yet Aristotle, judging the temperaments of men, exalted the intermediate and argued that anything more extreme was either excess or defect. To him there was, for example, a desirable quality called bravery...
...dogma of equality of results turns up some bizarre arguments. In his recent book More Equality, Herbert J. Gans, a Columbia University sociologist, draws up a scenario for "cultural equality" that would eliminate "invidious status and other distinctions between 'highbrow,' 'middlebrow' and 'lowbrow' levels of taste." "A culturally equal society," writes Gans approvingly, "would thus treat all ways of expressing oneself and acting as equal in value, status and moral worth." But why should a taste for Lawrence Welk instead of Pablo Casals, or Jacqueline Susann instead of James Joyce, be held of equal...
...yearning for cultural respectability paid off, particularly after pictures began to talk. Street Scene, Arrowsmith, Dead End, Wuthering Heights, The Little Foxes were expensively produced, soberly realized borrowings, often from the second drawer of other arts. They formed the basis for his bankable reputation at a time when the middlebrow public tended to administer a literacy test before taking a movie seriously. By persuading audiences and critics to regard at least some films as an art form, Goldwyn did his industry an enormous service...
...such breathtaking speed have a refreshingly foreign perspective that often cuts through the confusions to the core of the complicated affair. Their judgments are hard, yet not unexpected. Richard Nixon, they write, is a "not very brainy President." He surrounded himself with "an elite of mean-minded, middlebrow conformists; men who were simply not up to the job of government...