Three Dead Critics - John Simon - Beginning

What's amazing about this truly brutal review is that John Simon was right; and not just a little right, he hit a bullseye on every target. Star Wars is infantile and a brutal dehumanization of the senses, it bespoke a terrible wind in the spirit of our time that so pedestaled machines over humans that machines became the center of human connectivity rather than human connection to other humans. Star Wars signaled the end of the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema, not just the short one that lasted roughly from 1967 until 1983, but the long one from roughly 1920 onward that allowed Hollywood to release quality products every week for sixty years with good scripts, good acting, and good production design without any one element of the movies' quality overwhelming any other.

And yet how is someone so right so obviously wrong? Star Wars is brutal and stupid and dehumanizing and everything else John Simon said it was, but if you have to do brutal, stupid dehumanization, you cannot ever do it better than Star Wars. It's the 24 karat gold standard B-movie in which the sublime stands right next to the absurd, the great next to the camp, and Alec Guinness -arguably greatest actor in film history, stands for an hour next to an eight-foot bear/dog whose only line is (do wookie noise). In other words, to make the most obvious declaration I've ever made on this podcast, Star Wars is fun. And Star Wars made our country take fun so seriously that it arrested the entire development of our country, and if you cannot find that phenomenon fascinating, your intellectual development is as stunted as the millions of people you accuse.

And was the artistic world which Star Wars wiped out truly that great? Perhaps, but John Simon certainly didn't think so, I've read it measured that over the course of his sixty year career he gave roughly 1 in 5 movies and plays he reviewed a good review. William F. Buckley, not exactly the font of generosity himself, once quipped that 'John Simon reviews movies the same way a pigeon reviews statues.'

.....

I don't know if John Simon was a truly wicked man, but he was a wicked critic, and not necessarily for the reasons people think.