I didn't comment on Jonathan Rosenbaum's New York Times op-ed "Scenes From An Overrated Career" for a variety of reasons, the first of which is that I came to it a little late. Second, just reading the headline made my stomach sink. I got a mental picture of a meeting of the Times' op-ed staff, and some callow dickwad saying, "Hey, you know how everyone's saying how great Ingmar Bergman was? Why don't we run a piece saying that he sucked?" and heads bobbing wildly in agreement. Jeez. The guy's not even in his grave yet by then, probably. But you know these Times types—they all like to think they're Rick James, bitch, right after hitting Charlie Murphy in the forehead. "That was—'Coooold Blooded'!! Ha!" In other words, I was repelled by precisely the kind of forced, fake-ass "contrarianism" that animates the 85% worthless e-mag Slate.

A Times op-ed staffer pitches an anti-Bergman piece.
Then, my fevered imagination tells me (and please, anyone with inside dope on how the piece came to be should feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, which I suppose I must be), on being unable to find anybody to say that Bergman actually sucked, the Times dickwad settles for the genteel scepticism of Jonathan Rosenbaum. [UPDATE: Jonathan Rosenbaum very graciously and gamely responds, with a real account fo the piece's evolution and more, in the comments section. I'm keeping the paranoid ravings in the post for their putative entertainment value. Thanks, Jonathan.] This brings me to reason three. (P.S. I know that my explanations for why I didn't write about the piece in the first place are delaying my explanation for why I'm writing about it now. Please bear with me.) I hold Rosenbaum in very high esteem, and the Times op-ed was—as George Clooney once said of Tarkovsky's Solaris, I'm always amused to recall—not his best work. A lot of Rosenbaum's critical "debunking" here goes consists of defining what Bergman was not—e.g., not an avant-gardist and/or formal innovator on the level of Godard or Resnais. He brings up what he sees as Bergman's "perpetual retreat from the modern world," a variant of the "solipsist" position on Bergman which kind of begs the question as to exactly which world, say, the characters in Scenes from a Marriage inhabit. But these are supportable positions; I just don't happen to share them. The stuff about the blond, blue-eyed cast members, however, practically screams "Holy shit! I'm under by 200 words!" The snipes at Bergman-chic are about as critically substantive and useful as, say, making fun of a Pedro Costa fan for his taste in t-shirts. The evocation of "relevance" is tiresome. And finally, there's the "hard fact"—unverified, as it happens—that "Mr. Bergman isn't being taught in film courses or debated by film buffs with the same intensity as Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles and Jean-Luc Godard. His works are seen less often in retrospectives and on DVD than those of Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson - two master filmmakers widely scorned as boring and pretentious during Mr. Bergman's heyday."
Even if that's true—so what? One might recall in the late '80s Godard, for example, pretty much dropped off the map of critical and commercial consciousness in North America—his great 1990 Nouvelle Vague never got a proper release here. Actual critical assessment and the noting of critical fashion are two different things, as Rosenbaum ought to be the first to know. Also, if nobody cares about Bergman anymore, why call him overrated?
But all this is not why, finally, this piece winds up being one of those things out of which no good can come.
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