A Film Critic Without A Cause

Criticism can be fun, A. O. Scott promises, genially evading serious cultural debate.

- Leon Wieseltier

"You must change your life.” Those are the severe and startling words that conclude a renowned sonnet Rilke wrote in 1908, after an encounter with an ancient marble torso in the Louvre. They suggest that an experience of art is akin to a conversion experience, that an encounter with art confers not only ravishments but also obligations, that a sense of the beauty of existence entails a sense of the gravity of existence. Even the most transient of impressions may be a summons—a call to a commitment, to a spirit of seriousness about what is at stake in a life. It is an exorbitant demand.

Rilke, of course, was an athlete of transformations and an addict of transfigurations; the distinction between feeling and swooning was sometimes lost on him; and he was comically without humor. For a certain contrary impious temperament, the commandment at the end of “Archaic Torso of Apollo” will seem obnoxious, the pomp of an aesthete. (“Rilke was a jerk,” wrote Berryman with a vengeful hilarity.) Still, correcting for all the programmatic ejaculations of the Rilkean spirit, there is something inescapable about the poem’s injunction. It represents a lasting challenge to lazy habits of demystification, and to the contemporary idols of irony and charm. Perhaps there is nothing ridiculous, after all, about grandeur and consecration and transcendence and a single view of the world. Perhaps one should not return unchanged from a museum. Perhaps a decision does have to be made.