The Smile on the Mona Lisa

The plan of Movies, Morals and Art was for the lay author to relate Movies to Art, and his collaborator to follow up with Morals, but neither, to judge by the pervasive casualness, seems really to have thought the book worth writing. Thus Fr. Gardiner gets both of Dr. Kinsey’s book titles wrong, calls the same movie on successive pages The Lost Paradise and The Lost Continent, and begs leave “to underscore again that the basic moral crux had not been watered down,” as though “crux” had no etymology that mattered. Mr. Getlein, more worldly, ascribes 1 Timothy vi, 10 to the Old Testament, in the course of settling down to a breezy dormitory chat concerning Art; and Art, after some generalities (“poor old Aristotle”) he brings at tweezers’ end before our noses, in the shape of a stanza by Cole Porter (“a remarkable artist in many ways”).

“You’re the Top,” it seems, is “a masterful job”; it creates a world (poor old Michelangelo!). It creates, “with great economy and in an instinctive choice of detail,” “the fashionable international world of the 1930’s,” unfadingly limned by such details as “… the smile/on the Mona Lisa” (rhymed with “Tow’r of Pisa”). “The ‘Mona Lisa,’ to be sure,is universally known, but reference to the smile, in addition to providing a fine rhyme, suggests that the speaker, the person being addressed by the song, and their whole world, hence the listener’s world, too, all know more about such things than the ordinary citizen.” To be asked to suppose that anybody thinks anybody else ignorant of that smile, nay, stakes his title to sophistication on such a postulate, so disarms us that when Mr. Getlein, bidding us “regard the power of art,” points to “the authenticity of the speaker’s knowledge of that special world,” we barely know how to protest.

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Hugh Kenner

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The plan of Movies, Morals and Art was for the lay author to relate Movies to Art, and his collaborator to follow up with Morals, but neither, to judge by the pervasive casualness, seems really to have thought the book worth writing. Thus Fr. Gardiner gets both of Dr. Kinsey’s book titles wrong, calls the same movie on successive pages The Lost Paradise and The Lost Continent, and begs leave “to underscore again that the basic moral crux had not been watered down,” as though “crux” had no etymology that mattered. Mr. Getlein, more worldly, ascribes 1 Timothy vi, 10 to the Old Testament, in the course of settling down to a breezy dormitory chat concerning Art; and Art, after some generalities (“poor old Aristotle”) he brings at tweezers’ end before our noses, in the shape of a stanza by Cole Porter (“a remarkable artist in many ways”).

“You’re the Top,” it seems, is “a masterful job”; it creates a world (poor old Michelangelo!). It creates, “with great economy and in an instinctive choice of detail,” “the fashionable international world of the 1930’s,” unfadingly limned by such details as “… the smile/on the Mona Lisa” (rhymed with “Tow’r of Pisa”). “The ‘Mona Lisa,’ to be sure,is universally known, but reference to the smile, in addition to providing a fine rhyme, suggests that the speaker, the person being addressed by the song, and their whole world, hence the listener’s world, too, all know more about such things than the ordinary citizen.” To be asked to suppose that anybody thinks anybody else ignorant of that smile, nay, stakes his title to sophistication on such a postulate, so disarms us that when Mr. Getlein, bidding us “regard the power of art,” points to “the authenticity of the speaker’s knowledge of that special world,” we barely know how to protest.