Arts & Manners

THE CINEMA is a user, and we, quite rightly, don’t like users. But, quite wrongly perhaps, we often love them. Some of the most beautiful women I have known were users; so, I gather from women friends, are some of the most handsome men. Are these, then, not to be loved in a world where beauty, both the skin-deep and the deep-as-a-well kind are all too rare? Plato, I think, did us all a great disservice when, in the Symposium, he postulated a hierarchy in the realms of beauty and made the physical kind the lowest, good only for a stepping-stone.

Beauty, as any number of symbolistes and decadents kept reminding us, is not a moral concept, which is what makes it interesting; not enduring (at least when it’s physical), which is what makes it tragic; and not, in its full bloom, resistible, which makes it, after all, a kind of absolute. And the movies, bless them, although equipped to deal with all kinds of beauty, are of all the arts most suited for the display of the physical sort.

JS

About the Author

John Simon

Featured Tags

THE CINEMA is a user, and we, quite rightly, don’t like users. But, quite wrongly perhaps, we often love them. Some of the most beautiful women I have known were users; so, I gather from women friends, are some of the most handsome men. Are these, then, not to be loved in a world where beauty, both the skin-deep and the deep-as-a-well kind are all too rare? Plato, I think, did us all a great disservice when, in the Symposium, he postulated a hierarchy in the realms of beauty and made the physical kind the lowest, good only for a stepping-stone.

Beauty, as any number of symbolistes and decadents kept reminding us, is not a moral concept, which is what makes it interesting; not enduring (at least when it’s physical), which is what makes it tragic; and not, in its full bloom, resistible, which makes it, after all, a kind of absolute. And the movies, bless them, although equipped to deal with all kinds of beauty, are of all the arts most suited for the display of the physical sort.