Stanley Fish has a lovely appreciation of Charlton Heston in today's New York Times. I almost wrote "Stanley Fish, of all people," but I didn't. There was a time when Fish's admiration for Heston would have surprised me, but not any more. After years of playing Satan in the Culture Wars version of Paradise Lost—rather gleefully, too, it always seemed to me—Fish in the Times has proven to be a much more interesting, and likable, character.
When he writes about politics or academia, he still sounds like the impish, contrarian Fish of old, the promoter of postmodernism (even if he has never been exactly a postmodernist himself). He can still be infuriating on these topics, too, coming across as he almost always does as someone who admires the exercise of power for its own sake and who holds in contempt anyone and everyone who acts out of conviction. For example, he's predictably shrewd in attacking the New Atheists for their bad faith (ha ha), but he's also predictably infuriating in refusing to say whether he himself believes in God.
But when he writes about pop culture, especially the culture of his younger days—Heston, Sinatra, the TV show The Fugitive—he comes across as a charming, warm, and even nostalgic middle-aged guy writing about the movies, music, and TV shows he loves. (He can even come across as a cranky old geezer, as he did when he wrote about his frustration with Starbucks). Not that his intelligence deserts him on these topics—he's just as insightful about Sinatra and The Fugitive (about which he's writing a book!) as he is writing about First Amendment issues. Or maybe I just think so because I love Sinatra, too, for many of the same reasons as Fish does.
As for Heston, I can't say that I share Fish's admiration of the William Wyler western The Big Country—I've sat through it twice and find it overblown and boring—but I agree that Heston is good in it, and that the score is one of the best ever written for a western. But in his post Fish gets Heston just right, calling him a character actor in a leading man's body, and noting that his best performances take advantage of that contradiction. (Again, it's possible I think this is shrewd because it's pretty much the same thing I was saying in my own post on Heston.) Who knew that the guy who turned the Duke University English department into a hotbed of critical theory thinks that The Best Years of Our Lives is the "best American movie ever made" (Fish totally has a jones for William Wyler), and that the veteran old academic streetfighter is mad about Songs for Swingin' Lovers?
You know what, I guess I am a bit surprised to find that, even when he pisses me off, a blog by Stanley Fish—of all people!—is the feature in the Times that I most look forward to reading every week.
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