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overrated, which it remains until the inevitable backlash and it becomes underrated again. The point where the culture’s adoration or contempt is finely balanced, suspended in a place of perfect proportion, does not exist; some years back I myself was both underrated and overrated at the same time. Beyond this simple algebra I admit there was a brief period when, secretly, naively, I held out hope for something more. I hoped that in the city of no politics, no identity, no moment and no rationale, a new cinema would present itself, which I called the Cinema of Hysteria. I was convinced that throughout the Twentieth Century this clandestine cinema was already forming though no one noticed, since by its very nature it was scattered and entropic and found only in outposts represented by such movies as In a Lonely Place, The Shanghai Gesture, Bride of Frankenstein, A Place in the Sun, Gilda, Gun Crazy, Vertigo, One-Eyed Jacks, Splendor in the Grass, The Fountainhead, The Manchurian Candidate and Pinocchio . These are movies that make no sense at all—and we understand them completely. These are the movies that would be left when the bottom fell out of America altogether, the cinema that would rip itself loose of its moorings and stutter across an American screen that remembers nothing. In an age riddled with uncertainty by technological acceleration, financial upheaval and the plague of exchanged bodily fluids, when we’re panicked enough to root ourselves in anything we can still pretend to recognize—a job, a girlfriend, a heavily annotated calendar or Rolodex updated with correct area codes—the undercurrent of the age pulls us to an irrational truth, for which only an irrational cinema is sufficient. In the end this cinema resides at either the bottom of the psyche or the very top, the final shrill expression of a truth beyond words and thought, addressing the concerns of obsession and redemption that are beyond the rational calculations of technology or the rational price of finance or even the rational ravishment of plague.
    It was only later that I realized there would be no such cinema for the very reason that made me a movie critic in the first place. As time and passion dwindle to a pinpoint, the audience has come to understand that it no longer need subject itself to the actual experience of art but can subsume and synthesize faster and more efficiently art that is already processed by critical interpretation. Even better and more efficient when, as the second critic responds to the first, the art is twice removed; even better, as the third critic responds to the second, three times removed. When it became clear to me that reviewers, commentators and professional observers of all stripe were the true wise men of the new epoch, I could also see that with each new exponential twist of the ongoing cultural logarithm, the artist was approaching that ideal Utopian moment when he or she would vanish altogether. Well I’m no dummy. As a novelist I felt myself getting less corporeal with every passing moment. Except that … except that after a while the tedium of reviewing movies that could neither be overrated nor underrated, that were not worth rating at all, started driving me crazy. So I couldn’t get it out of my head, my Cinema of Hysteria, when I sat down last week to review the revival and restoration of the long lost hysterical silent masterpiece The Death of Marat , by the legendary director Adolphe Sarre, who made the picture when he was twenty-five years old and never made another film. It was one of my best pieces. In fact, it may have been the best review I’ve ever written. Brilliantly analyzing the construction and montage, eloquently conveying the power of the lead actress’s performance, I surmised in breathtaking terms how the entire history of film might have been affected if The Death of Marat had gotten its due when it was first released; I even quoted an interview with D. W. Griffith in which