The motives for Brody’s fellow ceejays getting behind the book and repeating its slurs are less Jacobean. They seem to dislike Godard on general principles and have jumped at the opportunity afforded by the book under review to stick a fork in him. Perhaps a fairer book would have had the same results, although it would have furnished them with a less lethal fork. The reaction against Godard that I became aware of after the publication of Everything Is Cinema seems to be part of a larger reaction against a certain idea of the arts of film and film criticism by a whole generation of writers who are now comfortably ensconced in their careers. Godard, who embodies that idea, is their natural enemy and a reproach to their very existence. This inevitable downshifting from cultural struggle to cultural journalism also has to do, I think, with the spread of reactionary politics in America over the last 30 years.
