It makes sense that Black Swan came out around Christmas because Black Swan is like a fruitcake. It is a cake, but not any kind of cake you’d like to eat; it’s heavy; and you find out too late it’s filled with gooey red clumps made out of God knows what. With dialogue like silent movie intertitles, its sunless expressionism is not so much reminiscent of The Red Shoes and Carrie as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It recasts ballet as a masculinized competition between broken dolls and maniacs that takes place inside a Freudian fairy tale, making it a film for today — incoherent and unsatisfying, it leaves you battered and confused.

Bickerton quotes Jean-Louis Comolli, an editor at the magazine during its most radical phase in the ’60s and ’70s. Film criticism and filmmaking, he wrote, must make “a political choice to stop seeing the audience as an inert, amorphous mass open to all sorts of manipulation by advertising,” and instead must “bank on the existence of an audience that is lucid” and “ultimately as creative as the filmmaker.” Bickerton argues that Cahiers switched tactics as the film industry changed during the Reagan–Star Wars era, dumbing down in order to please a new kind of consumer and to drive flagging sales.

Only Serge Daney, the magazine’s most vital film critic since the days of Bazin and Truffaut, held fast, admitting that while “the times themselves [had] grown more feeble, in terms of thought,” film critics still had to discover and explain “what was cinema’s ‘specificity,’ given the proliferation of images through advertising and television. . . . And how should the critic conceive of his or her role within this transformed landscape of images?”

Maybe Dom Cobb is a metaphorical name like Ariadne or Mal, other characters in this turgid crowd-pleaser, and I just didn’t know what the significance was. A lot of people who have seen it will tell you that Inception is one big metaphor — a movie about making movies, about how movies work, about what it’s like to see movies, and how close they are to dreams and how life is like a dream and like a movie, too. “It’s a movie about movies!” these fans insist, giving special emphasis to the word movies the way sometimes people used to say something meaningful was about life. Then they tell you how it was about movies. What they don’t tell you is that it’s about bad movies.

Why not? Kinkade can afford to dream. The one uncheckable factoid everything written on him can’t fail to include is that supposedly one in twenty American homes has a Kinkade hanging in it. “What the heck, I’m a romantic,” he says on the Christmas Cottage commentary track, explaining that he paints “an art that comforts your heart and reminds you of foundational things, a very sentimental kind of art.” When Oscar Wilde wrote that “a sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it,” he didn’t know that someday an American painter would find a way to make sentimentalists pay for it in monthly installments.

I give her a call, and we meet the next day. We meet in a Mexican restaurant Bertolano co-owns. In addition to her work as a loan specialist and restaurateur, she also works as a legal assistant for a bankruptcy lawyer. Bertolano, who tells me to call her Vienna, is a petite Filipina in her midfifties with a slight accent. “Vallejo,” she tells me, “was going to be the new Silicon Valley. It was a thriving market. People could buy investment homes here and see them go up 30 percent right away. When the bubble burst in late ’06, middle- and lower-income buyers who could barely afford $1,500 a month in rent were stuck with $350,000 homes they’d bought with no money down. In 2005 there were never houses here for less than $300,000. Now there are over 2,000 houses selling in Solano County for less than $100,000, many of them for around $35,000. The only people buying them are investors. And it’s going to get a lot worse. It’s going to be bleak.”

Far from being nonideological or apolitical, The Hurt Locker is actually pro-war, and it’s not a contradiction that it’s the best American film made about the war in Iraq so far. Kathryn Bigelow’s film explicitly states that it is better to spend every day of your life risking getting blown to pieces defusing IEDs in Baghdad than it is to spend even one day in the US shopping for cereal at Costco with your family. While many films have tried to present the American family’s consumerist nightmare before, Bigelow’s film is one that really makes you feel it. She does not shy away from the lower-income status of her hero by ennobling it, nor does she make it shameful. It is stated as fact.

In a series of bad dreams, Brad Pitt combines with Forrest Gump, E.T., Oliver from The Brady Bunch, the baby from Eraserhead, Tom Waits album covers, Dr. Zhivago, Dick Cheney/Donald Rumsfeld, on and on, like robot locusts eating the inside of the movie theater for three hours.

By the mid-1970s Farber knew what he wanted from audiences. He wanted them to be Farber. “The audience,” he said, “should be fantastically dialectical, involved in a continuing discussion of every movie.” He wanted the same from filmmakers: “The person making the movie should be held responsible for everything that’s said and shown, and so should the audience seeing it.” If this seems a long way from the pure pleasure Kael-ite critics accuse him of deriving from “underground” movies by directors like Hawks, Walsh, or Aldrich, it’s not. It’s just that Farber feels those directors were aware of a certain kind of responsibility. Ours is a cinematic age of auteurism without responsibility. Every film is A Film By and no director is ever held accountable for making bad movies and no audience is ever ridiculed for liking them. Farber’s direction for audiences and filmmakers makes more sense than ever, even as it becomes less possible for working film critics and film directors to follow it.

Farber states that he is not interested in pronouncing movies good or bad, but he is still always for or against something. If we see his influence in the nonjudgmental quality of our film critics today, who celebrate the great diversity of the regime of image-making practices, choices, and options we all live under, what we look for and don’t find is anyone being for or against anything they see.

For two months this summer the only movies I watched were movies about the war on terror. While other moviegoers were enjoying cinematic treats like You Don’t Mess with the Zohan and The Happening, or the revival of Kobayashi’s The Human Condition, or that Norwegian movie about Norwegian yuppie writers that everybody liked so much, I was immersed in the backlog of global war-on-terror movies released since 2002. The only summer blockbuster I saw was Iron Man, a war-on-terror movie and therefore allowable.

I watched three dozen of these movies and maybe 15 percent of them were any good. The rest, like the war itself, represented an enormous waste of manpower and resources that would have been better spent on something good for people, like entertainment. When I say this I do not mean any disrespect to the three thousand men and women who died on September 11, 2001, or the over four thousand American soldiers who have died overseas, or the tens of thousands of Iraqis who have been killed, or the unknown number of detainees who have been tortured in prisons. But watching these movies was like being buried under rubble while working in an office, like being stuck in the desert far from home, invaded by an occupying army, left tied in a stress position for days.