Customer Reviews

The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre, and Other Aspects of Popular Culture

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This book is a hard-to-find but fascinating and lightly-written look at film and its relationship with society. Warshow is elegant and interesting. If there are any publishers listening out there, my suggestion to you is to find this book, buy it, and reprint it

Robert Warshow's essays are some of the finest examples of critical prose in American literature -- they range far beyond the comic book (see the cover for a good example of bad packaging), and even in essays ostensibly devoted to film, etc., a range of serious social and philosophical topics are engaged. Everything he writes is worth reading. Perhaps the only similar criticism on this level is Ariel Dorfman's The Emperor's New Clothes (his essay on the Lone Ranger is a good complement to Warshow's on The Westerner).

This edition has two very fine essays by David Denby and Lionel Trilling (Trilling's came from an earlier edition), and one irritating essay by Stanley Cavell, which, like everything Cavell has written for twenty years is all about ME ME ME ME ME, as if he were GOD. You would think he might have learned a little self-effacement from reading Warshow.

Perhaps the best thing in the book is the constant sense of tone: how to write about popular culture without being snappy and ironic -- something which has completely gone out of the armature of critics today.