I just read some reviews of the short French film, The Red Balloon. If you haven’t seen the film, you absolutely should. You owe it to yourself.

I loved the film when it first came out, 1956. It shows there are good and bad people everywhere, even children, and you don’t have to be French. It’s about love, the love of a boy and his balloon. I showed it to my class when I was teaching fifth grade at Longfellow Elementary in Pasadena.

Those were the days when modern technology gave us movie projectors we could check out and roll down the hall to your classroom, pull down the screen, thread the film and turn off the lights. I saw it over and over, year after year. The students always loved it.

The school had a limited selection of films. I showed Disney’s Johnny Tremain when we studied the American Revolution.

Most of the reviews of The Red Balloon are insightful, responsive, glowing, precise. You can look them up so you’ll know what I’m talking about.

One, however, was particularly mean and nasty. You can look it up so you’ll know what I’m talking about.

There are critics who impose their own point of view, see the world through an adjusted lens. They look for parallels, but too often don’t let the work of art speak in its own voice.

Actually, all critics do, and should be really careful about that.

It’s especially difficult for Marxist critics, who are struggling with a world which does not, as yet, adhere to their interpretation.

But the point I’m circling around circumferentially is exemplified thus:

People forget that Jesus was a Jew.

Napoleon advocated the overthrow of kings and then became Emperor.

Sounds all too familiar.

But the point I’m trying to make is:

Everything we see is through the eyes of our own mindset and our own proclivities.

It’s the “job” of education, hence the teacher, to open up the student to the larger world, able to live in it, which may bend the rules or make new ones.

Every new thing we know is one less that we don’t.

Even the Founding Fathers who framed the Constitution brought different mind sets and points of view as they tried to change each other’s mind. They hammered out a compromise. We keep changing their minds, trying something, then taking it back, trying again. We’re a work in progress.

This should not surprise me.

History is the record of changed minds, the imposition of successive points of view.

Thus, religion: “That’s not God!”

Law: “That’s not justice!”

Government: “Where’s my share?” “I do what’s right!” “What’s right is what I say is right!”  

Art: “That’s not art!”

No wonder history is currently outlawed.

The critic’s “job” is to say what he sees and evaluate it, measuring it against a standard which may not be universal.

I’ve had similar examples in my own life which should illustrate the point I’m making, or trying to.

I relate them here as examples of how and why we need to experience art (and everything else) as it intends, before we try to force it into a set of rules and presuppositions, or tear it apart. In those instances I decry, the agenda becomes the focus and the art is lost.

My first example, and I may have mentioned it elsewhere, is from a German literature class I was taking at UCR, to fulfill a requirement, and because I like literature. I especially like German poetry. Partly because it has often been set to music by wonderful composers whose songs I love to sing. Partly because examples form the basis of some of my best and most successful lessons I taught to my high school students.

At UCR, we were reading Hofmannsthal, “Die Beiden,” 1895, just before the century turned.

The stirrup cup, offered to a departing horseman by the girl at the inn. Both were reluctant to part, their hands trembled as one proffered and the other reached, the cup dropped and the wine spilled on the ground.

Keiner Hand die andre fand

und dunkler Wein am Boden rollte.

My friend in the class, who lived in the dorm room across the hall from me, was an upperclassman and had a presence on campus (I think he turned out to be Student Body President, which I never realized until years later) apparently saw me as a rival and tried to one-up me with his interpretation.

He said the spilled wine was red and therefore was a metaphor for blood, for death and war and religion, sacrificial wine spilling as a sacrament gone wrong, yada yada yada.

I said, “The context and tone of the poem shows two nervous young mutually attractive potential lovers dropping the stirrup cup.”

The class agreed with me, as did the professor. And also the internet, at great Iength. I was pointing out the dangers of overinterpretation, which can prevent us from experiencing the original on its own merits.

My friend looked daggers at me.

I may have mis- and over-interpreted the incident, but that’s the way I remember it, and I still think of him as a friend.

Then there was that other time.

Henry Jaglom (alas now dead at 87) was premiering his latest film, New Year’s Day, at the nearest Laemmle, in 1989. After the film, he took questions.

One guy didn’t “get it.” He said, “Do people really act like that?”

I answered from the audience, “Well, It IS New Year’s.”

Jaglom was glad I gave that answer so he didn’t have to.  

And that, I think, concludes a sufficient rebuttal.