[BalinKing]

Slightly surprised to learn Master and Commander is “lowbrow”—is it just because it’s not an art film or whatever? Usually I’d expect Marvel films to be described that way (unfairly imo, when it comes to the Phase One batch at least)…

[canjobear]

It's clearly in a different category from the "highbrow" examples like Solaris, just by virtue of being entertaining to a broad audience. In contrast Solaris is the kind of movie where there's a five minute unbroken scene that's just a guy driving in traffic and thinking about his life. (Like the author, I like them both!)

[thundergolfer]

The ‘brow’ standards have dropped significantly, in a process Fussell has described as the general proletarianization of culture.

For a long time films that would be considered niche and arthouse were middlebrow, because film itself was at best a middlebrow medium.

To people still concerned with the various brows, Marvel films are below low. They are sign of a debased and infantile film culture that caters to childish tastes and merchandising, not art.

[mordechai9000]

Years ago I was surprised to read a critic that described Branagh's Hamlet as middlebrow. I mean, Henry V, sure - that only even qualifies as middlebrow because it's Shakespeare. I would assume it was lowbrow at the time it was written. I love the prologue, though.

[thundergolfer]

Yeah I'd say the critic was most likely affirming the idea that film is a middlebrow medium. Seeing Hamlet at the Globe is high brow, but seeing Hamlet as the cinema is middlebrow.

[TheOtherHobbes]

The Globe is full of tourists, so it's multibrow at best.

Bourdieu's take was that the working classes like simple sentimental art, the middle classes like aspirational, middlebrow art because they feel they have something to prove, and the upper classes often prefer kitsch.

Although sometimes it's high status middlebrow kitsch, such as a lot of opera and light classical music, which is more sentimental than technical.

Most opera lovers have no idea who Luigi Nono was, and would care less if they did know.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joteZTLpHdE

Highbrow art is the exclusive niche domain of intellectuals and academics UNLESS it's been commodified into a Veblen good, like contemporary art.

[jancsika]

> Although sometimes it's high status middlebrow kitsch, such as a lot of opera and light classical music, which is more sentimental than technical.

Are you sure it's more sentimental than technical? Like, with-your-ears sure?

Note that it took something like 140 years for someone to write a tempo fugue using a piano technique in Chopin's 4th Ballade. That is to say-- sentimental composers are as good at hiding their technique as audiences are at missing it.

[ggm]

The film is by Peter Weir, who is capable of being quite highbrow. But, it stars Rusty, who is capable of being quite low brow. It depends. Are you not entertained?

The books are a bit highbrow and lowbrow. OBrien did a fantastic highbrow biography of Joseph Banks and another of Picasso, but this series is lowbrow. Not as lowbrow as his translation of "Papillon". He was in his youth feed as a quite highbrow up and coming thing. He wasn't Irish, he was an astute fake who left his first wife and reinvented himself in France under an assumed name he came to personify. John Le Carre is similar.

The books are more highbrow than CS Forester. I upset a Hornblower fan(atic) by averring Bush has a homoerotic fixation on Hornblower.

De gustibus...

[rexpop]

Marvel films are commercial tripe. Pure commodity fetishism and cheap spectacle. Utterly without literary merit.

Master and Commander is pretentious pulp. Real, quality media is obscure, and largely unpalatable to our debased modern sensibilities.