Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert is a great humanist. By “great humanist” I mean someone who sees the failures and limitations and half-measures in humanity and looks beyond them to the enduring good, who recognizes in a leaf, or the corner of a dingy street, or the eyes of a half-remembered person, a glimmer of the divine. I am not a great, or even a good, humanist. I too often become so consumed with the failures of persons and people that I have no eyes for the beauty in them. For that reason, I am especially inspired by the great humanists. In my faith, they are master interpreters of the only God that exists: the God that is in each of us and in our surroundings, in everything and nothing.

Many of my favorite writers were great humanists. The historians among you will recognize Isaiah Berlin, Studs Terkel, and Tony Judt. Literary types will know John Steinbeck, Raymond Carver, and A. S. Byatt. Shakespeare was a great humanist, though he hid it well; notice how he drops his mask only for the character of the Fool. Beethoven was a great humanist.

Ebert, however, is different. Occasionally, a unique medical condition creates a situation in which a writer puts to paper not only his “polished,” publishable thoughts, but his entire thought and creative process. This happened to Beethoven with his deafness; when he could not express himself to anyone except through the music in his head, he went to the unusual extreme of giving us his whole soul instead of just the bits he was proudest of. It happened, briefly, to Tony Judt this year and last, and you can read the results in the pages of the New Yorker. It has been happening for years to Arthur Silber, though I would not call him a great humanist. And now it is happening to Ebert.

Ebert lost part of his face, plus his ability to speak and to eat, four years ago. Obviously his days as a television film critic were over. But as a man who made his living expressing himself in print, he followed the example of Beethoven, Judt, and Silber, and turned his full creative powers to the printed page: to blogging, reviews, and a series of books (all available from his website). Read them, and you have the rare and precious sensation that you are losing yourself in the mind of a great humanist. It is a feeling like no other. You can get this feeling from Beethoven, but not all of us are fluent in the language of early nineteenth century classical music, and besides, Beethoven was an angrier and more violent humanist than Ebert.

If you watched Siskel & Ebert in the old days, this is not the Ebert you know. This Ebert is quieter, more pensive, more eloquent. He does not rage against his condition as Beethoven did. Occasionally he is saddened by it. But more often he is simply grateful that he is still alive, and stepped in the sensory intake of a great lover of life.

You can get some of this from his blog. You can walk around Chicago in Ebert’s mind looking at architecture, or share in his joy at the golden age of Internet film critics, or muse with him about telepathy and immortality. But my preferred way to experience Ebert is through his series of “Great Movies” reviews, available in three published books and also online.

A good film critic tells you what to expect in a film, whether the film is good or bad, and gives you an idea of whether you might like it. A bad critic spends more time on the bad reviews than on the good ones. The bad reviews are more fun; there one can be scathing and sardonic. Roger Ebert is a great critic. Ebert’s good reviews are more enjoyable than his bad ones, and they are best read after you watch the films they review, not before. Watch a film like Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal,” and then read Ebert’s Great Movies review of it. It’s like watching the film a second time through the eyes, and with the senses, of a great humanist. Do the same with a wide smattering of great films, such as Hitchcock’s Vertigo, The Third Man, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kurosawa’s soaring Ikiru. You will begin to understand what a blessing it is that Roger Ebert is a great humanist.

Three final thoughts:

Ebert has expressed his philosophy of criticism in a quote from 1950s intellectual Robert Warshow: “A man goes to the movies. A critic must be honest enough to admit he is that man.” Ebert’s love for the man going to the movies is what makes him a great humanist.

I know of one other critic like this: my friend Scott McLemee, a self-taught critic, unapologetic Marxist, expert on C. L. R. James, and, at times, a great humanist in his own right.

Ebert often pens pieces I disagree with, strongly. Here are two of them. Well, I disagree with the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, too. If you can’t get past the parts of a great humanist you disagree with, you’ll never get to experience the “Ode to Joy” at the end. Either way, your choice.