On the one hand, I think Frank Capra’s “Lost Horizon”, from 1937, is a great movie that explores everyone’s sentimental search for a place of peace and quiet. On the other hand, I think that Howard Hawks’ 1938 “Bringing Up Baby”, despite its excellent pacing and performances, is just mildly amusing rather than hilarious. This preference may be merely personal, and so just a matter of taste in that limited meaning of the word, some people having a taste for salami while others do not, but perhaps taste is much deeper than that, about the way in which I apprehend the universe, taste then becoming a very profound matter indeed.
Now, I don’t care much for the long trek in the Himalayas that provides “Lost Horizon” with some adventure. It is so obviously staged in a studio, some stock footage of the top of the world edited in—or maybe it is just that I was traumatized by “Scott of the Antarctic”, which I saw as a youth. I never want to be that cold again. Nor was I overly impressed by the long opening sequence of the rescue of Europeans in China. It was very well filmed, but too clearly ripped off from Lindbergh’s landing in Paris, though you could see that scene as Capra’s attempt to wed fictional images with real ones so as to keep fantasy somewhat at bay, a tension which is the source of much of his success as a moviemaker. His failure to maintain that tension is what accounts, I think, for his falling off into mere sentimentality in “It’s a Wonderful Life”.
The center of “Lost Horizon”, for me, was its center, the quiet section at Shangri-la, where the details of a utopian community are spelled out in more detail than they usually are in movies or reality shows, the last of which are big on intervention from the outside rather than how the community is self-sustaining because it is morally and materially well balanced. The combination of antiquity and Thirties Modernist architecture catches just the right balance between the past and present that is visualized in those works of literature, like More’s “Utopia” and Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”, which project a future that is very much like the past, though Twain thought that the future would be much worse than the present or the past. Twain forecast tanks. Shangri-la, moreover, goes beyond its predecessors (or is oblivious to the implications) of allowing change to take place in a highly rigid and hierarchical society: it has a pastoral economy that will not be wrecked if indoor plumbing is introduced by the outsiders. The key to the harmony of the place is a philosophy. All emotions are felt with moderation, Aristotle’s description of how moral life actually works taken as an ideal that is realized only in a sheltered, perfect world. Men and women will be courteous in dispensing their sexual favors, sex a problem that often is at the root of the establishment and the destruction of utopian communities all the way back to Eden.
Shangri-la tests the characters of the interlopers. The corrupt businessman and the effete paleontologist come around to its good spirits, and the Ronald Colman character proves worthy enough to be chosen to replace the dying leader of the community. Coleman’s brother, however, is too frenetic a type to adjust. He has always been a dependant figure and so drags his girl friend and his brother away, and perishes when he finds that it is true that the youthfulness bestowed by the valley disappears beyond its precincts. Afterwards, it takes Coleman years and Herculean effort to return to his dream. All told, it is not surprising that “Lost Horizon” gripped the imagination of a generation. The name Shangri-la was borrowed by FDR for the retreat which was built for him in the mountains of Maryland, a place that was later renamed Camp David by the much more prosaic DDE after his grandson.
Taste is a funny sort of thing. David Hume thought that taste was an indication of a whole complex of things that were real about the object that was being judged, and so was grounded in reality. Taste is, then, an educated judgment about whatever it is for which we do not have worked out formulas. That, I take it, is what Kant meant by judgment rather than reason.That may be true, but an individual sense of taste develops out of so many sources that the best way to judge it is by whether it is conventional or not. We say of people who have tastes in literature or music or movies that are different from that of most people or even most critics that their tastes are quirky or eccentric, not that they are wrong, because we do not usually take taste to be a matter of right or wrong, objectively true or not, even if some, like me, see the act of criticism as objective rather than just the expression of a taste.
Indeed, it is fair to go so far as to say that one thinks one has good taste when one has managed to develop a taste, a quick judgment, that is similar to conventional opinion. Good taste means that you think what is great is what is generally considered great, like Shakespeare, and what is ok is what is generally considered ok, like Arthur Miller, and that what is minor is what is generally considered minor, even if worthy, like the films of Otto Preminger. It can take years to refine your tastes so that they are like those of people you admire or want to emulate, whether those are movie critics, literary critics, those who are your friends, or acquaintances who like modern art or Danish furniture. You form your taste by trying to find out what is worthwhile in these artistic endeavors, and by disciplining yourself to set aside what you find unaesthetic or unsatisfactory about those objects. I had to work hard to develop a preference for Danish Modern when I was young because I thought I should share the view of what I thought to be classy people that the square and unadorned lines of the furniture was the essence of being up to date. People, after all, will think you are just being contrary if you prefer George Bernard Shaw to Shakespeare. (Sondheim was setting up a straw man when he puts the two in competition in his version of “The Frogs”, but then wasn’t Aristophanes doing the same thing in his original version of the play when he had Sophocles contest with Aristophanes—or was he?)
So important are matters of taste that we apply the term to different levels of aesthetic experience. There are low brow tastes (for adventure films); there are middle brow tastes (as mine for “Lost Horizon”) where the moral is uplifting and easy to grasp; there is a highbrow taste for recalcitrant literature like “Waiting for Godot” or simply demanding literature that tests our moral capacities, as is true with “The Iliad” and most of the books contained in what was once called “the canon”. People can operate on all three levels, but we know what part of their souls they are experiencing and exhibiting when they engage in one or another of these pastimes. So it is important, some will say, to have good taste, whether in films or literature or politics, because that shows how complex your soul is, how much you have caught on with some form for the expression of an understanding of life. You can cultivate your taste for film or literature or ballet for the whole of your life.
Matters of aesthetics are therefore not small matters. It is worth remembering, though, that however important aesthetics are, they do not define the whole of a person. I certainly would not refuse to marry someone because I didn’t like her taste in movies. There must be other sources of attraction and I should think you would prefer to contextualize the difference in taste, make it something of a joke or a matter of irrelevance, if there were more important harmonies. But that too, strictly speaking, is a matter of taste: that we all know well enough (or should know) how to put matters of taste aside or in their place.
Moreover, I am not sure that the pursuit of good taste doesn’t devolve into a purely aesthetic matter, whereby good taste is the ability to evaluate whether a movie maker or a novelist has found a way to balance off his materials so that the arrangement is pleasing to behold as well as bears some resemblance to the actual or fantastic world that is being imagined. One can see through what the author has to say to his mastery of his devices, in which case D. W. Griffith is a genius rather than a racist, and Vladimir Nabakov rises above his tawdry subject matter. Rather, I prefer a more old fashioned standard: does the movie or novel offer me a dose of truth about the human condition? Theodore Dreiser stands out as a novelist who very well caught the class structure in America even if he did it in an ungainly way, what with his bad prose and melodramatic plot constructions. But still essential reading. And so, by the way, is Nabakov, who is not making Humbert Humbert into a figure of authorly manipulation, but into a specimen for the study of the nature of human desire. Taste is a first step, but not the last one. And so I treat “Lost Horizon” as the visualization of a longing that ends only in death of a contentment not easily achieved in normal life, but the impulse to which we should bear in mind. It is just another of the things, this perception, that makes up my soul.