On Kid Twist’s Refusal of Humanity
A Letter to the EditorFrom William H. Aile, August 29, 2026
Re: “Something Human is Up There” Or why film is not an art by Kid Twist
Mr. Twist—or as I’ve been told to refer to him, Monsieur Twist from Le Bronx—and the editors of Perseity have given us one of the richest poor arguments of the century thus far. The author’s brilliance and style are not in dispute, and I grant him every distinction in this field. (Nay, more: I commend him as a model to wayward writers, could they but bear to read essays entire.) But the Monsieur will forgive me if I take issue with his thesis—to wit, that film is not an art because it is too human, specifically because it does not, like puppet theater and the other fine arts, subtract from our ordinary human-recognitive faculties in order to make apperception an achievement. This claim has its point. Movies are surpassingly easy to consume (if consumption is the right word and we are not, as I have elsewhere suggested, in fact consumed by such things), and ease in art is more sedative than satisfactory. Easy paintings and poems let their authors off the hook at the same time as their readers. We see how smooth the transition from art to decoration is in such works. And that is just the point this point should make. Film and its history have shown (or reminded) us that the line between the artwork and mere amusement is not sharp, not a matter merely of medium—and this has proven true of all the arts. In painting we call it decoration; in poetry we call it gush; in music we call it background; in architecture we call it cookie-cutter. Each is what a new generation, in their apt ineptitude with words, is coming to call slop. That film lends itself to slop is an empirical discovery, but no essential surprise. And this is the true basis of M. Twist’s case. The scaffolding of his argument consists of some stipulated criteria for what makes an art an art, namely the aforementioned deduction or abnegation of human faculties. The arts, one and all, according to him, refuse humanity. But where do we get this idea? It could just as well be said that the great works of art are exemplary in their humanity. Not—not necessarily—in their adherence to some moral code, but in their revelation of what a human can do and what the human history of significant forms contains. Film no less than poetry. (Not necessarily less, at any rate. Poetry’s longer and brighter genius has made it a richer treasury than the film archives, but this is largely a function of its age; and poetry’s (seemingly) more primordial medium may make it live longer than film, the light of whose stars may be swallowed once and for all by the next media merger—but who knows? If moving pictures become the major medium of communication, we should expect a poetry of sorts to form of it, no? If, at least, a muse of it should find us with our ears open.) But the Monsieur’s idea of humanity is a thin one; and the operative notion of apperception narrow: the humanity that films, on his account, refuse to refuse, is the humanity of the people on the screen—as though the recognition of a human were more difficult in Olympia or even in Madame Cézanne in a Red Dress than in Black Narcissus or La Strada. But the humanity of those films, like the humanity of those paintings, is not a matter of the people in them being apperceived as people, but of the forms themselves being human facts.—It’s for this reason, not their being peopled with humans, that works of art can offer us a moral education, and not a moralizing one (a possible connection of art and morality the Monsieur has not considered).—The achievement art demands of a viewer is the achievement of seeing this form, which, however much we may be moved (and in all the arts we must be able to be moved to discover anything), requires a responsive activity on the part of the viewer to see it.—As the most relevant author on the subject of late concluded, our interests as viewers—the necessity of our response, as I’m calling it—intrudes into the analysis to such an extent, and at such an essential point, that, and I quote, “I do not see how [the question of which things are artworks and which are not] can be settled a priori in favor of some objects and not others.” M. Twist’s argument from and about essences is hard to believe, since such essences change—or, if you like, our ideas about them change. For just as we do not, says the Monsieur, class a Rothko as art, for it is one, this is all the argument I find necessary and, it turns out, sufficient to disprove the thesis that Wild Strawberries or Moonstruck or Love Me Tonight is not art. Each simply is. To argue this fact would be as trivial as to deny it is sophistical. The better question, I believe, than whether film is an art, is whether, since it has become one, we will again find anything meaningful expressed in it.