Heart and Soul

Kenneth Turan’s critical inability to relate to New Cinema lies not in, as some might think, his refusal to shuffle across the age gap. Instead, he fails to understand that “young people” appreciate New Cinema because we long to have exactly that which Turan chastises us for having--no heart (“New Cinema’s Heartless Beat,” Dec. 2).

Movies, notoriously, thrive as an escapist pleasure, and New Cinema’s pleasure lies in allowing our generation to fantasize that we have no heart, precisely because we find ourselves caught in the eternally complicated struggle of having one.

Yes, next-generation films, ranging from Harmony Korine’s “Gummo” to Mary Harron’s “American Psycho,” act out my post-boomer generation’s anxious fantasies that we have no heart anymore, in our fractured and high-tech world, at the same time that Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia” and Wes Anderson’s “Rushmore” remind us that, no matter how hard we try, our humanity ultimately insists that we feel a great deal.

Too bad Turan didn’t have the empathy to imagine that these postmodern filmmakers may have ended up capturing the reality of the human experience, in all its terrific complexity, more accurately than those before them.

SUSANNAH BRESLIN

Los Angeles

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Amen to Turan’s take on the current flood of “heartless art films” that celebrate technological virtuosity and a fixation on sleaze, ennui and the human abyss. Such movies are a triumph of sensation over soul. We leave the theater with our nervous system dazzled and frazzled but our hearts and minds starved and aching. Perhaps these soulless characters mirror an element in our society cut off from the past without a compass.

But surely there is a considerable public that hungers for films that explore and illuminate the human condition.

NORM LEVINE

Santa Monica