Too Well Educated?

I've never seen "The Polar Express" and probably never will, but I was struck by Manohla Dargis' review of the movie, which includes this now-famous quote:

...most moviegoers will be more concerned by the eerie listlessness of those characters' faces and the grim vision of Santa Claus's North Pole compound, with interiors that look like a munitions factory and facades that seem conceived along the same oppressive lines as Coketown, the red-brick town of "machinery and tall chimneys" in Dickens's "Hard Times." Tots surely won't recognize that Santa's big entrance in front of the throngs of frenzied elves and awe-struck children directly evokes, however unconsciously, one of Hitler's Nuremberg rally entrances in Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will." But their parents may marvel that when Santa's big red sack of toys is hoisted from factory floor to sleigh it resembles nothing so much as an airborne scrotum.

The reactions to this that I've seen seem to find this more than a little over the top. For my part, I can't help but feel that she's a little over-qualified for her job. She speaks as if consumers of pop culture are generaly familiar with "Triumph of the Will". I doubt it. And as for Hard Times' Coketown, I'm willing to bet that even the few who actually read the book remember Coketown. Here's Dickens' description:

It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.

I'm quite fond of Dickens, but I don't see this description as a touchstone of modern American culture that a lot of people read. Maybe people read it in college literature courses where the professors who know little of economics attack capitalism? Then there's Santa's sack. I suppose it displays that characteristic wrinkly look.

She also says,

the story is set in the 1950's, the decade when Mr. Van Allsburg [the author of the original book] and Mr. Zemeckis were both young Midwestern children.

Can she mean that eight-year-old Chicago children in the 1950's had a far different vision of the world than, say children from New York or Arizona?

But I digress. I could believe that Dargis' head is teeming with Dickens and Riefenstahl and scrota, but most viewers are not. Of course, maybe that's the point. She's trying to get us to appreciate good art. I listened to part of the director's commentary for The Anniversary Party, and I was struck by how a lot of stuff they did for the movie went right over my head. So I suppose these overly arty types do have some contribution to make.