Russell's movies present something of an enigma, since nobody is too sure who likes them. While art-theatre habitués say that Russell is commercial, the studios seem to feel he is too stylized for the masses and must therefore, by elimination, be art theatre. Where the confusion arises is that Russell's stylizations, while undoubtedly very arty, aspire to the peculiarly unserious condition of a kind of scurrilous cartoon realism in which queening, transmogrified Classics Illustrated characters enacting fancy-dress charades speak lines so banal that nothing anybody says can make the slightest difference to anybody else; in which whole lifetimes are reduced to a handful of hyper-romanticized traumas, climaxes of the wonderful or the awful, whose psychology is abandoned to a few dopey formulate that it would be profane to call Freudian; in which fantasy is mistaken for imagination, and horror, masquerading as evil, is exalted by how seductively it is choreographed and photographed; in which all the subtle means by which humans hurt or please each other are reduced to the grossly physical; in which sexuality of any variety is everywhere and every time mortifying; in which nobody relates to anything outside his fantasies, inside which he is stuck like a fly in jam, and which, anyway, are like no fantasies anybody ever had, except maybe Bob Hope dreaming he was a sheik making Dorothy Lamour. (p. 167)

[For] the horror-show consciousness of the Sixties and Seventies to which bourgeois domestic realism meant obsession and degradation and doom, Russell … tailored a new naive romance, fixated on the pathetic, mortifying conclusion, on creativity not as renewal but as the climactic last kicks of the strangulating body: the Romance of the Bad Trip. So, instead of Genius being the ordinary, persevering Joe with a flare for divinity, he'd be the extraordinary obsessive with a flare for the diabolical—sick, drying up, terrified of boredom….

[There] was a positive compulsion to Russell's films, a curious savior in being had by inverted, low-Hollywood, cliché junk consciously wielded into some kind of ersatz art form, always just outflanking the criteria by which film as "serious art" was usually judged….

[Somehow], out of his passion to "make it all fantasy," Russell had cooked up a formidable marriage of medium and message, embracing exactly that sort of bijou dross to which the movie medium would most readily lend its powers—the mechanical titillations of isolating, self-enhancing daydreams and omnipotent fantasies, going nowhere in the guise of going everywhere. It was the fantasist's domain of comic-strip reality—passive, exclusive, and impervious to the imagination, for it had little to do with living, either in dream or in waking reality, and was of no symbolic value. And to it the movies lent their enormous power to command credence, to amplify the impact of even the most perfunctory effects into a passive, exclusive experience of abandon, exempt from the consequentiality of real events. Consequently, one didn't have a movie experience so much as be had by one. (p. 170)