["Excess"] and an unrelentingly ironic point of view have probably been the qualities most responsible for the critical hatred of Russell's past work. His almost obsessive desire to destroy pretense and smash romantic icons seems to guarantee an adverse reaction. And an adverse reaction is bound to come each time he realizes this desire with vitality and an approach to cinema that does not admit of subtlety or moderation. But the reaction is quite urfounded. To be offended by a style without analyzing the reason for the style suggests critical self-satisfaction and cowardice, two qualities Russell is always attacking in his films.
Russell sees the artist as a man or woman of heightened sensibilities who is beleaguered both by his own neuroses or sense of mission and by an environment that is strained into madness as the artist tries to live out his life in it. Russell's inquiry (he says he approaches biography as a detective story) is into the ways his character might have dealt with his life, basing the material on existing facts, as Russell interprets them, but playing the "facts" against the romanticized myth that has grown up around the artist. Thus, the typical Russell subject is composed of three personae: the historical figure, the myth the figure has created, and Russell's own vision of the subject, which exaggerates the historical figure in order to pay it off against the myth. The result is, obviously, conflict. And it is a conflict in which no one wins: not the subject, not his contemporary world, not the popular myth, and certainly not the audience who come to a biographical film with certain expectations. Ultimately the biographical figure is turned into an actor in history and is destroyed by his act and the historical moment that cannot contain him. After his death he is further destroyed by his mythic persona, that version of himself created by the admirers of his art. (p. 42)
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