As the late Susan Sontag noted, interpretation tends to fall into two opposing camps. The first kind, ‘aggressive and impious’, treats works of art as landscapes concealing mineral ore: it ‘excavates, and as it excavates, destroys’. The other, by contrast, resembles less the pit-worker than the more distractible traveller who, so thrilled by the picturesque surrounds, decides to remain awhile: it ‘see[s] more, to hear more, to feel more’. These critical tendencies are still at war, forty years on. In a nutshell, this is the contestation between academic and journalistic writing. Australia’s interdisciplinary periodicals are the ambulances – and the ambulance-chasers – scrambling back and forth across its frontline.

It is apparent that, for Ivor Indyk’s HEAT, taking sides in this struggle is a no-brainer. Backing touristic curiosity and pleasure against dull but worthy travail is a clear case of good versus evil. The new issue kicks off with a piece by Adrian Martin that is as plain a plea for a sensual approach to criticism as Sontag’s own. Martin wants it to be acceptable to riff about Deleuze and Guattari, Bob Dylan, Anatomy of Hell and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in the first person and the same breath, and still be taken seriously. He argues that film critics would do well to relay the medium’s visceral pleasures in a language of equal passion, and to avoid circumlocutions and disavowals. Martin’s piece stands sentinel in HEAT’s front pages like an article of faith.