Violent America, with some of the more general material taken from his “Critics in the Dark” article of 1964, and his 1963 “Lawrence Alloway on the Iconography of the Movies,” comprise something close to a “unified theory of cinema” that he believed was “badly needed” to counter anachronistic or exclusivist theories that derived from “acts of exclusion on the basis of a sloganized vocabulary which prescribes the conditions and forms that reality can take.” There is a clear parallel here to his thinking about art in the 1960s when he sought to counter the “acts of exclusion” that Formalist art criticism had brought about. Looking back on his first decade in the USA, Alloway described how, “as a result of my coming to the United States… I've come to feel that if there is something to do, it has more to do with developing a unifying theory of art rather than fanatic support for some tiny segment of it.” In England at the turn of the decade, he had given “fanatic” support to the abstraction associated with Place and Situation. In the USA in the early 1960s, some critics has associated him with Pop art because of his writings about pop culture in the later 1950s, but Alloway never saw himself defined by a particular movement in the way that were Greenberg or Thomas Hess. In the first collection of his essays, Topics in American Art Since 1945, published in 1975, the sections included writings between 1961 and 1973 on Abstract Expressionism, Hard Edge and Systems, Pop art, problems of representation, “Art and Interface,” and art criticism—a wide range of styles, aesthetics, approaches, and issues. It was not only the particular topics that interested him, but the inclusiveness of pluralism because it accommodated a situation of abundance and the wide collection of diverse practices that increased during the 1960s. On one level, pluralism was the “unifying theory of art”—the notion of a set of different, but occasionally overlapping, value systems that ranged from figurative painting to abstraction, from compact forms to random scatter, and from permanence to obsolescence. The model that gave a structure to pluralism was the continuum that, in the 1950s, had enabled different disciplines or channels—from fine art through science fiction illustration, to B movies—to be equal in status.