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I spent the month of November in New York, and for part of that time I hung out at the Museum of Television and Radio (now the Paley Center for Media), doing research for a book I’m writing on the ’60s TV show “The Fugitive.” When I wasn’t reading reviews and cover stories in old issues of TV guide, I was going to galleries, listening to concerts and seeking out movies that would probably not make it up to Delaware County. The movie I found was “Starting Out in the Evening,” described in the reviews as a “small film,” which means not only that there are no special effects, but that almost nothing happens (a point of criticism on the part of some reviewers).

Leonard Schiller, an aging novelist whose four books are out of print, is laboring without much success to produce a fifth when a beautiful young woman enters his life and challenges the insularity of his hitherto inviolate routines. She is writing a master’s thesis on him and wants to explore the relationship between his writing and his emotional history.

He resists any such probing — he says that his characters have their own lives and that he just follows them around waiting for something interesting to happen — and the tension between them reflects the ancient quarrel between those who think that art is an expression of personal experience and those, like Schiller, who think that art is its own realm and is responsible only to the demands and laws of craft.

In a parallel story, Schiller’s 40-year-old daughter is also having birth pangs, but in a more literal sense. Devoted to a father who maintains a severe emotional distance from her, she wants desperately to have a child. But the man she loves is resolved not to bring anyone else into the world, and the two have been busy not negotiating this issue for a number of years.

That’s it; nothing else.

Only two things in the film rise to the status of an event. Schiller has a stroke, but its effect, finally, is only further to slow down a life that was already near quiescent. And in a conversation where it seems to him that Heather Wolfe (his young admirer) is condescending to him, he slaps her. But since the slap comes across almost as a caress — perhaps even a statement of gratitude for her having made him think about what it means to write — it does not have that much force and is in no way a climax to the non-action of the non-plot. In the last moment of the movie, Schiller goes back to his typewriter — an emblem of his refusal to be connected to things outside his study — and begins anew the search for the right word.

Refusal is the film’s mode, and watching it reminded me of why I am so drawn to “The Fugitive,” a series that ran on ABC from 1963 to 1967 and was the basis of a Harrison Ford-Tommy Lee Jones blockbuster in the nineties. (A new TV version, determinedly unfaithful to the original, tanked in 2000.)

It might seem that “The Fugitive” is the antithesis of “Starting Out in the Evening” because it is apparently so plot-driven. Everyone knows the story: Richard Kimble, a pediatrician, has been convicted of killing his wife. He alone knows that the real killer is a one-armed man he saw running from his house on the night of the murder. He is reprieved from execution when the train taking him and his detective-guard, lieutenant Philip Gerard, runs off the rails allowing him to escape. Gerard pursues him relentlessly and he, not quite as relentlessly, pursues the one-armed man.

But this double-pursuit plot does not give the drama its energy; it is merely a device for getting Kimble in and out of the many small towns where he encounters men and women in various stages of moral and psychological distress. The story really belongs to them and to the moments in which they must respond to the opportunities and dangers Kimble’s presence in their midst produces. Will they betray him? Do they believe in his innocence? Do they trust in the workings of blind justice?

While the decisions they make and the actions they take often affect Kimble (who is always a second away from capture), the real significance of what they do (or fail to do) resides in the lives they will live when he is long gone. He is the catalyst who precipitates a self-examination and a taking of stock he never performs; and it is only when his work is done (or turns out to be impossible; some people are just too far gone) that the plot kicks in – someone recognizes him – and he has to get out of town, often hiding in the back of a truck or in some other ignominious posture.

In short, “The Fugitive” is about character and moral choice and not about plot, even though it is through the mechanism of plot that Kimble moves on to the next place where people need his help more than he needs theirs. All the action, such as it is, takes place in small, usually dark rooms where a troubled soul is forced to confront his or her aspirations, doubts and demons.

The same can be said of “Starting Out in the Evening,” in which a typical scene finds Schiller and his adversary/admirer, or Schiller and his daughter, or the daughter and her lover, giving voice to their fears and anxieties and trying to come to terms with their limitations, often in the limited spaces of an upper West Side apartment. “People talk a lot” in this movie, one reviewer complained, and added that it was all too “masturbatory,” that is, self-focused.

And indeed it is, to the exclusion of everything else: The only issues raised are the issues with which the members of the small cast are obsessed — dedication to art vs. openness to the messiness of life, integrity vs. connectedness, purity of purpose vs. the seductions of commerce and fame (which Milton famously called “that last infirmity of noble mind.”) You would never know, while watching this movie, that there was a whole lot going on in the world — wars, famines, international crises, presidential elections, environmental disasters. We are allowed to assume that the setting is contemporary — 2007 — but the scene could be shifted to 1907 or 1607 without any loss whatsoever.

This is part of what I meant when I said earlier that the mode of the film is refusal. First, it refuses cinematic virtuosity. No intricate cutting, no clever camera angles, no hallucinations, no flashbacks, no disruptions of sequence, no tricks. Just a straight-ahead representation of one conversational scene after another in “real time.” Second, it refuses excitement, except of a quiet psychological kind. And third, it refuses relevance. Politics is referenced only once, when the daughter’s boyfriend (who is black, a fact of which, praise be, absolutely nothing is made) says that he would like to start a magazine that would be a forum for left-wing views.

But there are no left wing views expressed; indeed, there are no views expressed at all, except for the ones that relate to the existential plights of the characters. (In its determined austerity, the film sides with Schiller against the women who would draw him out of his aesthetic cocoon.)

And so it is with “The Fugitive,” too. Although the period 1963-1967 saw world-shaking events, none of them takes center stage in the series’ 120 episodes. Kimble and those he encounters can be presumed to have political views and partisan identifications; but we hear nothing about them, for they are no part of the moral deliberations that lead the characters to see what they have become and to consider what they might become were they to make this choice rather than that.

The day after I saw “Starting Out in the Evening,” I had another, instructively different cultural experience. I went to the opening of the New Museum at 235 Bowery. (Not the V.I.P. opening, to which for some reason I wasn’t invited, but the free-to-the-public opening.) Where I loved every moment of the movie (too much identification with the lead character, I suspect), I hated every moment in the museum, which is all drama, surprise, flash, effect and politics.

I know that I’m supposed to admire the structure of stacked-slightly-off-kilter boxes, but it didn’t do anything for me. The interior irritated me, starting with the pretentious-because-it-declares-itself-to-be-unpretenti ous concrete floor (complete with cracks). Then there were the harsh, industrial-style lights; the gift shop behind a mesh curtain of the kind you find in pawn shops; the cattle-car elevator; and the tiny café, intended, it would seem, to be inadequate to any conceivable occasion. Everything was making a statement and issuing a challenge: Do you get it? (Obviously I didn’t.)

But it was the art that told me how hopelessly retro I am. Here is a description from a reviewer who loved it: “Looking at the New Museum of Contemporary Art’s inaugural … exhibition is like visiting the crash pad of a favorite friend, the one that’s creative and stays up all night and leaves dirty dishes piled up in the sink and doesn’t have any real furniture and what’s in their place came from the stuff people threw out on the sidewalk.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself. The idea is to find bits and pieces of detritus and put them together in surprising and sometimes shocking ways. There’s a picture of Mel Gibson suspended from a long pole attached to a bicycle. There’s an arc of old chairs perched on what looks like broken mattress springs. There is an auditorium in which I sat watching a home movie featuring a pack of barking dogs.

At least you can sit in the auditorium. There are no chairs or benches in the rest of the building, a warning to museum-goers that they are not here to gaze reverently at timeless and monumental works of art. This inaugural exhibition is titled “Unmonumental”; the items in it, the museum’s Web site tells us, are “conversational, provisional, at times even corroded and corrupted … unheroic and manifestly unmonumental.” These works do not attempt to defeat time, but embrace it, and with it impermanence and decay.

They also embrace politics as the (vaguely postmodern) aesthetic that produces them demands. If art is not an autonomous discipline obeying internal laws, but is responsive to and constitutive of the contingent events of history, it is already political and offering itself as anything else would be a lie. What lies, the exhibit implies, is the illusion of depth and profundity. Here, everything is surface and perspective; no meanings are stable; no interpretations are authoritative. The largest piece in the exhibit is a multi-media installation — seven channels of ever-changing text messages flashing on rectangular shapes — “that tells a chilling story of abduction and assassination from seven separate points of view, set to an eerily laid-back bossa nova score.” (You can’t make these things up.)

But although randomness and chance are themes of this installation and of other pieces in the exhibit, there is nothing random in either the concepts or their implementation. I cannot deny the museum’s coherence, its (playful) seriousness. I just don’t like it. What it embraces — the ephemeral and the insubstantial — I shun, and what I embrace — work that aspires to permanence — it pokes fun at.

I cannot help wondering what Leonard Schiller, in search of formal perfection (he wears a tie and jacket in his study), or Richard Kimble, in search of perfect justice even as he flees its imperfect judgment, would think if they walked through the New Museum. But then I already know.