The latest issue of the terrific film journal Cineaste has a very lengthy feature called “Film Criticism in the Age of the Internet: A Critical Symposium,” and yeah mon, it is every bit as heavy as its title implies. It just went online. As it happens, I am among the symposiumaters, as are Jonathan Rosenbaum, the Self-Styled Siren, Richard Schickel, Girish Sambu, Filmbrain…the list just goes on, and the observations are all provocative. Also, my buddy Kent Jones relates just how fab the internet experience can be by citing a particularly heated and eventually completely whacked-out thread on The Reeler back in March, which my eyes bugged out at upon revisiting. Yeah, those were the days.
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Wow. That was quite a thing there at The Reeler. Have people always been this horrible to each other about personal opinions? Or, has the relative anonymity of cyberspace let us think we can say whatever we want to each other without repercussion to our very humanity. I’m so tired of looking at blogs where people spew forth bile at each other in an attempt to dominate, kind of like those little dinosaurs that killed Newman in “Jurassic Park”. For me it’s interesting to see what other people think about, well, anything. And, when I disagree, it usually sparks an intellectual discussion with my husband based on “Can you BELIEVE this guy?!”, not the desire to post a response to his comment, critique, etc., sure I should tear him a new one and impose my dominance upon cyberspace. How much does it suck for critics of the arts to have to put up with such vitrolic response to everything they write by both colleagues and regular Joe’s/Joette’s. It’s sad to see so much nastiness over artistic vision. Thanks for continuing to share your ideas and thoughts about movies, Glenn. My hope is that you and all the other unemployed critics will find the reimbursement you need, financially and intellectually, to keep up the good work. And that even includes people who make me roll my eyes in wonderment and clutch my stomach in nausea.
I hadn’t seen that thread before; thanks for the link. I do wonder sometimes if some critics are too thin-skinned. After all, their stock-in-trade is to brutally pick apart a piece of work that may have been years in the making: and they typically do not let the director off the hook if they think he’s a hack, incompetent, or otherwise failure. So why shouldn’t they be subjected to the same? It’s not my preferred method of discourse at all but I can recognize where it comes from. It seems Graham’s reaction to Kent Jones was way out of proportion and I can see why Kent got miffed. But if a critic destroys a director behind the smokescreen of the printed page, why should he be spared the same treatement on a computer screen? I think the primary difference is that the tone is conversational in the blogosphere; hence rough attacks seem out of place. Kind of like the critic walking up to the director on the street or at a party and tearing apart his work. But is this really the proper analogy? Seems that blogging falls somewhere in between print journalism and everyday conversation, hence rules of discourse are somewhat ambiguous.
Having just read your piece on Wissot, I think it’s fair to say you don’t err on the side of “conversational politeness.” This should get interesting…