It’s a topic that won’t seem to go away, isn’t it? Okay, so I’ll make you a deal—if it does go away, I’ll stop bitching about it. The topic, that is, just so we’re clear. In the meantime, some recent musings on it have inspired my debut post for ARTicles, the blog of the National Arts Journalism Program. The napalm you’re smelling is from several bridges I’ve destroyed with said post. Or have I? Comment here or there, but maybe you ought to think about there, as the blog could use the discourse.
The future/death of film criticism
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When I consider how dead-on the folks at Slant and Reverse Shot usually are, I’m happy that I live now and not in the days of Bosley Crowther. In fact, I’m happy that I live now and not in the days of Cahiers at its height or what have you. Today, anyone with an Internet connection can read some decent criticism and be disabused of the notion that a Crash or a Slumdog is a good movie, and get put on to, I don’t know, James Gray or Bong Joon-Ho. Decades ago, you might have to subscribe to the New Yorker for that, or read Manny Farber. Of course, maybe the audiences for Farber and you or Nick Schager are substantially the same and the fact that there’s no extra charge to going to Slant, once you pay your internet bill, hasn’t really changed anything. But I think it has, at least a little; at the very least, less stock today is placed in one’s local newspaper film critic, or Roger Ebert, when there are all these non newspaper critics running around.
Provocative writing, as always, Glenn, and lots of nutritious food for thought. But this isn’t a subject I can claim any sort of stake in. I’ve never been paid a cent to write about movies, even though I’ve been doing it on and off for several years. In fact, I never seriously considered that I *would* be paid to do it, as much as I respected those who did. For me and the people I’ve written with, writing about art was simply the best way to respond to it. And I’d hope this was true for every critic I’ve ever admired–Bazin, Wood, Farber, E.T.A. Hoffmann…
One nice thing about film discussion being so disseminated is the increased rate of discovery that Asher describes. It also bridges the gap between critic and regular viewer, for better or for worse. On the positive side, this shorter distance inspires confidence in a lot more moviegoers (like myself) to better articulate their responses to movies, to become better viewers. The negative side has been articulated and then some.
Well diagnosed, GK. It’s rare that someone actually points out that the very economics of the current situation (“permanent networking” as our small-scale version of “permanent campaigning”) determines what sorts of arguments (the strong, rancorous kind) generally aren’t made. Like you say, cash is on the line, so it’s better to play nice.
And as I read your post, my mind jumped back to a line from season one of “The Wire.” “You can’t lose if you don’t play.” As a fairly marginal Texan, I’ve found that spending some quality time on the periphery has its merits. I’d especially recommend it to the editorial staff of IndieWire.
Warm thanks for the shout-out, Glenn. Kohn’s piece leaves me unruffled. Doherty’s, however, fills me with despair from the first lines, where he offers “It sucks” as an example of typical Web analysis.
It isn’t as though I haven’t seen this before, many times. But as of today, I have had it up to my keister with certain print writers and academics and their little sand-dance that goes, “Of course I read blogs, whaddya think I am, OLD or something? But darling, most of them are just ewwww.”
We bloggers can take all the care we want with with writing style and essay construction and thematic consistency, we can do our research and spellcheck till doomsday. Nothing will keep these mandarins from writing the same goddamn essay about Harry Knowles and Jeffrey Wells and chat boards and, if a mood of generosity strikes, trotting out the same one or two former bloggers, now safely anointed with print jobs, as the sole flash of gold among Internet dross. Because these guys don’t, in fact, read blogs.
But if Jonathan Rosenbaum himself can pop up in comments to make cogent points about quality of audience and serious Web writers, only to have Doherty pull out his lorgnette and drone on about “time in the saddle,” then you are right, Glenn–it’s Doherty’s privilege. Let him have tea parties with Reed and Schickel.
I will just retreat to my place, where I once wrote–excuse me, typed–a post concerning my problems with Doherty’s love letter of a Joseph Breen biography. And I never used the word “suck.”
I have this song by the Mike Curb Congregation stuck in my head now…
Anyway, having dated myself, I’ll admit I haven’t read Kohn’s piece (and hope not to have to), but I had a few remarks of my own about Doherty’s recently in a little blog entry called “Oh dear, who’s killing film criticism this week?” (Please excuse me for the plug: http://j.mp/bxmSl8.) I began with this quotation from a piece Richard Corliss wrote in Film Comment… 20 years ago:
“Movie criticism of the elevated sort, as practiced over the past half-century by James Agee and Manny Farber, Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael, J. Hoberman and Dave Kehr… is an endangered species…”
Damn film criticism. It’s STILL dying! This death scene is longer than Paul Reubens’ in the 1992 “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” movie…
@msic, and I guess Glenn: Are you really saying that the internet has made for less, er, “strongly-worded” criticism? Really? ‘Cause as far as I can see, the web has had two effects on film criticism: 1) Expanded the number of people who engage in it (and reduced the number who are paid to do it); 2) Created a huge number of people who specialize is hyperbole, calumny, and general insult-comedy.
Well, no, Fuzzster; what I was really saying, in an admitedly hyperbolic, rambling fashion that was designed to ever so slightly upend the self-seriousness of my argument, was threefold. First, that complaining about the internet is pointless; two that the internet has provided a place not just more film criticism but for a lot of stuff that pretends to be film criticism and is all too often MISTAKEN for film criticism; and that when one writes about the state of film criticism in such a circumstance one is not, in fact, necessarily writing about criticism, or writing criticism itself; and that this sort of thing is partially responsible for a hyper-cliqueish environment in which pointing out some things relative to the prior point can have consequences in one’s professional life. Oh wait, that’s four things, not three. I feel like the guy in the Monty Python “Spanish Inquisition” sketch. I would never claim that the internet has made for less “strongly-worded” ANYTHING.
I don’t have much of anything to add to what Mr. Kenny has written above, except to perhaps clarify that there’s a difference between strong and strongly-worded. A strong claim, I tend to think, is usually backed up with facts, experience, empirical evidence, *and* it can ruffle feathers because it can’t be simply dismissed as just more hot air on the Internet. It’s something you have to contend with, that clarifies who you are, and often draws actual (rather than imaginary) battle lines. This doesn’t really happen very often in a nervous, hand-to-mouth world, where no one has a firm foundation from which to work. I know I’m guilty of a certain amount of punch-pulling.
The Mike Curb Congregation…oy.
Siren, here’s another way to look at it. People will keep writing pieces like Doherty’s – “thumbsucker” doesn’t quite do justice to its absolute vacuity – for a while, and then they won’t. Film criticism isn’t dying, it’s changing. What’s dying, as Glenn says, is the money.
Glenn, I agree that there is a lot of stuff on the internet that doesn’t really amount to criticism, let alone writing. But then, is it a valuable use of our time to worry about it? People who are really committed to serious thought are going to mount careful arguments, and that means writing. People who aren’t are going to either drop away after a time or stick to websites where they can make ten-best lists and throw down proclamations and condemnations to their heart’s content. At this point, the perception remains that there is still some kind of authoritarian super-structure to be overthrown. Some people still consider it a radical gesture to write as if they’re doing it on a Blackberry while walking from the Uptown 1 to the Times Square Shuttle at 5:30pm. If that’s the downside of a movement that has led to serious posts from people who have never had a shot at paid writing but who are eager to have a real conversation, I can put up with it for a while.
Thanks Kent, I appreciate it. But you bring up another point, in a roundabout way. What’s missing from this discussion and others is the larger context. Film critics aren’t being singled out. Arts coverage is the first thing to go; I know a woman whose job as a book reviewer recently evaporated. All the way back in 2004, Reuters threw some other journalists out of work by outsourcing basic Wall Street reporting to India. People who are out of work are scrambling to freelance any way or anywhere they can, and the ones who do have jobs are shaking in their boots, from the NY Times all the way down to the lowliest fact-checkers on the smallest weeklies.
Actually, I know a reporter who will tell anyone who listens that it’s ultimately the Times’ fault. He says that if that paper had gone to a paying Web model early and stuck to its guns, we wouldn’t be in this brave new “content yearns to be free” world.
Anyway, I am deeply sorry to see someone as good as Todd McCarthy get treated so shabbily, not to mention our host here. But right now everybody in print media is like that famous picture of Clara Bow, looking apprehensively at the microphone and thinking “What do I do now?”
Not to throw down the sententious meta-crisis gauntlet, but the more I think about this stuff, the more convinced I become that the problem is bigger than film criticism, art criticism, or even the demise of print, but rather has more to do with, basically, macroeconomics. I know, the political alarm bells are ringing, but bear with me: the art world is increasingly dominated by the super-rich. The entertainment world is increasingly turning toward the pursuit of the super-profitable above everything else, resulting in an emphasis on idle diversion – from video games to cell phone games to facebook games to the mega-spectacles promised by 3D, HD, etc.
Don’t get me wrong – art will survive, as it always has, and there is still a functioning trickle-down model in place, with excellent films (Two Lovers, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Shutter Island) being made and occasionally penetrating the mainstream. Avatar, despite its flaws, was a fun experience in my book, proving that 3D might have a future, provided swaggering artist-generals like Cameron keep impressing the money men.
But we are losing something, and it’s not just because of the internet making things cheaper. The model we’ve come to expect from our culture is one in which people are upwardly mobile, educated, and have a decent amount of free time to spend on aesthetic endeavors, such as watching and talking – seriously – about films. Which is the exact opposite of the culture that’s been emerging for the past several decades, in which art, and the discussion of art, has become the province of the privileged – those who not only can afford knowledge for knowledge’s sake, but have the time to do so.
Sorry to add a pseudo-Marxist flavor into the stew, but I couldn’t help but zoom out just a bit beyond where The Siren left off, since it seemed like the natural progression of this thread, especially considering the money-based points of MSic and Glenn. Although I take full responsibility if SCR is besieged by tea-baggers.
Zach, when you get to the part about “our culture,” I start to wonder. Because what does that really mean? Sometimes it means something big, and sometimes it means an agglomeration of smaller things. Sometimes it’s genuinely popular, sometimes it’s “synthetically” popular. Sometimes it’s a more rarefied experience shared by a few, sometimes it begins with few and spreads to many. It’s constantly changing and never settled. It is true that a lot of that change is driven by purely commercial considerations.
Somehow, this all puts me in mind of a passage from the great socialist critic Irving Howe: “Far more prevalent and far more insidious is that slow attrition which destroys one’s ability to stand firm and alone: the temptations of an improved standard of living combined with guilt over the historical tragedy that has made possible our prosperity; one’s sense of being swamped by the rubbish of a reactionary period together with the loss of those earlier certainties which had the advantage, at least, of making resistance easy. Nor, in saying these things, do I look forward to any sort of material or intellectual asceticism. Our world is to be neither flatly accepted nor rejected. It must be engaged, resisted and – who knows, perhaps still – transformed.” That essay was written in 1954, and with some modifications it could have been written yesterday. I have a feeling that the phenomenon you’re describing has a lot to do with the belief that the “slow attrition” he identifies either isn’t worth avoiding, or is woven into the fabric of existence. That’s why I like those last two sentences so much: it disassembles said belief and suggests the possibility of transformation, small and large.
Kent, thanks for your response, which certainly fleshes out the complexity of the situation that I barely glossed.
I should have been more careful about dropping the “c” word – it’s undeniably a loaded term, and I was speaking pretty broadly – basically, referring to some rough American conception of a liberal middle-class that’s rapidly disappearing, or at least changing in ways that make me very uncomfortable. Which isn’t to say that any of its previous iterations were entirely good or desirable. Certainly, imagining some steady momentum from the days when Howe wrote that essay isn’t my idea of a progressive ideal – various aspects of the country have progressed dramatically since the 1950s, while others have steeply declined.
I was thinking along the lines, more or less, that it would be nice to live in a society where people (more so than right now) could make a decent living writing about films (and art in general) – that that would be, mostly, a good thing, and recent history provides a plausible model. Of course, there are more important things – film writing, based on this site and others, can still be vital as an avocation, whereas I agree with David Simon’s (and others) view that it’s absurd to think that there can be a functioning press without professional journalists.
I think the economic decline I mentioned is, in a lot of concrete ways “bad” – but that doesn’t mean that good things won’t come out of it, or that it won’t give rise to lots of interesting new forms of expression. It seems that Howe is implying that transformation is pretty much constant and unavoidable, and I can’t disagree.
In any case, I’ve got to read the rest of the Howe quote – what essay is this from, and where might I be able to read the whole thing?
Zach, the essay is called “This Age of Conformity,” and it’s near the beginning of SELECTED WRITINGS, 1950–1990.
i, for one, am thrilled to see this new trend of “let’s set everything on fire and see what happens” in media.
now let’s all go get bbq at the salt lick.
Don’t make me come in there and write an implicit anti-you screed, Lichman.
pen it and we’ll discuss it in April when i’m back at grassroots.