Despite various sins against criticism, and the fact that I am sometimes moved to pity by the wailing and gnashing of teeth of my younger confreres, I’ve never felt moved to comment on the apprehension-producing output of one Natasha Vargas-Cooper, a really not-so-bright young thing whose staggering smug banalities suggest the witless confidence of the preternaturally attractive, and yet…oh, never mind. However, the gnashing of teeth attending her inaugural column for GQ—I’m not sure if it’s both the print and online edition, but if it is, holy crap, copy desk, get on the stick; all that passive voice really tends to stick out on paper—has been sufficiently poignant to stir up sympathy enow to foster a word of commiseration or two.
Ms. Vargas-Cooper’s column is dubbed “The New Canon,” and therein she proposes to Take Very Seriously, or Kind Of Seriously In Her Ostensibly Sassy Way, the works of what she calls “our generation of filmmakers.” That she chooses to first treat a picture by James Cameron brings up a question concerning that “our.” James Cameron is older than ME, Natasha. I thought you were supposed to be a Bright YOUNG Thing. Ahem. But that’s not important, as Leslie Nielsen (28 years Cameron’s senior) said in Airplane!.
What is impor…well, not important, but kind of interesting, in a really irritating way, is how she prattles on as if she’s doing something subversive or transgressive by proposing…wait for it…Terminator 2: Judgement Day for her “new canon.” Didn’t some notion relative to this idea come along with, um, Andy Warhol, or, wait, was it Milton Caniff, and didn’t the “bums” WIN that particular argument? I mean, is this individual REALLY rekindling a high/low dispute that doesn’t figure in ANYONE’S actual conversation about film or almost any other aspect of culture anymore? I mean, Kingsley Amis dubbed Terminator 2 an “unimpeachable masterpiece.” David Foster Wallace disdained it as the first work of “effects porn,” and bemoaned that it was a betrayal of its low-budget antecedent. Neither writer, each a certified bonafide highbrow with a fancy college edumication and everything, even hinted that the movie was in any way beneath their notice or consideration. Thinking seriously about a film like Terminator 2 was no more novel to either than, maybe, drinking a glass of water was. And yet here’s Natasha Vargas-Cooper, flouncing around like a moron giggling “Look at me! I think Terminator 2 is actually a great movie! Aren’t I naughty?”
Sigh. And I’m not even getting into the slack, stupid prose (as I believe I mentioned, that’s a big olé passive voice ya got there, Natasha, and I say that as a feller who regularly piles on and abuses the subordinate clauses, if’n ya know what I’m sayin’ and I reckon ya do), the unmotivated swipe at a classic film combined with a brag that she hasn’t seen it (Rules of the Game, in case you’re wondering…) and other such delights. As I said, it’s causing a lot of pain for my chums (“Would GQ hire a literary columnist who bragged that she hadn’t read Hamlet?” a friend writes, in genuine confusion and anger), but I can’t get TOO worked up about it. “Professional” “arts” “writing,” particularly on the internets, is becoming something of a zero-sum game conducted AGAINST the reader; the more effin’ mad it makes you, the more the desperate-for-relevance-and-page-views editors think it’s “hot” and “provocative” and likely to go “viral.” And rest assured that Natasha Vargas-Cooper is laughing at you, very loud and very cattily. Include me out.
UPDATE: It has been brought to my attention, relative to a rather inappropriate (to the reading-comprehension and irony-challenged, at least) pastiche-joke I made on Twitter (although, on reflection, pastiche-jokes that call for a lot of contextualizing might not be entirely apt Twitter-fodder, alas), and a few of my phrasings above, that certain of my speculations and opinions concerning Vargas-Cooper were/are on the sexist side. For better or worse I’ve learned that saying “I am NOT sexist” when someone calls you sexist doesn’t really earn you any slack, so my assurances that I would cite “the witless confidence of the preternatually attractive” with respect to a bad male writer who came on as if he looked like Armie Hammer would no doubt be exerted in vain, at least as far as those readers committed to being convinced of my sexism were concerned. Which is a long winded way of saying, “Sorry, but tough.”
Oof. I don’t think the problem is that improper attention is being paid to a certain type/class of movies, such as T2, ALONGSIDE the “old” canon. Rather, I’d say the generation she’s supposedly striking a blow for hasn’t gotten over its nostalgia-crazed, wannabe contrarian streak. There some gnarly Tea Party type anti-scholarism in there too; what she’s really discouraging is a healthy curiosity about movies.
The enthralling power of… INDEPENDENCE DAY? WTF?
Maybe the sheer amount of these essays has lowered my standards, but my first reaction was, “Well, at least she’s admitting she doesn’t give a shit about The Rules of the Game, instead of telling me that it’s impossibly boring/pretentious and everyone who has ever liked it is pulling the wool over their own eyes, making its reputation a lie that has been blindly passed down from generation to generation.”
Hungry for some bait, eh?…
Movies “deserve to be free of the tastes and prejudices of people who grew up without Quentin Tarantino.”
What an airhead.
Esquire had (or maybe still has? I don’t know) Chuck Klosterman– NVC is GQ’s attempt at a new version of that.
Don’t know if she’s a stupider version of Renata Adler or a smarter variant on Ben Lyons.
‘Terminator 2’, “effects porn”? Compared to the likes of ‘Green Lantern’, T2 is more “effects that treat you to a fancy dinner and intelligent conversation before a night of passionate, consensual lovemaking”.
And I *did* grow up with Tarantino – it’s just that, based on the aesthetic trajectory of his first three features, I once could’ve sworn Tarantino was growing up as well.
I just bumped into the ghost of Jean Renoir. He was devastated when I broke to him that film was innately inferior to literature and that NVC didn’t care to see ‘The Rules of the Game.’
I mean this lady shouldn’t write in the first place but here she is! Writing about something she holds in contempt! Yay, you go girl! Or rather gUrl! Watching a dumb old Hawks film won’t improve your reading of the Coens. You don’t need to know Altman or Kubrick because you have P. T. Anderson. Culture is disposable. James Cameron holds a degree in Physics. Guy Maddin doesn’t exist. Etc..
I’ve only read a small portion of her piece, but I already have a question for Ms. Vargas-Cooper, which is: what the fuck are you talking about? It is each generation’s job to destroy history? No it isn’t, you idiot. And by the way, don’t act like you think nostalgia is some awful bogeyman. You know as well as I do that the vast majority of your favorite movies came out when you were in junior high.
Enthralling power of INDEPENDENCE DAY…saints preserve us.
Also, does this woman have any clue how disdainfully, say, Quentin Tarantino would regard what she’s saying? If any of the filmmakers she’s trying to celebrate, including Cameron who I can’t stand, felt the same way she does, they wouldn’t be making films in the first place.
“I just bumped into the ghost of Jean Renoir. He was devastated when I broke to him that film was innately inferior to literature…”
You mean on top of everything else, she’s ripping off David Thomson’s shtick as well?!
This upset me on a perfectly fine Friday morning. It’s sad, really, because the frightened child lashing out is all over this “article”. Unsure it lashes out to declare things not experienced or not understood to be bad and the cookies and toys scattered on the floor infront of it to be good and pure. Pathetic bullshit. How can she put her name on this?
Somebody PLEASE arrange a meet-cute between Vargas-Cooper and Willie Osterweil and report the transcript of the results. The witty screwball intelinsidectual romantic comedy for our times is there, and for real!
Well, I will admit that I am too much of a snob to watch any Terminator movie. Something really bores me about movies with explosions.
This pisses me off on so many levels: as a fan of Terminator 2, as a young movie lover, as someone who HASN’T seen Rules of the Game yet and feels utterly EMBARRASSED by such blind spots. Her piece is so snide it reads as a parody of itself. Jesus.
Oh, and as someone who takes a certain pride in being grammatically correct. At least now we have a replacement for the New York Press.
“And it breaks your big stupid heart.”
Speak for yourself, lady.
The column is so annoyingly stupid in so many ways that if it was published in different circumstances, I’d assume she was pulling the reader’s leg. Not here, though. She may be sassy, but it’s clear she’s all too painfully in earnest.
“I will admit that I am too much of a snob to watch any Terminator movie…”
Tarkovsky (in)famously preferred ‘The Terminator’ to “boring” Ozu; I myself will admit there’s T1 and 2 in my DVD collection along with 8 Ozus, but would rather have Schwarzenegger smash a 1.8‑liter sake bottle over my head than sit through another Tarkovsky.
Well, I have the first two “Terminator” films, all the Ozus available in the US (plus a few from the UK,) and the entire filmography of Tarkovsky (including what is likely my all-time favorite and most re-watched film, “Andrei Rublev”) all right next to each other on my DVD shelves.
Well, not literally right next to each other – my collection is arranged mostly alphabetically – but they are all in the same general area.
The point is, maybe, that though Ms. Varga-Cooper seems to think that she’s doing something brave and iconoclastic by taking a James Cameron film seriously, I don’t actually think such a mix of so-called “highbrow” and “lowbrow” cinema would be a problem for most modern critics.
That should read: “Ms. Vargas-Cooper”
Yes, this is late for the party 20 years ago.
I’m sure Movieline and Premire got alot of high school cheese submitted from budding film critics.
Who would have thought it would become the standard?
Why is this article even a thing? Who asked for it? Are they basing entire articles on the rantings of AV Club com-boxers now? Will ZODIAC MF start writing a column for them too? What about the “firsties” guy? Will he be profiled in GQ?
Not to harp on the nostalgia aspect of her article, but it just occurred to me that she accuses, I guess, older critics, meaning older than she is, of succumbing to nostalgia and this explains their, I guess, crazy obsession with films made before 1986. Yet by drawing the line and what I’m assuming is a year that falls somewhere near her birth, she is restricting her own cinematic interests exclusively to films that would have been made during her lifetime. In other words, only to films she can feel nostalgia for. You can’t be nostalgiac for something you weren’t there for, so if a film critic, one who is even 70 whole years old, likes, say, F. W. Murnau, it’s not because the critic is feeling a pang of nostalgia.
I think maybe she’s a moron.
And 1939 says, ‘Right back atcha, Ms Vargas-Cooper, we deserve to be free of the tastes and prejudices of people who grew up with Quentin Tarantino.’
You’re right about her odd comments about nostalgia. She seems to rail against the restorative nostalgia that supposedly exists amongst the “critical élite” or whatever she might want to call it. Old codgers pining for the days of Hawks and Renoir, when movies were real movies. Proper movies. She’s right, to a degree, that there’s an issue of conservatism in criticism and, particularly, in creating a canon. The Chaos Cinema hullaballoo, where supports denigrated the naysayers by claiming they couldn’t get with the kids and the future, the naysayers saying the new kids have no understanding of the art, etc…
Still, I think her brand of reflective nostalgia is worse. It’s a justification for liking those comfort foods you grew up with. There’s a lot of good to be said about T2, and others have done so before and will do again. She even makes a few decent points, half-baked though they are.
But restorative nostalgia can provide a healthy juxtaposition between Then and Now, giving us an interesting insight into shifting culture and style. Reflective nostalgia is just wallowing in your own memories, and though there can be significant worth to that, it’s terrible for attempting to create a supposedly objective New Canon for “our generation”, whatever the hell that means.
“Professional” “arts” “writing,” particularly on the internets, is becoming something of a zero-sum game conducted AGAINST the reader; the more effin’ mad it makes you, the more the desperate-for-relevance-and-page-views editors think it’s “hot” and “provocative” and likely to go “viral.”
Bingo.
“T2 is itself an exhibition of technology, imbued with a 19th century-style grandeur…”
Who cares about some 20 year old movie? And she really lost me when she dragged the 19th century into it. The new canon shouldn’t have anything older than ARMAGEDDON in it, and that’s pushing it.
Seriously though, why don’t pundits like this realize they’re in the majority? She’s tilting at a birdhouse, not a windmill. Or has this suddenly, without my noticing, become a universe in which classics and art films are more widely seen and discussed than contemporary studio product, or indeed the more recent ‘classics’ of the current pundits’ formative years? How the hell is THE RULES OF THE GAME (or the like) any kind of threat to the enduring reputation of T2 (or the like)?
The publishing world has finally coughed up someone who makes Karina Longworth look like a deep thinker. At least Karina is a fan of Godard, one of the dinosaurs Vargas-Cooper dismisses (along with Cary Grant) as not worth knowing about.
This is the sort of trendy ignorance that the media now promote as hip, cool and daring. You can pretend good movies were invented 25 years ago – presumably by James Cameron – and be hailed as the cutting-edge voice of your generation. You might even get a berth at a national magazine.
In reality, there are many smart and history-savvy people in their 20s. They’re just not of interest to GQ’s editors.
Kind of in line with what Bill’s already says, this Ms. Villalobos (I’m guessing she would get that reference, given her apparently great esteem of Sir Quentin) appears none too bright. Not to bring up Wallace again, but even by the first paragraph, the piece is already “so stupid it practically drools.”
Let’s also stop talking about all those dumb books and plays and paintings that are sooooo old, and only for snobs. You know who likes a painting from 1975? Elitist assholes, that’s who.
And also, why don’t literary critics spend more time talking about how AWESOME late-period Grisham is? When the lawyer has to sacrifice his career for that one thing it just breaks your goddamn heart.
…
In all seriousness, there have been several books written about James Cameron and any history of contemporary Hollywood, academic or otherwise, deals pretty extensively with his films. He gets consistently excellent reviews. Even his detractors appreciate his amazing setpieces, and even his supporters admit his wretched dialogue and cliched storylines. For someone whose faults are that universally agreed-upon among critics, he gets a TON of attention and respect from all corners. Along with music, it seems that movies are the art form that most readily includes the most popular, mass audience-directed works among its great achievements, right alongside the dense, formally and narratively adventurous stuff. I don’t know where all this anti-snob stuff comes from in film criticism. The world’s highest profile critics are just as likely to overpraise Avatar as they are to embrace some obtuse anti-film with subtitles. Even the more cinephile-oriented magazines like Sight and Sound or Film Comment are just as likely to have features on Cameron, Peter Jackson or Christopher Nolan as they are on Claire Denis or Apichtpong Weerasethakul. Actually, the critical consensus on The Dark Knight seems to be stronger than it was/is on the new Godard. Film criticism has been heavily populated by people who don’t give a shit about movies, and who don’t seem to enjoy it all that much, since its inception. The NVC’s and Dan Kois’s of the world don’t really realize that, not only aren’t they blazing brand new trails or redefining our conception of cinema, but they’re really part of the boring, predictable mainstream of criticism. You know what would be brave and new? A writer for GQ trying to explain to his/her readership what there is to appreciate in, say, Rules of the Game. That would be pretty goddamn radical. Whereas aggressively reaffirming mainstream culture’s suspicions that the movies they’ve already seen are the only ones worth thinking about is not.
I think even the filmmakers she’s lionizing would disagree with her. F’rex: the Coen brothers. If O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? wasn’t a big, wet doggie-kiss to Preston Sturges, I am Marie of Roumania.
You don’t need to be familiar with SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS or all the Warner Bros’ chain gang movies to enjoy it, but that knowledge certainly enhances the experience.
TROPIC THUNDER cites not only Vietnam War movies like APOCALYPSE NOW, FULL METAL JACKET, and PLATOON, but WWII movies like BATTLEGROUND.
All art stands on the shoulders of the giants who went before. Her premise is inherently stupid.
M_hulot pour la victoire – I didn’t check the amount of critical work, academic or otherwise, published on the subject of T2 because I have to imagine Ms. Vargas-Cooper didn’t, either. I further have to imagine ad page counts at GQ are so dire they are doing everything they can to not alienate the Coors Light-drinkin’ steakhead demographic towards which such proudly ignorant pablum must be directed, enabling their target audience’s own proud ignorance while breaking its big stupid heart by resolutely not challenging its big stupid stupidity. What do you suppose Ms. Vargas-Cooper will essay next – TOKYO STORY or TOP GUN? You need never see (a‑motherfucking-hem) “a stylized Godard flick” to understand the latter’s enthralling power (eat it, 1968!).
I did see Ms. Vargas-Cooper’s Twitter feed referenced, and for my sins, I went to read it. Her Wildean, pithy, under-140-character epigram announcing the publication of this article? “I WROTE THIS!” Sic, sic, sic. Yes, this is precisely the mature, discerning sensibility – from a writer whose only other work for GQ was apparently a profile on Dr. Drew – we all are crying out for from the author of a column titled The New Canon.
After us, the retard god.
“Painting from 1975.…Why don’t critics talk about how AWESOME late period Grisham is..”
Comparisons to other art forms would be irrelevant under her suspect criteria, because you see, film is a “mass art” and therefor inferior to “serious” art forms, which is, of course, all very convenient because it takes her off the hook from being able to engage in something that aesthetically works on more than one level.
The truth of the matter is that cinema is more complex than any other art form ever created (and it’s just getting started really, that is unless your notion of cinema is 35mm projected). The use of sound (which most filmmakers completely neglect; it was over 40 years ago when Godard said “liberate sound from image”) combined with moving images, editing, music and language (whether through dialogue, narration or simple text on a screen) creates an aesthetic that captures, unlike literature or any other art, exterior and interior reality. The directly objective and the abstractly intangible. All one has to do is see “Masculin Feminin” or Tarkovsky “The Mirror” or hell, Terrence Malick’s “The Tree Of Life” (which is from this year, so it has a chance to make the sexy, relevant cannon) to understand this.
But film has been saddled with an industry, and most seem to make the fatal mistake to equate the industry with the art itself, and all of it’s capabilities. In years to come, I have a feeling that artists will catch up with the art, and it will be NVC who will be the dinosaur desperately holding on to a time when movies were disposable, and she was allowed to write about it without getting laughed out of the room.
“I think even the filmmakers she’s lionizing would disagree with her. F’rex: the Coen brothers. If O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? wasn’t a big, wet doggie-kiss to Preston Sturges, I am Marie of Roumania.
You don’t need to be familiar with SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS or all the Warner Bros’ chain gang movies to enjoy it, but that knowledge certainly enhances the experience.”
See I would just advise skipping O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU and watching SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS, or similarly, skipping FARGO and watching NIGHTFALL.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOZTDP8Ff9w
“Take that, Guernica!”
As Vargas’s article should be dismissed because of its willful ignorance, so should yours because of its idiotic and willful sexism.
Both Vargas’ piece and yours share the attitude of a lazy and spoiled child. “Sorry but tough” is infantile. I’d just erase that “update” part if I were you. Either actually adress your own offense, or stand by it. Don’t do some half-ass cutesy tap dancing.
Ooooooooooooooooooh.
I second that “Ooooooooooooooooooh”, and demand some whole-ass cutesy tap dancing, thank you. You know, like character assassination practiced anonymously.
Actually, I welcome Anon’s condemnation! Not to indulge in tit-for-tat, but the fact is that writers such as Vargas-Cooper indulge in more cutesy tap-dancing between their actual articles and their subsequent defenses of them than I do, um, generally. Now I cop to having made a pretty crass joke in which I yoked NVC’s “As an experiment, let’s exist in a universe…” lede to a particularly ugly image from “Hostel 2,” which I intended as an illustration of the sort of hostility work such as NVC’s not only engenders, but seems to actively pursue. It was absolutely dumb and wrong to do that, and I’m sorry I did. I’m not sorry I made the comment pertaining the the type of confidence implied by NVC’s rhetorical tone. Fact is, in this brave new media landscape, folks such as NVC (male and female) are a dime a dozen; they write and sell pieces in which they gleefully thumb their noses at “prigs” and “snobs” in pridefully pig-ignorant fashion, and then if anyone who actually CARES about the material they’re having such a ball pissing on should so much as raise an objection, they get all “Who, me?” and “You’re being mean!” and “Leave Britney alone!” and so on. And if you think that NVC doesn’t make her gender any kind of issue before, during and after the “Who me?” portion of the would-be zero sum game, then YOU’RE being willfully ignorant. So one can either choose to be “above” that sort of thing, or fight fire with fire, or something in between. I’m not above being ill-tempered, or shooting from the hip. If I feel I’ve done genuine wrong, I’ll genuinely apologize. In this case, I apologize for the “Hostel” joke. Everything else stands, stands, and stands.
But you seem to be under the impression that I supported her article. I don’t, I think it’s ridiculous garbage. But I also think this post is ridiculous. Under the guise of being blunt and brash and no nonsense person that “shoots straight from the hip” you perpetuate sexist thinking. But I actually do believe that it’s unintentional.
Anyone with an awareness of history (including gender dynamics), which, as we’ve decided is very important, would realize that this sentence right here:
” a really not-so-bright young thing whose staggering smug banalities suggest the witless confidence of the preternaturally attractive”
is so loaded it makes your whole post disposable immediately. You’re a smart man Mr. Glenny Kenny, you can continue to excuse personal sexism or racism or any ism with boasts of ‘straight shooting’ but a *sexist* straight shooter you’ll remain.
I believe I mentioned above that once one gets caught in the “you’re a sexist!/I am NOT a sexist” trap, it’s all over…and come to think of it, maybe I ought not invoke a “tar baby” metaphor…but anyway: “straight shooter?” Yuck. I’d never refer to myself by such a term, and looking back over my comment, I see I did not. As for the “not-so-bright young thing/preternaturally attractive” remark, I said it before and I said it again: as far as I’m concerned it could apply just as easily to a male writer who thinks he’s Armie Hammer, or something. The closest thing to an example I can come up with at this early hour is Movieline’s Louis Virtel, who’s not quite right (he comes off more like he thinks he’s a toned Michael Musto—I know, SO homophobic) but will have to do for now. As for Vargas-Cooper, I think her prominence (such as it is) is due in part to a kind of institutional sexism that digs its female writers “cute” and “sassy” and “outrageous” because it says/markets something about the Way We Live Now, or The Way We’re Supposed To Want To Live Now. Is it catty for me to observe that her pictures don’t deliver the goods that her persona, and the double standard that promotes it, implies? Absolutely. And would Vargas-Cooper write the same way if she looked like Andrea Dworkin? You tell me.
I THINK ALL POSTS ARE RIDICULOUS!
NO! THEIR REDICULOUS!
Claiming T2 is an inferior movie let’s say compared to pictures of Tarkovsky or Bergman is being unaware of concepts like relativity and absolute value (does it really exist?). Don’t like Arnie, but T1 and T2 are sci-fi classics.