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Criticism is dead. Long live criticism! Laws and Sausages

by Karina Longworth Mar 17th 2006 // 10:03AM

Filed under: SXSW, Critical Thought, Newsstand, Movie Marketing



cartoon by Hugh@gapingvoid
 
Is film criticism dead? After I flew down to Austin for the SXSW Film Festival last week, I strangely found myself spending more time talking about the (apparently sorry) state of criticism than I did actually practicing it.

Surely, you remember that article in the New York Post, a couple of weeks back? The one in which that Lionsgate exec announced that he and his compadres were no longer willing to shell out "$50,000 for the privilege of negative reviews"? I'm not saying Mr. Marketing put any ideas into any heads, but have you noticed a certain thinness to the Friday film sections, the past few months? I personally rationalized the no-screening epidemic as part and parcel of the late-winter doldrums – everybody knows there's nothing new worth seeing this time of year, so it's almost a blessing that the studios aren't asking critics to pretend.

But evidence mounted, whilst I was in Austin, that the situation is much more dire than I had previously perceived. In their banality-padded chat on Saturday morning Peter Bart told Christy Lemire that, though the Oscars still matter, critics really don't. He admitted that most studios fall just short of making their poster quotes up. Thanks to an ever-widening stable of "blurb whores" who will attach their names to any prevarication the market departments suggest, a-list critics like A.O. Scott and Kenneth Turan have become, as far as the studios are concerned, entirely superfluous. Bart himself had nothing but grumbles for the critical establishment, lambasting "New York media types" for seemingly basing their advocacy on obscurity (Variety's critics are different, he said, because they're required to estimate each film's commercial prospects – Bart called this "a good exercise"). Then, on Monday, Cinematical's own Christopher Campbell sent me an email. Chris, it seems, contacted a studio about reviewing an upcoming cheapie horror film, and was told by a publicist, point blank, that the studio in question is no longer screening horror films. No exceptions. Lose our phone number. We don't need you. 
Critical irrelevancy is not a new phenomenon. For as long as there have been blockbusters (30-plus years, if you go with the presiding wisdom that Jaws was the first), there have been consumers ignoring critical dissents. I think I first saw the phenomenon referenced directly by a critic in Jonathan Rosenbaum's (positive) review of Titanic. In it, he described seeing the film twice – once with an audience of other critics, and once with an audience "of regular people" – and though Rosenbaum got sucked in to James Cameron's soggy soap opera both times around, only the second screening could be called a communal experience. "The second screening, unlike the first, was punctuated by gasps, laughs, and applause in all the right places, suggesting that the second crowd, which had only its own interests at stake, was a lot more receptive," wrote Rosenbaum in the Chicago Reader. "It's as if I'd sat the first time with the ship's owners and the second time with the passengers." Though Rosenbaum went on to call Titanic "one hell of a film", it certainly wasn't a unanimous verdict. As of this writing, the picture carries a score of 75 on Metacritic; raves such as Rosenbaum's are balanced by out-and-out pans from the likes of Richard Corliss (TIME), David Edelstein (Slate), and Turan, who summed up the film's script thusly in the Los Angeles Times: "What audiences end up with word-wise is a hackneyed, completely derivative copy of old Hollywood romances, a movie that reeks of phoniness and lacks even minimal originality." "Audiences" had little use for Turan's concern; Titanic is, of course, the highest grossing film of all time.

But the gap between what critics want and what audiences are willing to pay for widens every day, and as much as I hate to say this, on this score, Peter Bart may be right. According to Metacritic (a database primarily made up of mainstream print critics), the best reviewed film of 2005 was The Best of Youth – a six-hour Italian TV miniseries that played in the US on a handful of screens for a couple of weeks. Revenge of the Sith, the highest grossing film of the year, and one whose success was undoubtedly stoked by fan-motivated online activity, did not make the Metacritic Top 20. More and more mainstream print critics find themselves standing outside of the zeitgeist, watching film culture pass them by; more and more, this ship seems to be steered by its passengers.

As print journalism and online media converge in terms of audience share and influence, both constructs find themselves at a crossroads. As I seem to be saying a lot lately, I believe that if blogs (especially corporate properties like Cinematical, where, like in MSM, there's a payroll to keep up) are going to survive, we're either going to have to take the final steps towards cloning traditional journalism, or we're going to have to break our ties to old media and become something else entirely – most likely, an almost-completely user-motivated experience. This past Monday on the Blogging About Film panel, I said something to that effect, and was approached afterward by Gerald Peary, longtime critic for the Boston Phoenix. Peary has spent the last five years working on a documentary called about American film criticism, called For The Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism. After chatting briefly (and learning that Joe Swanberg was serving as his on-location cameraman), I agreed to an on-camera interview.

Peary would say that he is what used to be called a Sarrisite – that is, he's an obstinate follower of that auteur theory-spewing legend, and current critic for the New York Observer, Andrew Sarris – but his writing (of which ample examples are available here) is full of passion and verve and rhythm far beyond that most of his compatriots. Beyond the noble goal of constructing what is really the first oral history of our shared profession, Gerald's film seeks to explain, and, I think, append some kind of resolution to, the long-running conflict between Sarris and his followers, and the late Pauline Kael and her analogous Paulettes. Though I don't consider myself a real Paulette *or* a Sarrisite (I tend to think any real meaning in the conflict between the two critics died with Pauline), soon after the camera started to roll it became clear that Peary was calling on me to inject a little Pauline in the proceedings. I did my best.

On the basest level, Sarrisites knock Pauline for what they (in many cases rightly) perceive as a lack of critical/historical objectivity.  As I told Peary, I have no doubt that if Pauline Kael was alive and working today, she'd be keeping a blog. It would simply be the perfect forum for her highly subjective prose and often severely populist tastes. Where Kael would get in trouble with the audience, is with her fixed insistence on speaking for her public. Where Pauline really starts to look like a blogger (and where some bloggers really start to embarrass the medium) is in her presentation of absolute subjectivity as empirical fact. Peary's thesis seems to be that criticism, as he and many other writers of his generation practice it, is no longer relevant to the general movie-going masses, and as much as the lingering academic in me would like to disagree with him, the part of me that makes a living writing a blog would be hard pressed to mount an opposing argument. Do we, as consumers, need criticism? No, but that doesn't necessarily mean we don't want it. As far as I see it, the problem is that criticism, in order to stay relevant in an age in which authority has become, as a rule, so decentralized as to give Lyotard pause, has to move beyond the ancient squabbles of the Paulettes and the Sarrisites. If Pauline Kael was blogging today, she'd learn really quickly that the audience isn't looking for dogmatic direction. Moving forward, the best and most relevant criticism will be that which aims to set words for a conversation. The internet may look infinite, but in its way, it is self-limiting: there's no longer space for final answers.

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