There
seems to be a consensus that professional critical opinion isn’t
as influential with the mass entertainment public as it once
was. Nobody I know has demonstrated this by contrasting Critical
Influence graphs today with those of, say, 1977, but neither
have I seen hard statistical data for the sense that “Shit!”
and “Are you okay?” have replaced “Let’s
get outta here!” as the trendiest line of movie dialogue.
Some things just have to be absorbed through the pores, and
one of them would appear to be the slackened faith in venerable
holders of opinion.
Count
the factors -- the film studio tactic of blanket Friday openings
for creating a weekend box office ‘event’ you’re
either with or aren’t with before reviews are out; the
theater party ticket plan insurance taken out on plays months
before official openings; the usurpative role of book chains
and Internet vassals for determining publishing’s best
sellers; the loosened hold of daily newspapers with staff reviewers;
the degeneration of the third pages of tabloids into undeclared
advertising for new motion pictures and television shows; the
sprouting of happy-happy reviewers on any television channel
with a camera and every radio station with a microphone; self-styled
national ‘entertainment reporters’ who assume any
media production is a profound commentary on the times because
they can show clips for it; the even more self-important successors
to Roger Ebert; the ‘binge’ watching of TV series
that makes critical observation as productive as an AA convert
in a saloon; etc. All these air-borne particles have attested
to the weakening of a critical ozone layer, justifying doubt
about what is so authoritative about authoritative opinion.
Even the most conspicuously lambasted works of the last few
years -- the Battlefield Earth similars -- were consigned
to public contempt and box office bankruptcy by gossip columnists
before being unwrapped, leaving critics merely to notarize bad
word-of-mouth. Isn’t it time for these people to admit
they have been outflanked and that nobody
is weeping over the fact? If they still want attention, why
not organize an annual awards show on HBO and hand out golden
Solomons?
I
had such questions long before media marketing visionaries hatched
their schemes for preempting the significance of critical pontifications.
Back in the mists of time, the intellectual fracas raised by
Last Year at Marienbad propelled me to boycott all
plotless Alain Resnais pictures that featured a matchstick game.
Only when the floorboards in my head no longer creaked over
the Meaning of It All did I dare venture into a revival house
to see the film. At other times, Harold Pinter plays, David
Wallace books and Alanis Morissette videos have seemed to require
further brewing than the Instant Folgers views being spooned
out. I didn’t begrudge the professionals their opinions,
just the attendant addiction for having the discussion defined
by those opinions. What did it say about the depths of our vicarious
existences when the point of reference became responses to a
piece of work rather than the work itself?
This
is the shadow play that has also sent Sony, the Nederlanders
and Barnes & Noble into action to defend their treasuries.
Who had ever elected those opinion-shapers pope in the first
place? Why should the hundreds, if not thousands, of workers
with livelihoods invested in a project have to rely for their
next paycheck on the verdict of some New York Times
drone who might have an imminent appointment for a root canal?
That this broadsheet should have attained the power it had,
especially in the theater, was already sad confirmation of the
lemming instinct in the entertainment world and its public.
Better a Tower of Babel than the Times Tower. Who could object
to every local TV station installing its own correspondent for
show business as a voice-of-the-people corrective for elitist
tradition? What made Charlene the Channel 6 Culture Chick less
of an expert than the Pauline Kael clones when it came to recommending
Hot Makeout Flicks? If the WWOW man on the aisle decided Cats
was more tuneful than T. S. Eliot riffs on hollow men, he wasn’t
speaking only for himself. And appearances notwithstanding,
the Washington Post didn’t hold a patent on 1,500-word
analyses of 1,500-page books about the building of canals; other
opinion was readily available at the websites www. whatIthink
and www. whatIthinkwhenI’mnotthinking. When did democracy
have to stop at the door of independent thinking?
But
that said, this pushback makes me uneasy. It bothers me, for
one thing, that outside our agreement on this topic, I have
no common interests with Sony, the Nederlanders or Barnes &
Noble. This leaves me feeling as though I’m allied with
Godzilla just because we have a couple of the same letters in
our names; i.e., not enough reason to savour vindication watching
him swat his tail around the Ginza. I know why Sony, the Nederlanders,
and Barnes & Noble want to eliminate or at least diminish
all the standing critics they can: They’re underfoot,
blocking access to the cash register. But how is that putting
any money in my pocket?
The
answer, of course, is that it isn’t. In the long run it
will cost me since, as any quality control supervisor at any
Hanes plant in Taiwan can attest, every negligence of attention
now will only insure an embarrassing draft later. The real problem
is to what degree do we trust ourselves to exercise the quality
control, under what precise circumstances do we not, and where
do we go when we do not. Even within the shadow of the Tower
of Babel favored by Sony, the Nederlanders and Barnes &
Noble, it seems imperative that we come up with answers to those
questions.
______________________________
As
mentioned apropos Last Year at Marienbad, I’ve
never found it easy acceding credibility to a critic. Even when
Horace was going on in
his Ars Poetica about how poetry had to be sweet and
useful, I took the instinctively contrarian view that no, it
had to be bitter and useless. That conviction lasted only until
cultural schools emerged many centuries later to agree that
the only poetry worth creating was that spat out regardless
of practical consequence. At that point I had to rethink my
perspective for a new criterion that would neither elevate nor
depress, but, like some faded gold key in a drawer, suggest
usefulness without actually being good for anything. This brought
tremendous intellectual turmoil and insecurity for a long time.
Every critic I came across seemed at best to convey only ‘part’
of what I felt about a given work, habitually overlooking something
that I deemed fundamental. This in itself, obviously, was already
a telltale sign that beneath my posturings I was taking it for
granted that some critic out there should have been anticipating
my thoughts perfectly, that somewhere along the line I had tacitly
agreed to entrust my responses to someone who could express
them as an authoritative professional. If I had been a house
cat, I would have been all arrogance and independence -- until
meal time.
But
give even the house cat its due: It trusts some feeders more
than others. The critics I trusted? None completely (they were
still other people, weren’t they?), but they rated a second
sniff if they seemed open to the idea that there was more to
the world than their salaried beat part of it, if they didn’t
comment on their subjects from their knees, if they didn’t
write as if instructing their audience how to read, if they
had historical knowledge of their field, if they conceded (as
a humourless politician once told me) that “humor has
its place in human affairs,” and if, whatever their opinions
of David Lynch, Jonathan Franzen, and Patti Smith, they liked
the New York Mets, Ennio Morricone, Robert Ryan, and maple walnut
ice cream. Correct: It was all very personal.
Sheer
quantity made it necessary to delegate. I couldn’t see
‘all’ the movies and plays, read ‘all’
the books and government manuals. Living in a modern metropolitan
center carried a stiffer price than that concocted by the Taxi
and Limousine Commission. It also carried a clear distinction
in the ‘yins’ and ‘yangs’ who exposed
themselves to somebody’s work in order to share impressions
about it.
My
first sharer-hero dated back to when Cue magazine, then still
in business as an independent New York weekly, had a film reviewer
who took his job so seriously that daily press screenings were
the least of it. When it was necessary, this intrepid soul braved
the boroughs bordering Manhattan on Saturday mornings to take
in Grade D westerns that would have insulted the Empire State
Building and that were filling out a double bill in Jackson
Heights or Flatbush. Not even the crudely produced sexploitation
pictures confined to the Times Square area or fund-raising documentaries
targeted for a church hall in the Bronx escaped his notice.
His dedication permitted
Cue to claim that it provided three-line capsule reviews of
absolutely every feature playing in a New York City building.
Not counting his second looks at films he was especially taken
with and his busman’s holidays to foreign festivals, this
added up (by his estimate) to seeing more than 600 movies a
year. Don't ask if he had a TV set at home.
Where
the reviews themselves were concerned, the man’s astounding
energies broke down into hearty approval, vague irritability,
and a profound dissatisfaction. When he was particularly enthusiastic
about a picture, he invariably praised it as “compelling
and masterly.” When he left a theater with little to show
for his time but two completed circles of his watch, his rendered
judgment was that the film in question had “not been especially
compelling or masterly.” And when he hated something altogether,
he was prone to dismissing it as “the very opposite of
compelling and masterly.” All of which should have prepared
me for his answer when I once asked him how he could be so tireless
in ferreting out every piece of celluloid to emerge from a film
editor’s workbench. “You never know when you’ll
be
surprised by something compelling and masterly,” he said
with a straight face. “I like to think my readers will
be grateful for that information.”
Ever
since the Cue gentleman I’ve thought of reviewers
as those in search of the compelling and masterly. Influenced
by the same gentleman and his employer, I’ve also regarded
them as integral parts of the tourist industry -- advertising
copywriters who tell people where to go, where to get the best
bargains, what cons to avoid etc. If they were covering hotel
rooms instead of movies, they would have a grading system based
on four (excellent), three (good), two (mediocre), or one (bedbugs)
piece of bed pillow chocolate. I know I’m not alone seeing
them in this light because the notion of reviewer has traditionally
evoked images of unripe apples, muddy boots and drab Chevrolets
while a succulent Golden Delicious, gleaming Wellingtons, and
a shimmering Mercedes-Benz presumed, by contrast, to identify
a critic. The yins and yangs of the business.
A
reviewer wears jeans and has pens in his shirt pocket; critics
wear herring-bone jackets with ironed white handkerchiefs in
the breast pocket. You always know where a reviewer stands,
never know where a critic is hiding. If the task of the reviewer
is to tell us which high school band was most in tune, which
drum majorette cavorted with the most flair, and which city
agency was the most disciplined marching along the boulevard,
critics have taken it on themselves to tell us whether the parade
should have been organized to begin with. There is also the
difference that the subject bringing out the reviewer arouses
the critic’s interest only incidentally. Critics would
not exist without their agendas, and common to all of them,
from reflecting a perennially absorbent ideology to galloping
along on a hobby horse, is their own writing. The critic takes
on his subject as a test of his creative powers; his true arena
isn’t the novel, play or painting triggering reflection,
but the inspiration at the source of that novel, play, and painting,
how it is relevant to the critic’s concerns, and how it
has been exploited by a parallel creator. While the reviewer
seldom has the self-delusion of being as imaginative as the
people whose work he has been called on to review, the critic
feels no obligation to such modesty. For the critic the compelling
and the masterly
is not only what might or might not have been accomplished by
somebody else, but what might or might not have been accomplished
by someone else while he and his lively ambitions were asleep
at the switch.
And
one other measure of the difference. The reviewer often sounds
as though he has a second job churning out copy for Ripley’s
Believe It or Not. The performance he saw last night at the
Longacre was “the greatest in living memory.” X-Men
Meet Y-Women and Have Odd Children could be “the
most epic film we will see in our lifetime.” He intimates
comparisons even as he shows that he has no conception of time,
what has transpired in it, or what has yet to transpire in it.
Whatever was is amnesia, whatever will be is a down payment
on it. His concern is less for conveying artistic weight than
for underwriting blurb fluff because that is the one way to
get his name in his periodical when he has a day off, as well
as in publications that don’t pay him a cent. On the other
hand, the critic is liable to start relating a John LeCarre
novel to something by Graham Green, and who has given a damn
about Graham Green since he played a Sioux in Dances with
Wolves?
And
so? Where do we stand with these critics?
The
fact is I can be as stimulated by a reviewer’s musings
on a Will Farrell laughfest as by a critic’s meditations
on Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s impact on Henry Miller. Reviewers
didn’t surrender their brains entirely in agreeing to
indulge annual speculations on who deserved an Emmy for Best
Supporting Actor in a Streaming Tuesday Comedy; vice versa,
critics didn’t acquire epochal wisdom for divining the
precise moment Jack Donne turned into John Donne. Truth be told,
I’m as interested in the difference between reviewers
and critics as in that between the FBI and Homeland Security.
The issue remains how many dirty tricks are being played in
my name and how much better off would I be eliminating all of
them altogether.
While
temporizing, I’ve cast critics in various speculative
roles. When I humanize them, I think of them as friends who
have seen and read what I have yet to see and read. Their enthusiasm/disdain
doesn’t necessarily count, but what always counts is how
much they relate about the experience. If they say they don’t
want to spoil it for me with too many details, I conclude they
genuinely want to encourage me to have their experience or are
possessed of retentive powers best suited for straining fettuccine.
Other times I weaselize them. If they start off by talking about
actors or a writing style or the recent 50thanniversary celebrations
for Larry the music label’s sound engineer, I suspect
they’re backing into their assignment in line with a directive
to be as ‘positive’ as possible. On still other
occasions I robotize them, imagining them tramping through a
pre-programmed function with the discrimination of a Transformer,
scaling the Alps or gauging the capacity of a coal bin as equally
plausible objectives. None of these fantasies brings me the
absolute answer I’m looking for any more than the seeming
orderliness of a beads shop with its infinite number of shapes
and colors and trays ever leads me directly to what I want:
Why this blue pony heart instead of that yellow diamond head,
what am I to do with it when I get it home, and why is it important
even to figure out what to do with it? Nevertheless, I accept
the intellectual browsing. More, I am usually left to concede,
the browsing has been the objective from the beginning,
hasn’t it? If we were all content just knowing what we
wanted, not merely critics, but publicists, the ad industry,
moralists, churches, psychiatrists, white supremacist groups
and the Detroit Lions (just to name a few) would be out of business.
So
it is that I have had to conclude that critics remain a necessary
evil and that attempts to defuse their potential impact, including
through a tactic of critical voice saturation, do indeed have
only Godzilla designs. The trick is not to confuse all the friendly,
weaselly, robotic chat with the compelling and the masterly.
