The Death of Film Criticism
I hadn’t read Andrew O’Hehir’s screed against unemployed movie critic bellyaching until Wolcott linked to it, but I think that both O’Hehir and Wolcott make solid points about the future of film criticism. Wolcott:
I miss those days, but they’re not coming back, any more than the doors of CBGB’s will open to reveal the Ramones onstage, firing three-chord fusillades. What’s happening to movie critics is no different from what has been meted out to book, dance, theater, and fine-arts reviewers and reporters in the cultural deforestation that has driven refugees into the diffuse clatter of the Internet and Twitter, where some adapt and thrive—such as Roger Ebert—while others disappear without a twinkle.
In a recent blog post, Ebert counseled against dark despair and declared that this was the golden age, lit by a thousand points of light. The front lines of criticism may have dissolved, but a fresh multitude of voices have arisen, many of them inspired specialists in film noir, horror, anime, and pre-Code Hollywood. “What the internet is creating is a class of literate, gifted amateur writers, in an old tradition,” he wrote. “A blog on the internet gives them a place to publish. Maybe they don’t get a lot of visits, but it’s out there. As a young woman in San Francisco, Pauline Kael wrote the notes for screenings of great films, and did a little free-lancing. If she’d had a blog, no telling what she might have written during those years.” The print emigrants and upstart originals may not be addressing a general audience, but there’s no longer a general audience to address. They went thataways.
Indeed. While I reject the notion (which O’Hehir floats) that film criticism has become fatally disconnected from the moviegoing public, I do think that professional film critics are almost uniquely vulnerable to New Media. Many professionals can do a somewhat better job of thinking and writing seriously about film than many amateurs, but the differences aren’t so great that they justify professional employment for a large group of individuals. If Barack Obama: Socialist Tyrant made payment for film criticism illegal tomorrow, writing about film wouldn’t end; indeed, I wonder whether there’d even be a meaningful dip in criticism. People write about film for the same reason that they watch film; they enjoy doing so. Given opportunity and platform, people will write about film for free, and many will do so with insight. This doesn’t mean that the insights of the very best critics are without value, but it does suggest that the days in which every newspaper maintained its own critic are gone, and moreover that those days ought not be mourned at any length.
“the days in which every newspaper maintained its own critic are gone,”
They never existed, except in Very Large Cities (and occasionally not even then). Unless it was something the owner’s relative did, most local newspapers reprinted part of a column from a syndicated reviewer.
The ad revenues from the local cinema and/or drive-in didn’t make it worth having a staff film reviewer (let alone critic). And–unlike local sports–the newsweeklies or the larger papers always covered movies with their weekend/Friday edition, so even in the “Old Media” days, the supply outstripped all reasonable demand.
Depends on what you mean by “Very Large City”. The Eugene Register Guard had its own film critic in the 1990s, at least, and the Portland Oregonian had a couple back in the day. The Lexington Herald-Leader still has a part-time film critic.
Shit, not that long ago the Worcester Telegram & Gazette had three at one time.
Yeah, sorry, but my midwestern city of about 100K had one for their paper, at least for a couple or three decades, although I haven’t looked at it lately to see if he’s still writing for them.
Plus ca change, and all that. Dead-tree magazines like Film Threat and Fangoria have been dealing with Serious Critics putting them down since fo’evah.
Given Wolcott’s cushy position as a Conde Nast printperson making big bucks by writer’s standards gurgling about Rock Hudson and Doris Day in the pages of Vanity Fair, I think it’s a little tactless of him to tell the newly unemployed to quit their whining.
“Many professionals can do a somewhat better job of thinking and writing seriously about film than many amateurs, but the differences aren’t so great that they justify professional employment for a large group of individuals.”
It’s true that many if not most people fancy themselves as film critics, in a way that they wouldn’t presume to comment on, say, architecture or painting. That doesn’t mean they’re right. People love to write about movies but there is a difference between the writings of fans and buffs and the writing to which true critics aspire (although there is overlap among the categories, critics being fans as well).
The point is, economically speaking, no one cares. At least not a large enough group of people to pay for all of the folks who want to be professional film critics.
You can read a “true critic”, or you can read an amateur critic. Generally speaking, most of the folks who are reading the “film critic” in their local newspaper are reading the critic’s review to answer burning questions like “what’s this movie about?”, “is it any good?” and “is this the kind of movie I should take my spouse/kid/parent to without being embarrassed?” Answers to such questions can be just as easily found with a visit to a website or two – and you can read something that gets right to the heart of the underlying question “is there a chance I’m going to enjoy this movie” without having to read the pretentious twaddle generated by the local paper’s film critic to fill column.
It’s much like the quandary that op-ed writers find themselves in. The Internet is full of amateur op-ed writers, some of whom are better informed but less well-connected than the folks who get the paying op-ed gigs. Same thing.
“It’s much like the quandary that op-ed writers find themselves in. The Internet is full of amateur op-ed writers, some of whom are better informed but less well-connected than the folks who get the paying op-ed gigs. Same thing.”
Bingo.
True criticism is not consumer-guide stuff. If that’s what you’re looking for then I agree there’s plenty of it to be found on the web, along with some good writing. But that is not the same thing as saying that the loss of paying jobs for critics is no big deal or that good film critics come with the mail.
But that is not the same thing as saying that the loss of paying jobs for critics is no big deal or that good film critics come with the mail.
Well, I’m sad when someone loses a job, but let’s imagine the internet does not exist: I don’t actually get to read the guy in Dubuque. Good critics didn’t really come with the mail either unless I went to the bookstore or subscribed to this’n'that.
I don’t think this is true. I can’t remember anything I’ve learned from a professional film critic that seemed more insightful than the kind of things I’ve learned from amateur critics, or even random intelligent people I’ve seen movies with. There was a random comment thread on Yglesias’ a couple of months ago talking about Fight Club that was considerably more insightful than any of the professional movie reviews when the movie came out.
I tend to disagree with this specific point, because on occasion a media outlet with a significant readership employs someone who is considerably better than much of what I regularly read on the Internet (Could my opinion be skewed? Certainly. But judging from, e.g., Pitchfork, I doubt it.) I say this with considerable emphasis on the phrase, “on occasion.” A guy like Anthony Lane truly writes some artful shit every other week for the New Yorker. Would that every movie/everything-critic were as insightful as he.
All that said, the diversification of criticism on the ol’ WWW is worth encouraging the heck out of.
Fatally? No, but there has always been a disconnect to some degree.
Many “pro” critics are terrible when it comes to genre films, it’s not so much that they can’t evaluate them against non-genre films- but the fatal flaw is the inability of many to distinguish films within a genre from eachother.
Another issue, is that the more educated film critics have seen too many films, they will overrate a film if it gives them something novel (to them)- even if it’s gimmicky, they will downgrade something solely because they *think* they’ve seen it before- even if what they saw it in before was an amateurish student film seen by 25 people
I think there’s always going to be a disconnect between someone who sees hundreds of new movies a year because they’re paid to and a reader who sees 20 or less purely for fun.
There is something to be mourned here, whether or not film criticism remains vital as it goes wholly amateur. The death of professional film criticism is part (albeit a small part) of the ongoing shrinkage in opportunities to make a living from writing. Anyone with an interest in writing or creative or artistic pursuit more generally should acknowledge this as a strikingly negative aspect of contemporary cultural and economic trends, with respect to which points like Ebert’s are irrelevant.
How big an issue is that, really?
Under the pre-internet system, for every professional writer that was able to “make a living from writing,” there were dozens of writers that weren’t able to “make a living from writing” because the gatekeepers (agents, editors, readers, whatever) didn’t like them, or didn’t like them enough. For the love of gawd, think of Confederacy of Dunces – there’s a writer we literally won’t be reading more of because the writer couldn’t get published. Even in the pre-internet system, many “serious” writers had to work as teachers or something else to make ends meet anyway. Gene Wolfe used to advise writers to keep their day jobs.
Things are still shaking out, but this looks more like the end of artificial gatekeeping and the opening up of an industry to talent, not the end of “professionalism.”
Granted. I fail to see how multiplying the denominator of that ratio by many further dozens is an improvement.
I hope so. But as the estimable Cuba would say, show me the money.
If you think film criticism in the old media is in trouble, ha! that’s nothing compared to classical music/opera/ballet criticism. This week saw the truly excellent Tim Mangan get his online gig with the Orange County (CA) Register axed. When I first started reading Mr. Mangan’s work in the Los Angeles Times in the mid-70′s, he was one of 3 full time classical/opera critics at the Times and there was a full-time dance critic as well, totally unthinkable today.
Since classical/opera/dance criticism takes a much wider breadth of knowledge to be acceptable than film criticism does, it’s a big loss for those of us who like to read good criticism and/or are looking for hints about whether to spend money on yet another performance of Beethoven’s Fifth.
That (mistaken) attitude is part of the problem film critics face.
There is in fact good music and dance criticism to be found on the web, as critics in those fields who have lost their paying print jobs migrate online to gigs that pay less or nothing at all. Progress!
Newspapers and magazines are in the business of selling advertising and are only incidentally interested in filing the news hole. It’s not just critics and commentators that are being edged out– actual reporting is too. International and national correspondents will be the last to go. School board and city council coverage, and even the state capitol reportage are more endangered than the Siberian Tiger. Does this mean that journalism is dead? Maybe not, but it certainly means that there needs to be a new economic model. Could blogging replace conventional news reporting? I doubt it. All those automobile ads and supermarket inserts underwrote operations that were pretty expensive. The real issue is whether Google and Yahoo and the like are prepared to recognize the ethical wall that separates content from advertising.
The great age of film critics went the way of good films. We needed Kael for the age of Bergman and Altman. We don’t deserve her like in the age of Transformers and Iron Man.