You know what bothers me? Well, plenty of things. But what's bothering me at the moment is imprecise writing. Case in point, Armond White's essay in the New York Press called "WHAT WE DON’T TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT MOVIES". What starts as an essay bemoaning the proliferation of bad writing among internet film critics goes on to make a series of hasty, and increasingly bombastic, generalizations about all film critics.
Example:
What we don’t talk about when we talk about movies these days reveals that we have not moved past the crippling social tendency that 1990s sociologists called Denial. The most powerful, politically and morally engaged recent films (The Darjeeling Limited, Private Fears in Public Places, World Trade Center, The Promise, Shortbus, Ask the Dust, Akeelah and the Bee, Bobby, Running Scared, Munich, War of the Worlds, Vera Drake) were all ignored by journalists whose jobs are to bring the (cultural) news to the public. Instead, only movies that are mendacious, pseudo-serious, sometimes immoral or socially retrograde and irresponsible (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Army of Shadows, United 93, Marie Antoinette, Zodiac, Last Days, There Will Be Blood, American Gangster, Gone Baby Gone, Letters From Iwo Jima, A History of Violence, Tarnation, Elephant) have received critics’ imprimatur.
I'd like Mr. White to show me just who ignored War of the Worlds. If he felt like it he could spend a day reading the reviews listed for it at the Internet Movie Database. The same goes for Munich and World Trade Center, both wide-release pictures by two famous directors (Spielberg and Stone, respectively). Akeelah and the Bee, lacking a big name director or a blockbuster budget, still managed to secure good notices, including a four-star review from Roger Ebert, who also conferred a special jury prize on the picture when he released his Ten-Best list. While it's true that he didn't finance a ticker tape parade for the movie along Chicago's Wacker Drive, I don't think anyone can say he ignored the movie or gave it anything less than his complete support. Instead, it puts the lie to White's second claim in the paragraph that "only movies that are mendacious...have received the critics' imprimatur."
I bring Ebert up here because Mr. White goes to considerable lengths to attack the various things Ebert has allegedly done to destroy film criticism, and film, and indeed the entire moral structure of the universe as we know it. (That last bit was an exaggeration. I apologize for it, which puts me one up on Mr. White.) White contrasts Ebert's era with that of Sarris and Kael in order to demonstrate that, by making film criticism accessible to the unwashed, Mr. Ebert has...well, I guess I'll have to quote Mr. White to explain:
To discuss movies as if they were irrelevant to individual experience—just bread-and-circus rabble-rousers—breeds indifference. And that’s only one of the two worst tendencies of contemporary criticism. The other is elitism.
This schism had an ironic origin—the popularization of film criticism as a consumer’s method. A generation of readers and filmgoers were once sparked by the discourse created by Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris during the period that essayist Philip Lopate described as ìthe heroic era of moviegoing.î The desire to be a critic fulfilled the urge to respond to what was exciting in the culture. Movie commentary was a media rarity in those days and relatively principled (even the Times’ Arts & Leisure section used to present a forum for contrary opinions). And then the television series At the Movies happened. Its success, moving from public to commercial broadcast (who can tell the difference anymore?), resulted in an institution. Permit an insider’s story: It is said that At the Movies host Roger Ebert boasted to Kael about his new TV show, repeatedly asking whether she’d seen it. Kael reportedly answered “If I want a layman’s opinion on movies, I don’t have to watch TV.”
Kael’s cutting remark cuts to the root of criticism’s problem today. Ebert’s way of talking about movies as disconnected from social and moral issues, simply as entertainment, seemed to normalize film discourse—you didn’t have to strive toward it, any Average Joe American could do it. But criticism actually dumbed down. Ebert also made his method a road to celebrity—which destroyed any possibility for a heroic era of film criticism.
At the Movies helped criticism become a way to be famous in the age of TV and exploding media, a dilemma that writer George W. S. Trow distilled in his apercu “The Aesthetic of the Hit”: “To the person growing up in the power of demography, it was clear that history had to do not with the powerful actions of certain men but with the processes of choice and preference.” It was Ebert’s career choice and preference to reduce film discussion to the fumbling of thumbs, pointing out gaffes or withholding “spoilers”—as if a viewer needed only to like or dislike a movie, according to an arbitrary set of specious rules, trends and habits. Not thought. Not feeling. Not experience. Not education. Just reviewing movies the way boys argued about a baseball game.
I won't mock too hard the idea of a "heroic era of moviegoing". I was once moved to write an epic poem about my experiences watching Goldeneye "'Twas Brosnan's steely gaze 'pon the dish of fire that roused me 'gainst self-slaughter..." Sorry. I won't, however, drop one thing. Mr. White, Andrew Sarris's "era" isn't over. He's writing for the New York Observer and you can read his reviews on current releases whenever you're of a mind to do so. His rival, Pauline Kael, went to the great box office in the sky, but Sarris is still with us.
As for criticism dumbing down...well...I'm not sure about that either. Were daily newspaper reviewers ever writing to people other than "Average Joe American"? After all, Mr. White, and I hate to tell you this, lots of people do just like or dislike movies, and many of them would prefer to know before blowing money on a film whether it's likely to entertain them or not. That's why they're reading the paper or watching television. Those with more sophisticated tastes will gravitate toward The New Yorker or Film Comment. That's why they're there. They have room to publish longer articles and can assume a certain level of reader knowledge. What Ebert did was broaden the audience for film journalism, with all the costs that this involves. It was ever thus that those who talk to the uninitiated have to speak their language, and say things that they'd find interesting. Mr. White can feel free to dislike Ebert for doing that, but before the next time he wants to start a harangue about how Ebert doesn't educate his audience, he should remember that lots of "Average Joe Americans" would never have heard of Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, or Stanley Kaufmann if Roger Ebert hadn't, from time to time, mentioned them in his columns.
There are plenty of other errors and faults in Armond White's essay. I doubt he'll take advice from me, but if he does I'd tell him that a quick read-through of Orwell's Politics and the English Language would be a good use of his time. Nobody who has a lick of sense and one good eye should allow a sentence like "The love of movies that inspires their gigabytes of hyperbole has been traduced to nonsense language and non-thinking" into print. The love of abstract and polysyllabic words that plagues Mr. White's prose tells me that he might have something to learn from Roger Ebert. I may not find the secrets of the cinematic universe in a Roger Ebert review, but at least I can figure out, after the first reading, what the man is trying to say. I've read Mr. White's essay four times now, and though I'm an educated man with a master's degree in English and several awards for fiction writing, I'm still unsure what Mr. White's problem is. The first three times, I thought it might be might be my fault, but the fourth reading left me wondering and now...well...here were are.
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