Wednesday, July 25, 2001

Ah, since I started the day with a book review, let's go on to the topic of criticism in general, shall we?

I went to get my usual dose of media news at Poynter org and was pointed to this article, by a Sean Glennon.
Valley Advocate | Arts. Now, Mr. Glennon is not a heavyweight, but his article does reveal a very American response to the word critic. Critics seem to open some obscure anti-intellectual toxin in the American body. The idea that one's whole job is criticizing - with the implication that one can do better, and the evident disdain for really doing so - goes against both the native pragmatism and that boosterism which is a thread running all the way back to colonial times.

Mr. Glennon has structured his article on a series of denials - by which I mean denials in the psychoanalytic sense. A denial is embedding an assertion in a grammatical negation - a "not... but." As in, "Not that I am saying you are a liar, but you do have a problem with the truth." This advances propositions behind an ostensible denial that one is advancing a proposition. Of course, the "not...but" structure is not to be taken as the only way denial works - but it is at the core of denial, and one can reduce most denials to sentences of that form. In Mr. Glennon's case, the series of denials goes something like this:

-Not that I read the critics, but here's what the critics are like.
-Not that I care about the critics, but really they should be forced to be reporters before they are critics.
-Not that I think we should have critics.

This kind of logical series is, classically, coordinate with a certain kind of resentment.

We begin, then, with Mr. Glennon denying, first, that he is ever influenced by film reviews:

... I almost never read reviews of movies I haven't already seen. I just don't find most film criticism particularly helpful when I'm trying to decide whether to see a movie.

That's a fair enough position. But, having made it clear that he is not very acquainted with film criticism, he has no problem going on to tell us about film criticism. He tells us his opinion of film criticism without reflecting on the fact that he has just proclaimed his ignorance of film criticism, which, presumably, should undermine his credit with his readers. That is, if they believed his account. It is one of the odd but compelling features of resentment that statements made under the sign of this intellectual mood are not to be taken at face value. We aren't, in other words, to believe Mr. Glennon is as innocent of film reviews as he claims. This rhetorical game of making claims that the speaker presumes the hearer won't quite believe has a name - demagogery. Editors usually block that kind of thing when it comes to, say, a consumer report about cars, or a business story. But when it comes to the arts, editors don't really care. This is an odd but telling fact about newspaper life.

To get back to Mr. Glennon. In the paragraph succeeding his preliminary denial of any concern for or persuasion by film critics, he goes on to analyze the types of film critics - revealing that he does, indeed, read film reviews. This presents us with a conundrum. If he doesn't read critics before he sees films, presumably he reads these critics after he sees films. But why would he do this? It goes against the normal way of treating film reviews, which is to read them not only for the opinion of the film reviewer, but as a guide to what movie one is going to see. It is a very common phenomenon: you are with some friends, you want to see a movie, and somebody pulls out a supplement from a newspaper and starts reading out bits from selected film reviews, and somebody else vets the movies - I don't want to see that, I want to see this, etc. Mr. Glennon is immune to this middle class ritual. But he is also, apparently, secretly obsessed with film critics, since after he sees a film, he collates the reviews from newspapers and magazines to the extent that he has even developed a typology of film reviewers. Otherwise, how would he know enough about them to make the following generalizations?

"What I end up reading most of the time is the work of "critics" who aren't really critics at all -- the ones who don't seem to understand the difference between a review and a plot synopsis. Then there are the dry, tedious, self-aggrandizing, academic essays tendered by critics who think of themselves as "writers" rather than journalists (people who regard the word "reporter" as a slur), and whose main interest seems to be showing off their knowledge of film. And, most infuriating of all, there are those breathless, fawning and utterly shallow raves about movies that almost invariably turn out to be just more of the Hollywood same. "

Notice that critics attracts the scornful quotation marks. Really, to be a critic, in Mr. Glennon's estimation, is something secondary, and vaguely disgusting. The quotation marks, here, prolong the logic of denial. And then there is the positing of the critic and the reporter - both are given scare quotes, but it is interesting that the "critic" lends the scare quotes to the "reporter" - which in a sense negates the effect of the scare quotes. Two negatives, after all, make a positive.

This is all leading up to Mr. Glennon's proposal:
"At the very least, I propose that no one should be allowed to work as a film critic who hasn't logged at least three years as an actual, honest-to-god reporter. Not only would that serve to weed out the bulk of the "writers," the glamour critics and the not-actually-a-critic critics, but it would ensure that the people writing about film have some real-world perspective. Spend a couple years covering fatal shootings and city hall shenanigans and it becomes hard to forget that most movies aren't actually all that important."

At this point the logic of denial breaks down - or perhaps it would be better to say that the revenge of logic on the demagogue is to undermine his point. Because surely Mr. Glennon's admiration for reporters isn't premised on the fact that they make hard subjective decisions about which stories are important and which ones aren't. Or does Mr. Glennon think that reporters who are dealing with some story they think is unimportant - say the shooting death of some vague poor person - should research and write about that event carelessly? Actually, as anybody who has read a regular local paper can attest, this is how the news is reported - with a bias towards the powerful, and an incredible carelessness towards inconvenient facts, if they concern the "unimportant."

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