I really admire the old guard of the critical set. And if you think I don’t daydream about cutting my teeth with that set and living that lifestyle, you’d be wrong. The idea of writing one or two in depth pieces a week along with maybe a handful of blurbs – being able to spend a day or two on a single piece, writing a deep, affecting critique of a film very few of my readers might actually care about or even see? Well I can certainly understand why so many of them are upset that this world they came up in is dying. By all accounts it was pretty great.
This point was driven home last week in a now infamous screening of For the Love of Movies in which a collection of print critics once again leveled a shotgun and opened fire on internet critics for killing film criticism. There are a number of great articles already floating around about the controversy like this great recap by Stephen Saito or this pointed one by Todd Gilchrist – so I won’t be regurgitating my own feeling here. Instead I would like to talk about the elephant in the room. WHY film criticism as we knew it is dying.
Because nobody really wanted it in the first place.
As the news gathering/pleasurable daily reading consumer model changed from print media to electronic, film criticism desks proved to be the Emperor with no Clothes. Criticism was sold as part of a package – not on its own. And when made available as part of that package, whether it be with hard hitting news, commentary, local coverage, movie times or the funnies – people read it. Why? Because that was the critique YOU already paid for. But the moment you were able to choose who you read you no longer wanted to read the guys from the paper. You wanted something edgier or funnier or more sarcastic or more in tune with how you feel about movies. As it turns out, 1500-word spoiler filled reviews that tore apart and reassembled the movie before your eyes wasn’t necessarily what people wanted to spend their time reading.
Up until the advent of online criticism, a film critic had to concern themselves with three things: reviewing the film, meeting their editorial word count requirements and the language of the piece. They never had to ask themselves “Who would actually want to read this? Who is my audience?” They knew the answer to that question. This environment churned out a number of incredible intellectuals who, never having to sell themselves outside of the occasional job interview…never learned how to sell themselves. They never learned how to write about what people wanted to read. For them, they wrote what and how they wanted – within the confines of their editor’s purview. But that’s changed now.
I wish we lived in a world where a well written review received more traffic than a Robert Pattinson pictorial or a story about a 20 year old starlet caught without her panties – but that’s not the world we live in. The truth is it was never the world we lived in. The days of ivory tower criticism are over. That’s not to say that there isn’t a market for it – there is. It just happens to be so small that the glut of old school writers is busy cannibalizing each other’s markets trying to get to it. And that means a lot of out of work writers.
Is film criticism dying? In its old form, yes. But there are many of us trying to keep that intellectual flame alive while trying to get people to read it at the same time. The environment is turning out a whole new type of critic, and if we work hard enough at it, we might even prove to be even better critics than our predecessors.
Might.
Check out last week’s Counterpoint with Cargill
