Film Criticism Has Become Film Claquing--Take it From Armond White

Back in that burst of interest in Pauline Kael's life and legacy circa 2011 Armond White published a piece in the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) considering the same subject. Just like Frank Rich's piece (which Mr. White references, not altogether favorably) it contrasted the kind of criticism she produced, and the critical world of which she was a part, with the world that has existed since.

As he observes, more recent "publications like . . .Movieline, and Entertainment Weekly," whose coverage of Hollywood he describes as "hand-in-glove with Hollywood in terms of what is and is not worth praise and attention," produced "a gushy, starstruck culture where hype and reviewing are inseparable" (emphasis added); where, as he quotes Kael saying, the "tendency," all too convenient for Hollywood Suits who "want [reviewing] to be an extension of their advertising departments" pushing their product on "moviegoers" ideally "uninformed and without memory, so they can be happy consumers," has become "to write appreciatively at the highest possible pitch, as if" the sole values were "peaks," and anything a reviewer "like[d] becomes a new peak." In the process audiences came to take for granted such things as "front-page raves for summer blockbusters," to the extent that the writers are actually talking about the content of movies at all (as against box office grosses and awards show prospects). Indeed, it has all gone so far that everyone seems to be not just surprised of but suspicious of and even intolerant of whatever is at odds with the "consensus" all too easily readable in the figures churned out by the review aggregators (which show an upward trend in the average score for films, and where single film franchises like Top Gun can sometimes show the shocking change in standards over the decades). Indeed, it is the case that such dismiss those who depart from the consensus with such terms as "gadfly," "curmudgeon," "contrarian," that treat the more independent-minded critic as simply being disagreeable rather than having anything interesting to say.

All too true, I think, though I do take issue with the author of that piece on at least two points. The first is his view that "[a]udiences these days seem to want to be validated in their own opinions, and take personal offense to critics who do not oblige," implying that audiences were more broad-minded in the past and have fallen away from that, a thing he asserts but does not actually support--and which seems to me the more problematic because it is all too easy for someone writing in the pages of a publication like the CJR to punch down at the "ordinary" moviegoer that way.

The second is Mr. White's claim that the "groveling" we see in the coverage of film "does not occur in coverage of music, the fine arts, or architecture," though I suspect it is just as bad in at least the first two of those areas. We would not be arguing about the influence of poptimism in music and the degeneration of music criticism into "lifestyle reporting" were it otherwise in music. Nor would the art world produce such obscenities as Salvatore Garau's "immaterial sculpture"--the sale of which literal nothing is a slap in the face of every artist, or even would-be artist, who ever did one second's worth of work to create a piece of art, and completely inconceivable were "fine art criticism" not so obscenely degenerate. Indeed, considering all that it seems possible that the situation may be even worse in music and the fine arts than it is in film--while in not saying the same of architecture I refrain only because I do not know the journalism of that field well enough to feel comfortable venturing a proper opinion.