James Ponsoldt's The Circle and the Tyranny of Generic Classification

I missed James Ponsoldt's The Circle when it first came out back in 2017 but caught it on streaming some years later. As I had largely missed the film's publicity at the time of its release--and I must admit, also not read Dave Eggers' book--I saw the film with very few expectations. I will not go so far as to claim that it is a latterday classic, but when I saw just how poorly it was received (a 16 percent on Rotten Tomatoes!) I thought it deserved better than it got, indeed a lot better. It also seems to me that I am not alone in thinking so, as while the audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes is almost as bad as that of the critics (21 percent), the users of the Internet Movie Data Base give it a far from great but still better than absolutely horrible 5.4.

It also seems to me that there is something worth saying about the extreme negativity of the professional critics toward this film. Part of it, quite frankly, is that critics today as much as ever have a deep bias against socially critical material, and often hide this behind bad faith claims that a work which is socially critical is somehow really saying nothing at all. (We saw plenty of this with Todd Phillips' Joker, for example.) It was not that The Circle said nothing, or said something "outdated" in a "condescending" fashion, or as Peter Griffin had it, that it "insists upon itself," or anything else of the sort, but rather that it all too clearly said something relevant but which they did not want said that excited them to their displays of contempt, the more in as it was a Tom Hanks and Emma Watson-starring wide release opening in three thousand theaters rather than a small arthouse film (watching which the critics tend to be more indulgent when a movie has a Message, plausibly because so few will see it).

Indeed, it seems plausible that the critics are especially sensitive to any challenge to the Cult of Silicon Valley, with all it has meant for the legitimation of neoliberalism in our time, and which in so many cases these days is their employer with all that means, given the digitalization and corporatization of the media, and the way the "move fast and break things" crowd has bought up that media, and not hesitated to exercise the political power that comes with its ownership.

However, it also seems to me that the film version of The Circle was the more vulnerable to such attack because of the way in which it was categorized for marketing purposes, The Circle sold as a "thriller." Judged by the standard most people have in mind when people hear the word "thriller" (especially in this period in which thrillers are more and more associated with shock and with action rather than a Hitchcockian cultivation of tension) the movie is at best unconventional, and at worst rather limp. Had it been presented as the darkly satirical comedy-drama the film actually is I suspect some at least would have been less harsh in their judgment--but alas, such things are more difficult sells in the world the movie marketing folks Pauline Kael so rightly called out a near half century ago have made.