1.
Can someone tell me why I am neurotically, insistently hacking my way through the thicket of aesthetic offerings that various critics and commentators have dubbed 2019’s Best? Compulsively – if not entirely joylessly – inhaling movies, TV shows, and record albums in advance of the New Year, as though they might spontaneously combust or turn into pumpkins at the stroke of midnight on January 1…?
I’m not on a deadline! Am I…?
Could it be the still-kicking prick of some long-suppressed critical impulse spurring me on? A never-entirely-purged obsession with scribbling my thoughts and having my say regarding the current state of arts and entertainment in a timely fashion? Am I still clinging to the illusion of my own intellectual relevance?
Why?
I have come to accept that my opinion is worth no more than anyone else’s. In some ways, it is worth less. (In some ways, it is worthless… Ha…) For starters, I long ago ceased consuming media in a way that would allow for any genuine discovery. When seeking out works, I rarely take a chance on something untried these days, preferring to take my guidance from the relative safety of lists and recommendations cooked up by critics (and other consumers) whom I trust (and some I don’t).
And then I complain about the uniformity of critical opinion…
Oh, I know: Critics are a notoriously contentious bunch, but not lately. They may disagree – even vehemently, even violently – about one film or series or album or other, but pull up any Top 10 or 20 or 50 list for the year and the majority of offerings you find there will be the same, maybe in a different order. When was the last time you saw a critic of note offer a full-throated, superlative defense of a work that few others found any value in? Or that few others even managed to find at all…?
It shouldn’t be that difficult. Sure, a critic’s job is to see or hear “everything,” but that usually just means “everything” in the mainstream. And, yes, the best critics will often stray from the beaten path of popularity and shine a light on something that might otherwise have gone unnoticed, but by the time you get to the end of the year, the buzz surrounding its brilliance has spread like a virus, and this small work now stands in a blazing spotlight, pushed center-stage by a chorus of conforming critical voices.
I wonder how many more delicate works have wilted under such a glare…?
Ah, you say, but if there is an objective yardstick for measuring artistic accomplishment – as, to your ongoing irritation, you have repeatedly heard me assert – isn’t this just the process by which the alleged cream rises to the top?
Perhaps.
But, in that case, I see no need to add my voice to the larger ensemble.
I did not become a critic in order to –
2.
Wait. Sorry. Sometimes I forget…
I did not become a critic.
For a good long time, though, I tried. I wrote criticism as compulsively as I consumed the works I scrutinized. I sent my work out. I published it in various amateur platforms, eventually retreating to my own blogs, and even now, I still incessantly compose critical analyses in my head that never even make it to the page. I can’t seem to stop myself…
There was a time where I believed I was doing it for Manohla. Just because I loved her and she believed in me, and I wanted to prove myself worthy of that. (Which, upon reflection, really translates as me doing it for myself, to prove something to myself…) But the impulse predated her. She just kindled a spark of confidence in me that I, in turn, fanned into a flame of zealous conviction.
Henry had, much earlier, equipped me with the intellectual paraphernalia, but the habit… It seems almost encoded in my genes.
I could never just look at the ocean. Or the sky. In my head, I was always trying to wrap my mind around the vast expanses, trace the tides and currents, map the geometry of the stars, differentiating the imposed patterns of constellations from the empirically observable systems of the heavens, envisioning life in the invisible depths or on the other side of the world.
Traveling was never just seeing new places, trying new things, but an attempt to pick up on a certain city’s rhythm and feel its flow, discover the true essence of a particular place and its people, explore what gave them their unique vitality.
A superficial experience was never enough for me. I always wanted to get to the heart of things…
(Which may be why I have such hair-trigger impatience for euphemism, sentimentality, bromides, and all other manner of bullshit. Not necessarily with strategies deployed to obscure something’s true meaning or nature, but always with those that are deployed to obscure their absence …)
Is this what a critic does…?
I suppose it depends on who you ask. But it’s what criticism meant to me.
The intellectual process was innate. The translation of that process into a piece of writing – and the potential expansion of that into a paid vocation – was so organic and obvious that I missed it entirely. Until Manohla drew my attention to it, anyway…
And then…
3.
I never wrote criticism in order to tell anyone what was good or bad, or what they should see, or read, or listen to, or what they shouldn’t. (Though it’s amazing how easily a young critic can fall into that trap just because it has become the inescapable convention. You almost feel like you’re doing it wrong unless you’re framing your writing in those terms…)
I wanted to guide people into a work of art’s invisible depths, tracing its patterns, revealing its rhythms, distilling its essence, bringing them along, like the aesthetic equivalent of a travel writer, on my journey into its beating heart. And, ideally, in the aftermath of their own experience with it, engage them in discussion and debate about how their journey differed from my own…Furthermore, in a belated attempt to rescue this from the mire of self-absorption and self-pity…
That’s not only the reason I wrote criticism. It’s also the reason I read it.
When I mine the yearly Best Of… lists in search of some worthy gem, I almost never bother reading the compact commentary that accompanies each entry. (If, in fact, there is any commentary at all…) You can’t capture that journey or get to the heart of a major work in a few sentences. (And, if you can, is it really because you’re that good a writer? Or is it, perhaps, that the work in question is not as profound or impressive as it might appear…?)
I read criticism because I want the critic to take me on their journey. To shine a light on any shadowy corners in a work that I might have missed, to reveal a stretch of connective tissue that escaped my analysis, and even to remind me that, like the universe itself, a work of art may have no center, but a variety of nexus points at which one’s explorations may begin or end. In short, I read criticism to experience a work of art through a different pair of sharp, penetrating eyes, and then bring those insights back to the work itself, to see in what ways my experience of it has grown or changed.
Is this what an audience does?
Again, I suppose it depends on who you ask. But I feel increasingly that it is not. And, perhaps, that it has never been…For a variety of reasons, critics are no longer viewed – if, in fact, they ever were – as trained professionals educated in a specialized sphere, or even as shamans with a gift for translating the unseen mechanics of artistic creation to the spectator. They are seen, instead, as a self-proclaimed elite authoritatively imposing their aesthetic judgments on the ignorant masses – a status few contemporary critics would either assert or embrace.
Popular audiences want their own unmediated experience of a work of art, which is fine. But they also want to be able to adjudicate its aesthetic quality with authority, despite being armed with little more than their own opinions, and having little or no ability to elucidate their experience of it beyond, “I liked it,” or, “I hated it.” Their sole reason for reading criticism, today, seems to be to infuriate themselves when some critic or other suggests that an independently-made foreign film might have more aesthetic value and thematic complexity than their current got-to popcorn blockbuster. To them, criticism is a zero-sum game in which their favorite works must be defended against some mythic final and unalterable critical judgment of their qualities.
(And that’s not even opening the festering can of hematophagic maggots that is today’s political climate, and the effect that it has had on criticism… Point being…)
To the heart of things seems to be the last place anyone wants to go.
4.
Is that why I stopped trying?
I don’t know. I think the truth is that I’m still trying to stop.
Here I am, on December 28th, gorging myself on what other critics say are the year’s best offerings, as though I were on some self-imposed deadline to deliver my thoughts on the subject. As though my thoughts were anything more than another unheard voice in an increasingly monotonous chorus, whose motives for conformity have grown increasingly suspect, and whose refrain seems destined to fall on deaf ears…
Don’t get me wrong.I still enjoy watching great films, and making my way through intriguing TV series, and discovering new music, and reading incredible books. But writing about them has become little more than an unwelcome compulsion delivering diminishing returns, a mechanical impulse in which there seems to be so little point, I wish I could just ignore it and get on with my life…
But I can’t. My brain does it what it does and, like an addict chasing that disappearing dragon, I keep coming back. So it may yet happen that, once again, I’m unable to stop myself from churning out some half-assed retrospective that, ultimately, amounts to little more than a weary subjective calculus, a self-assigned “How I Misspent My Aesthetic Vocation” essay. At least it won’t be a pathetic descent into maudlin self-pity…
My thoughts on Todd Phillips’ JOKER and the GAME OF THRONES finale are already congealing into compositional form against my will…
Watch this space.
But is it Art...? 