A few years ago, a friend identified me to a young man of his acquaintance as "the guy who writes about movies for the newspaper."
The young man thought about that for a moment, then asked my friend what I did for a living. Or maybe I was independently wealthy?
I'm not, although I agree that it is remarkable to be paid to write about the movies. (Though I would hasten to note that's not all I do.) It is not the sort of job most children can imagine growing up to do, and maybe not the sort of thing that many people can expect to do. Professional film critics are pretty rare these days -- they haven't had one at the newspaper in Atlanta for more than 10 years. And a couple of weeks ago, Miami lost its only full-time film critic, Rene Rodriguez.
Rodriguez will be OK, he still has a job -- covering real estate -- and he's a fine writer and reporter who's going to thrive in his new role. I don't worry about him. I worry about the rest of us.
Outside the coastal cultural centers of New York and Los Angeles and maybe Chicago, there's not much real criticism of the arts going on in our popular media these days. There's what they call entertainment journalism -- gossip and chats with stars. And in this market-driven, Naked and Afraid age, that may be what most people want in the way of cultural coverage anyway.
One of the reasons American film criticism is an expiring art is diminished expectations of an audience that, through the wild, wild internet, has immediate access to canned studio propaganda and the bray of rabble. And although there are still some fine critics working in newspapers, the best criticism has rarely been accomplished on tight deadlines. Movies don't live long enough these days to be reconsidered at leisure. The review has become less a reflection on a film's meaning than a part of (or antidote to) the momentary hype.
Studios more and more consider critics nuisances to be circumvented or -- perhaps even more often -- tin pot pashas to be appeased and co-opted. For the most part, "entertainment journalism" in this country is a lapdog press, bought off by access and proximity to celebrity. Most newspapers seem more interested in chasing celebrity gossip than considering the implications of the few serious-minded films that somehow make their way into the moviehouses.
In a way, that's OK, because most modern movies aren't made to be watched critically; they're made for date-night couples and 13-year-old boys (or 30-year-old men with the sensibilities of 13-year-old boys). My feeling is that this isn't how it has always been -- the movies I watched in the 1970s seemed to have more at stake than movies I see today. How much of that feeling can be attributed to nostalgia and how much of it is accurate observation? Maybe that's something that deserves consideration. I hope so -- it's something I spend a good deal of time thinking about.
And that's what reviewers do -- they notice films.
There has always been a bias in journalism toward the quantifiable and tangible, and in the precincts devoted to the coverage of culture this translates into an almost obscene obsession with numbers, with all this meaningless blather about box office and budgets, and who "won" the weekend or a Golden Globe. Oscars may matter, but they ought not be a preoccupation of critics because this blather only serves a small and often mediocre minority of films. It also pressures movies into the do-or-die panic that only one or two weekends matter. As art and entertainment, films need to be about matters of quality, and the zeal to quantify them degrades that.
Reviewing movies is like coaching basketball or practicing law: Almost everyone secretly believes that, given the chance, he or she could do a creditable job. (Hardly a week goes by when we don't receive a letter from some proud parent nominating a child as a potential reviewer of children's movies.) The job of the American film critic has always been complicated by the fact that virtually all Americans regard themselves as astute judges of movies.
There's no mystery why this is so. Most of us have probably seen thousands of movies, and a lot of us can be said to have constructed a style of living based largely on the films we've seen. The movies inform our self-perception; we measure ourselves against the screen's two-dimensional characters, we talk like them, we borrow bits of business and fillips of transitory grace. Movies teach us how to talk to girls, what sunglasses are cool and how to smoke.
Soaked in the movies, wise in their conventions, it is only natural that we consider ourselves their master. The documentarian D.A. Pennebaker has discovered that, with today's lightweight video equipment, just about anyone can be trusted to shoot usable footage. We all know how to frame a shot. We've developed an almost instinctual sense of what movies look like.
But just as sunbathing imparts no particular insight into nuclear fusion, basking in the movies is not the same thing as knowing them. Art works because it affects and engages us in mysterious ways and on several levels. A child can tell you what he likes, but can he tell you why? And is it even useful to think about the "why" of a movie or a book or a painting?
It is, because understanding the art people produce is essential to understanding people. American movies say things about America -- buried beneath the dunes of sugar and schmaltz is a secret history of yearning and aspiration. As in dreams, these meanings might be obscured and entangled with emotions so profound as to be nameless. (And sometimes a cigar is just that.)
Movies are like our collective dreams -- it is the critic's job to interpret them.
I'm still the guy who writes about movies for the newspaper. We're not Atlanta or Miami. Not yet.
Email:
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
blooddirtangels.com
MovieStyle on 04/28/2017