Very contemplative. And maybe which is first and which is second is the other way around.
Since returning from Europe about seven weeks ago, and this has become a possibly coincidental benchmark for a lot of things I've been thinking about, I've been really going through the motions as a critic. I'm dutifully supplying between one and three reviews a week, and mostly covering the films I feel need to be covered. And it's not taking me any longer to write my reviews, with a notable exception that I'll mention in the next paragraph. I'm just quicker to accept that the tack I've started on is a satisfactory one, and I'll just keep spouting off various disconnected observations until I reach my word count.
But then I also had something that hasn't happened to me in a while: I started to write a review that I just totally abandoned. It was for Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein. I wrote two paragraphs that I decided were a dumb way to start the piece, and instead of starting over again, I just left it unfinished. When I searched my soul, I decided I didn't have a single goddamn thing to say about Frankenstein.
This isn't usually a problem. I always power through it. There's a core standard of professionalism to which I hold myself, acting as though I were on deadline even if the only deadline is in my own head.
Sometimes there actually is a deadline. For any film where I've gotten a screener or attended a premiere, there's the expectation that you'll deliver your verdict by the opening Thursday, if you have enough time, or at least before the first weekend. I do always meet that deadline, and Frankenstein wasn't an example of that scenario, as I waited until it was available on Netflix.
But the Frankenstein episode did disturb me a little bit and it awakened a fear in me that I wasn't ready to confront, and am only forcing myself to confront in the piece I'm currently writing:
I don't know how long I want to keep on doing this.
There are lots of arguments why I wouldn't keep doing it:
1) It no longer brings me (enough) joy.
2) It is becoming less and less financially viable. I'm paying the monthly bills to run the website, and those costs are basically offset by the free tickets I get with my critics card. I'm not running the numbers right not to figure out if I'm coming out a little ahead or a little behind, but it could just as easily be the latter -- which is one of the reasons I'm not running those numbers, because I don't really want to know that.
3) It is pretty exhausting. You're always rolling that ball up the hill. You're always trying to figure out when you need to see a movie in order to put up a review at an optimal time so that your theoretical audience -- and I think the audience is also becoming more and more theoretical -- can use your recommendations as a practical consideration in whether or not to see a movie. And you're making some decisions that might disrupt other areas of your life, such as time with family and friends. Last night I was going to go see If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, which came out on Thursday, which means I really want to review it this week before it becomes totally old hat. When my wife heard that was the movie I was going to see, she asked if I could wait until the weekend so she could see it with me. I didn't want to, from a reviewing standpoint, though fortunately, my commitment to my wife won out over my commitment to my work, and I went to see The Running Man instead.
Sorry, this is becoming a bit stream of conscious. I'll get to my point.
There is one big reason I don't stop. Let's set aside the small reasons, like the fact that I'd have to start paying for movies again. The big reason is:
1) If I stop being a critic now, I will never be a critic again.
I believe this is true even though it is technically not 100% true. I could worm my way back into something in the future, not likely an actual publication with a history or consistent readership, but my own equivalent of the site I currently run. Heck, by writing this blog I am still technically using the same muscles involved in film criticism.
The scary thing is: Maybe I don't care if I'm not a critic anymore.
Maybe. I haven't fully worked that one out yet.
If I think I'm having an existential crisis now, just imagine what it will be once I'm actually not doing the thing that gives me some sense of the validity of that existence. Professionally speaking of course.
As I've gotten this far into this piece, it occurs to me that I've written pieces like this on this blog before. I think that was likely assumed in my opening, in which I talked about being contemplative "again."
And indeed, in looking back, I found this post just over three years ago, in which I shared many of these same sentiments. If you want to go there, you can see how similar it is. I'm not checking it now.
There's a difference this time, and maybe a similar optimistic ending, but we have to get a bit darker first.
On a walk this morning, I listened to the bonus segment of a recent Slate Culture Gabfest, the segment that is only available to subscribers, of which I am one. They were talking about a New York Times article about the death of criticism, broadly, which used the widely publicized elimination of a number of key critics jobs -- including the one held by Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune, which left that paper without a film critic -- as its jumping off point.
The four podcast panelists came around to end on sort of a high note, as I think you are often compelled to do in such a discussion. You can't leave your audience on a note of pure doom and gloom as it is just too depressing. But before that they each said "Yes this sucks, and I don't know if there is anything that can be done about it." The media paradigm is just changing too much. They know where all the clicks are, and they just aren't on movie reviews. Or other types of review, of course, but the panel's movie bias put the focus there.
They also, though, mentioned the efforts of the secret intellectuals who kept alive Greek philosophy in medieval Christian Europe, when there was every bit the chance that the prevailing forces would snuff it out. Those people were heroes, we can appreciate that now.
There is obviously not a direct correlation with film criticism. Ten years from now, films may not even look like they do today, let alone criticism bearing any resemblance to the current form of criticism. Though I suppose it will bear some resemblance, considering that criticism is already on its way out.
The thing is, people like me -- struggling to decide whether it is even financially worthwhile to keep running a website -- can be the sorts of people who stand in the way of what the prevailing forces are trying to accomplish. Simply by not removing myself from the landscape, I allow that landscape to continue existing, in the same way that every vote counts in an election, and every movie ticket sold is an endorsement to keep making that movie.
I think of it as similar to my most beloved of cinematic entities, the single-screen cinema. I'm sure I've told you it is my dream to run a single-screen cinema in some semi-remote town, just far enough away from the multiplexes to serve the local population usefully, but not so far away that I myself can never get to those multiplexes.
No one makes money on those cinemas. They are financial losers, pure and simple. You can't sell popcorn for a high enough price to recoup the costs of licensing films, paying your staff, keeping the lights on. Which is why only people who are already rich usually run them, as a labor of love.
If it were only about the financial, they wouldn't do it. But it's about something more than that. It's about the romantic notion of single-screen cinemas continuing to exist in the world, so we can show the young people what their history looked like, and so we can continue to live that history ourselves.
And I think there is a romantic notion to criticism itself that must be preserved. No, it may not be entirely consistent with the modern marketplace for people to come looking for a particular critic to tell them whether they should see a movie or not. But criticism is also a place where intellectual discussions are hosted, either actual discussion (through a comments section) or implied discussion in the form of the debate a reader silently has with the person they're reading.
And surely there will someday come a time when even the notion of an intellectual discussion is outdated, a reality that AI may be hastening. But I'm not so cynical as to think that day is close.
And movies? There are a shit ton of them. Every time I think this industry might be truly contracting, I then look at my Letterboxd watchlist and am overwhelmed by how many movies from the current year are still out there that I haven't seen, that I want to see before the end of the year.
While there are still movies, there should still be critics, and to the extent that I play any small role in that being true, I will continue to do it.
For now ...
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