A Parasitic Profession

I think that fundamentally the critic and the director are enemies--and that's the way it's supposed to be. They each have an important job to do, but they can do it best with absolutely no contact between them. Joseph Strick   (director of The Balcony, Ulysses, and The Tropic of Cancer)

Joseph Strick makes it a point not to read criticism written about his movies. It's hard to really fault him for it though; for even a cursory sampling of film criticism written in the U.S. today reveals the extent of polarization between critics and artists. Strick is simply recognizing, to borrow a well-worn academic concept, that there is little or no "constructive" criticism being written. Why should a director read his critics, unless he's hoping for an ego boost? There's nothing to be learned.

Most of the film criticism that I have seen in the last decade serves two principle functions: to make for entertaining reading, and to present the critic's personal judgment on the film in question. (Some would argue another, more important function: to provide publicity, and thereby perpetuate the current system of economics, distribution, and exhibition--but in this I believe the critic to be an unwitting if not unwilling accomplice.) "Entertaining reading" usually translates on the page as to how "witty"--or "cutting"--the critic can be. "Personal judgement" usually reduces to a matter of taste--with painfully little by way of reasoning or specific evidence.

A pretty good case can be made that these two functions--entertaining reading and personal judgment--are all we really have a right to expect from a critic; that no one buys a publication just to read the film page anyway; and that after you compare your own taste to that of a particular critic, you can usually predict whether you'll like the film in question. Many readers operate that way, indeed, have no choice but to operate that way. Judith Crist hated it, so it's either a bomb or very intellectual; Stanley Kaufman liked it, so it's probably a bore. Andrew Sarris hedged, so it might be a masterpiece. And on it goes.

For me, however, the extent that film criticism is limited to these functions is the extent to which I loathe the profession. Being a critic is embarrassing enough to start out with. The very term "critic" has a negative connotation: One of the definitions in my Webster's reads "a person who indulges in faultfinding and censure." Is that what we do? Indulge in faultfinding and censure? The artist bats his brains out for months or even years to come up with one small work, and the critic sits down and bangs out his review in one night. If there were no artists, there would be no critics--it's a parasitic profession. I'm reminded of those small satellite fish which travel along with a shark or whale, feeding on the scraps of food left behind. Blustering with self-importance, the critic feeds on the scraps of giants, regurgitating on cue an article for publication.

To use less dramatic imagery, the point is that most critics I know--all too often myself included--simply lose sight of, or lack the perspective to see themselves in relation to, the craft they purport to criticize, and the artists who make that craft come alive. That's not to say that all works succeed as art (or are even intended as art), or that all filmmakers are good artists--but to limit ourselves to making entertaining copy or personal judgments is to do a disservice to art, to the intellect, and to ourselves. It's not that anything is necessarily wrong with being entertaining and opinionated--only when that's all there is in the review.

In the quest for entertaining copy, the critic all too often falls into what I call the "Time Magazine Syndrome:" the witty dig, the cutting remark, the clever put-down. It usually takes the form of word-play--perhaps a pun on the film's title, or on an actor's name. Sometimes the put-downs are more involved, bringing in associations from previous films, or the personal lives of the people who made the film, or aspects of the film itself. The one thing that all forms of this syndrome have in common is that the put-down is gratuitous, and irrelevant to a consideration of the film's content. These are so formulaic, they could almost be filed and used over and over, simply rotating the names of who or what is being put down. To quote from the master, Time wrote that Zabriskie Point was the lowest elevation in the U.S., and that the film Zabriskie Point occupied a similar location in Antonioni's career; or that in the gangland 1920s, pineapple was a euphemism for bomb, which applies to the pineapple epic The Hawaiians. I can recall one of mine (which I'm not at all proud of): I wrote that The April Fools was surely meant to be seen on April 1. And on it goes.

Every critic seems, at some point, to be influenced by this syndrome; at their best, the put-downs are clever and amusing--at their worst, crass and tasteless. But what's always offensive about the syndrome is that it is antithetical to any exchange of ideas. It's much easier to come up with a put-down than with solid reasoning explaining why a critic disagreed with or disliked a film.

A put-down is a way of shutting off discussion, not encouraging it. That's true in discourse, and it's also true in reviewing. The advantage derived from a well-written put-down--a moment's entertainment--simply isn't worth the damage to the process of communication.

In the old days, when films were called movies, newspapers and magazines generally assigned reporters to do the reviewing. A movie was an event, like any other, and the same principles of journalism applied here. Therefore, first and foremost, the reviewer gave a plot summary, often in great detail; he listed the players, and, as it were, "reported" the general mood or impact that the experience of seeing the film was likely to convey.

Sometimes, I feel I'd almost prefer that system again (as a reader). What happened to it, of course, was that the pendulum swung the other way both in connection with attitudes toward the medium (movies began to be called films), and attitudes toward journalism. The rationale for the latter was very simple: Since reviewing cannot help but be in very large measure a matter of personal taste anyway, why not drop the facade of objective reporting, and let the reviewer display his personality?

As this trend developed, it became fashionable to scorn the critic who still believed in "give 'em the plot" as a reasonable basis for the review. Certainly, if the review is nothing but a plot summary, there is little to recommend it; but I think it's a mistake to categorically avoid detailing aspects of the plot as a general principle. For one thing, the reader, regardless of whether or not he has seen the film, has much more difficulty in knowing what the critic is talking about if the critic refuses to be specific. But perhaps more serious, the deliberate omission of plot elements is the first step towards omitting any corroborating detail, those specific facts within the film which substantiate the critic's interpretation. To those who argue that plot is irrelevant, that image and technique are what count, I answer that contemporary film is still primarily a narrative medium, and a medium which relies significantly on language. There is no literary criticism I know of which does not consider plot--or more appropriately--the events which constitute the work.

Frankly, I would be happiest as a critic if all films were great works, so that I could spend my time explicating and analyzing rather than evaluating. But since evaluation is an inevitable part of the job, it seems worthwhile to try to articulate some of the problems involved.

Evaluation, of course, is a matter of taste, and everyone's taste runs differently. Different plotlines, settings, actors, genres, etc., immediately start off with associations for the reviewer, associations which may or may not be favorable, and which cannot help but precondition the reviewer to have certain expectations. Confronted with this state of psychic anarchy, the reviewer essentially has two options. He can accept his preconditioning as a given, and simply write down his reactions as they occur, leaving it to the reader to determine the extent to which the reviewer's tastes overlap with the reader's own. The other option is to attempt to make an objective appraisal of the film in the film's own terms, either omitting, or specifically identifying the critic's personal prejudices.

The latter is a difficult if not impossible course, but it is the one that appeals to me, for a number of reasons. The first approach is the more personal one, and as such, seems to tend to cut off dialogue or constructive discussion of the work in question. After all has been said about the critic's reactions, what remains is basically the question of why the critic is the way he is--not the question of why the film is doing what it does. In other words, the personal approach to criticism almost by definition involves a personal language and aesthetics system--but if there is to be dialogue between artist and critic or between reader and critic a common language must be found. The other approach, by attempting to deal with a film in its own terms, minimizes the critic's own personality precisely in order that he may find the common language with the filmmaker and viewer-reader: the language of the film itself.

For me, then, evaluating a film involves the questions "what does the film want to do, what is it trying to do?" and subsequently, "how well does it succeed in doing what it sets out to do?" Beyond these considerations--whether I agree or approve of the film's motives, or even whether I believe in the sincerity of those motives--is another question, either to be dealt with separately in the review or not at all.

The reason why I call this approach difficult if not impossible is because there is a very real question as to whether there is any such thing as "an objective appraisal of the film in the film's own terms." The very process of articulating what the film's own terms are involves a decision-making process, a selective sensitivity which is unique to every individual. Thus, one can make a persuasive argument that such an approach simply cannot work, and that critics who take this approach are doomed to uncertainty as to whether they truly have been objective.

Nevertheless, I believe it worth both the effort and the uncertainly to try to approach criticism in this way. For then, when a critic makes a personal judgment, there is some hope that the critic tried to see it the filmmaker's way, and that the critic tried to be as fair as possible about it.

The personal approach starts out with the critic's own personality, and the film is seen in relation to it; the objective approach attempts to start out with the film itself, difficult as that may be. But if more critics tried the latter, Joseph Strick might begin reading reviews again. And perhaps some meaningful dialogue between artists and critics and the public could ensue, for the betterment of art in general.

Emanuel Gold, formerly the film critic for The Boston Phoenix and the Boston Review of the Arts, is now the review editor for Fiction Magazine. He is also a student at the Harvard Medical School.