Discourteous Discourse

Prediction: It might take five years before most people see The Social Network for what it really is. That’s about how long it will take to flush it through the media system, thus allowing viewers to respond without interference. The same holds for the education documentary Waiting for “Superman” which clutters the same ground already covered more incisively by The Lottery, a documentary the mainstream media practically ignored. The difference is that Waiting for “Superman” has a bigger promotional budget and the surfeit of liberal guilt appeals to media sanctimony.

All this distortion owes to what’s been called film culture’s “democratization,” a misleading term for how the expansion of film discussion beyond journalism’s art pages and all over the Internet has weakened our cultural foundation and decentered aesthetic and political authority.

As uncredentialed experts multiply and flounder, we’re all victimized by hype.

Or, as film critic Molly Haskell astutely observed: “The Internet is democracy’s revenge on democracy.” Nothing proves that better than all the hype for The Social Network (see [my review of the film here](/article-21676-creeps-as-heroes.html)), which enshrines Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s anti-social behavior without understanding how his neuroses set the agenda for Internet bullying and film culture chaos.

Consider how film criticism now works: Publicists select favorable media outlets to create advance buzz (embargoing others) and then, with frat-boy mentality in effect, no one else in cyberspace dares dissent from the hype. Ironically, The Social Network locates the origin for this unprincipled practice in Zuckerberg’s misconduct. To praise this movie is to praise the whole rotten system.

As Chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle (which is now in its 76th year), I proudly pledged to defend “the dignity of criticism” as specified in the organization’s original charter, but it couldn’t have happened at a more difficult time. This summer’s most alarming movie event was watching the critical profession get drowned out by trendy aggregate websites.

Reviews of blockbuster films Toy Story 3 and Inception by established professional film critics ([myself particularly](/article-21357-bored-game.html)) received a record number of largely intemperate posts on the RottenTomatoes site, which then expanded into wholesale Internet attacks by agitated fanboys and upstart blogs. A new model of cultural response is taking over: criticism of criticism—and critics—as a pointless, snaky substitute for examining films themselves.

Support for this sea change is apparent in the way mainstream publications—Wall Street Journal, Time magazine, Washington Post, USA Today—covered the RT melee as either amusement or as a legitimate new form of discourse. At one point, over three million Google results offered links to the ad hominem ferocity which suggests that group-think and mob-mentality happens beyond the Internet’s lunatic fringe. This ignorant viciousness threatens to become the standard. If so, the era of erudite criticism we once knew is finished.

Attacks from bloggers—crude interlopers of a once august profession— are not about diversity of opinion. What’s at root is an undisguised rivalry. Every moviegoer with a laptop claims equal—vengeful—standing with so-called professionals. This anti-intellectual backlash defies the purpose of the Circle’s founding in 1935. Professional dignity is the last thing Internetters respect. Their loudmouth enmity and lack of knowledge are so overwhelming that it is imperative to put this crisis in perspective.

These new social networks overturn the informed judgments and occupational decorum of journalist-critics, substituting the glib enthusiasms and non-discriminating devotion of apparently juvenile cliques. Worse yet, this schoolyard style of peer group fanaticism has devolved into all-out, ugly intimidation: Internet bullying. It has begun to sway the professional ranks already frightened by media transitions that have cost many of my colleagues their jobs.

The most important concern exceeds the critical profession; it’s the danger these changes pose to the culture in general. Ridiculing the need for mature thought and discriminating judgment diminishes film culture. Any opinion that challenges the blockbuster market gets punished. We never experience a healthy exchange of ideas. The social networking approach to criticism encourages anti-intellectual harassment and the excoriation of individual response; it may spell the end of critical habits altogether.

When was the last time you had a good conversation about a movie? Not watercooler chat about box-office scores, but a discussion dissecting what a movie says, means or how it relates to your life? Every weekend, box-office reports bring the bad news that the public is being discouraged from talking about what any of the hits or flops actually are about. When the largest number of posts on a single topic in the history of aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes appeared, stemming from [my review of Toy Story 3](/article-21357-bored-game.html), points made in my critique of the movie were ignored in favor of the site’s arbitrary percentage-point system. The wild, hostile response was so extreme it became news in itself, but not the film’s style, aesthetics or content, not even the nastiness and racism bloggers unleashed.

What has not received widespread attention is the total disregard for interpreting or understanding a film. Useless clamor distracts from the fact that the decline of intelligence regarding popular culture has become routine; fanboy enthusiasm has replaced reflection. Musician Neil Young first noted this problem in the 2004 song lyric “No one could explain it/ It just got great reviews.”

Consider the illiterate belief in “spoilers” that now restricts critical discussion: Fear of “spoilers” nullifies any attempt at detailed interpretation or explanation of a film. It forestalls the tendency to analyze meaning and content that used to be a tenet of liberalarts education. Somehow the critical practice of analysis, reflection and comparison has not dawned on today’s consumers or taught them the merits of a reasoned response. In the blockbuster era, criticism has wound up in a disrespected place where it no longer addresses audience’s needs for enlightenment and excellence. Criticism has lost its educative function and the culture loses its moral foundation.

In 2008, [The Dark Knight’s Internet minions](/article-18545-knight-to-remember.html) gave the first sign that there was a disgruntled cyberspace underground. Now their asperity rules discourse. This generation has never been affected by lively, impassioned, informed criticism, only by Hollywood hype, which guides their naive habit of buying and buying movies. And job-panicky critics have helped this dumbing-down by going along, responding to movies like thrill-hungry teenagers, colluding with commercialism. They are allied with blockbusters that, by the very impersonal nature of blockbusters, leave fanboys feeling anomic, running to the Internet, screaming for attention. Ignorant of their own minds, they throw brickbats and bad names at any professional opinion that brings attention to their own susceptibility.

The Internet’s querulous, sarcastic backtalk should not be mistaken for intellectual debate; it’s schoolyard bickering, enmity from an otherwise voiceless mob unable to synthesize opposing points of view. What’s missing from the Internet hordes’ meanspirited griping is the learned skepticism, detachment and rationalization that are essential to intelligent cultural consumption and maintaining individual taste and choice. The late Pauline Kael’s warning, “Criticism is the only thing that stands between the audience and advertising,” has gone unheeded thanks to the newly empowered nonprofessional bloggers. Now, moviewatchers—including some scared reviewers—have lost faith in journalistic criticism as a trustworthy source of information or judgment.

In giving up, they merely rubber-stamp the summertime notion that criticism is meant to only promote movies. But criticism should be an act of reasoning that prepares us to reason through life. The Internet’s free-for-all and anonymity fosters gullibility and incivility even among those who consider themselves film-lovers. And when film discourse becomes discourteous, mindlessness take its revenge on reason. This critic’s nightmare is a movie huckster’s dream. It demeans us all.