Not too long ago, I posted a screed covering my ongoing disdain and distaste for the culture of overpraise, where so many minds are blown by so much of the mediocre, where every theatrical performance rates a standing ovation, where every actor appearing in everything is a star, and where, I suspect, for all too many out there, great sex is defined by, you know, just showing up.
This aspect of modern life derives, to my mind, to a certain extent, from the participation trophy system, and of course the world of “likes.” But there’s also a responsibility owed to that misunderstanding and further misrepresentation of “best” for “favorite,” not to mention all that completely justified insecurity and uncertainness of opinions of those expressing those acclimations, with all those blown minds and all.
There’s a lot to be said—and a lot is said, in this case—in regard to the hivemind’s mob need to share an enthusiasm, be it positive or negative. I embarrass myself when I fall into this hyperbolic secular evangelism, be it for a movie, television series, book, or food, to mention only a few of my rampant daily enthusiasms.
That said, I really do my level best to temper that enthusiasm by trying, and yes occasionally failing, to indicate a favorite, as opposed to a best. And yes, despite my anathema for such things, I know what Yoda says about trying, specifically, “Trying bullshit is.”
Trust me on this—I looked it up.
And then, of course, there’s the obverse. The worst. Or, as they say in Hollywood, “Not my favorite.”
No shit—that’s the absolute truth about how that aspect of the entertainment industry indicates loathing. Me, I prefer “I hate this,” and “I hope she/he/they dies tasting her/his/their own blood” in such a context. But that’s just me. And see, I can be pronoun forward, too.
Which brings me—at last, I know, I know—to the lede.
I read a lot of criticism, and have for an awfully long time. Not, to be clear, about me or my work. My feeling—I only have one left, but it’s a beauty—is too easily hurt. So I do what I can to remain neutral to the reactions of others to what I do. This goes for the positive as much as the negative, to be even clearer.
As I noted only this morning in an exchange, my self-deprecation, utterly appropriate for my more misbegotten work, is tempered by my confidence, bordering occasionally on outright and potentially insufferable arrogance, in regard to what I regard of my professional output as brilliant and worthy of actual positive attention.
I say this with no irony, by the way. Do with that what you will. What I do know is that whatever metric or standard is applied to the work in my chosen field, whatever I perceive as excellence in my work, to a profound extent, doesn’t mean shit to the proverbial tree.
And in that regard, all too often when I do see work that is revered by institutionalized enthusiasms, I am grateful to be the outlier I am. Sharing idol worship with frauds, hacks and mountebanks who know how to work a crowd is no place for a man with my limited patience and limitless disdain.
I learned to appreciate criticism from a mentor of mine, a mid-twentieth century comic book artist, now long dead, who remains the most evolved autodidact I have ever known, a man who could speak ill of his own material with as much objectivity as he brought to an occasionally—okay, all right, yes, frequent, for fuck’s sake—sneering dissection of others.
One of my fondest memories of my time working for him as his gofer and apprentice is his glib, and to be sure completely right on the money dismissal, of my late teenaged tastes in comic book talent. I learned to look with suspicion at my own enthusiasms with a newly jaundiced eye that day, and have done so ever since.
This distinctly complex and contradictory man taught me, by both example and insistence, to look deeper, to read deeper, in everything. His flaw in this regard was an inability, from my perspective, to embrace what Gilbert Seldes pointed at in THE SEVEN LIVELY ARTS, or Robert Warshow’s observations in THE IMMEDIATE EXPERIENCE, or what Manny Farber brought to bear in NEGATIVE SPACE…to whit, that there is value, often hidden but genuine potential value nonetheless, in what have been long regarded as the lower popular arts.
From the Blues, to Doo Wop, to comic books, to pulp crime fiction and films noir, to B westerns, to old Jewish comedians, among so much more, we can always find someone of intellectual probity and cultural respectability enamored with such stuff, sometimes ironically, of course, but just as often unconditionally. And anyway, who’s to say those two perspectives are necessarily mutually exclusive, yes?
I suspect this was the explanation for why such a thoughtful man, who spoke with such shrewd precision about his own work and the work of others, and could write so eloquently in essay in both regards, couldn’t write a comic book script to save his fucking life.
Turgid and prolix would be the best description of the results—which indicates to me that he’d lost the ability to read and intuit value in at least that singular popular art that fed him, beyond the visual hyperbolics that first engaged him and then informed—some might say strangled—much of his work in the most productive period of his creative life.
Perhaps I flatter myself, but I’d like to think I’ve moved on from an exclusively elitist perspective, and have managed to find value in what might be identified as the more common aspects of a creative life, without at the same time falling into the dangerous trough of relativism, a trench that informs so much of modern self-described criticism—while still holding on to just the right measure of a certain delightful and disdainful condescension.
I like a lot. I dislike a lot, too. My thoughts in this regard are entirely subjective, and only possessed of value by me first, and by you if you care at all about what I think, and for that matter why, second. I have no illusions about the application of an imprimatur of quality, or value, on anything I profess to admire, nor the kiss of death for that which I despise.
All this notwithstanding, I tend to mostly post recommendations for what I dig, as opposed to trolling what I don’t—with the occasional cruel exception, of course.
Despite my uninterest, I stayed with that one show which apparently blew so many minds until the very end, a super show that bored me to tears in its obviousness, its overacting, its shallow and leaden passes at parody, solely because my editor, who I deeply respect, promised a comic overview as well as a joke at its conclusion.
I have to admit I remember neither the show’s conclusion nor the joke. So much for nine hours of my rapidly vanishing life lost to this nonsense.
I gave up after three episodes of another one of those space bound mind blowers when I realized I was asked to be entertained by what seemed to me to be on a par with the modern-day narrative equivalent of SKY KING.
And when, on another of those beloved manifestations of fan service, that bank denied that world famous, world saving superhero a loan because, you know, RACISM!! I shook my head, muttered “Oh, please…” and slipped away quietly into the night.
I mean, for fuck’s sake, I even gave that reboot of the beard show a shot, and boy, was that a generous error in judgment, even before they fired the allegedly rapacious Chris Noth, believe you me.
And yes, it bears mentioning that, in the name of full disclosure of my contempt prior to investigation, I have also done reviews of movies I’ve never seen, and will never see, because, to paraphrase someone who dismissed my work with “I don’t have to read it to know it’s bad,” sometimes, in my case based on prior experience, you just don’t have to go back to the well one more time to be reminded the water is still stagnating.
See above in regard to occasionally cruel comedy at the expense of others and their tastes.
So yes, to somewhat contradict my statement above, I have occasionally been made aware of what the world thinks of me, critically speaking, thanks, in large part, to my editor, who will mostly filter out the more appalling observations in an attempt to protect that last lone feeling I mentioned above, but will also now and then insist I be hipped to some jive in particular for whatever reason he deems important or appropriate.
One of those assaults on my career and good name used the word “Shouldn’t” in it headline—specifically, indicating something I had produced which, from this person’s perspective, I should not have done.
This, in this particular case, was not criticism in any literary sense, but performative ideology using the presentation of criticism as a beard, like that cable show mentioned above, with what used to be four women and now has three, to sell an idea and manifest a point of view bearing little or no resemblance to observed, let alone lived, experience.
This was brought to mind recently when I read a review of a novel I’m currently reading, and another review I’d been directed to of a piece of nonfiction I’d praised in a post. In each case, the writers of the reviews took the authors of the two books in question to task, for what boils down to not writing the book they themselves would have written, given the chance. Thus, “shouldn’t.”
This isn’t new, of course. I was reminded of a slew of stern, sad and finger wagging criticism of the all too eminently criticism worthy Christopher Nolan’s picture, DUNKIRK, for being so White and male in its character presentation, pigmentation and orientation.
The comical contradiction of complaining about not depicting non-White people involved in a conflict between two nations which put the White in White supremacy, a conflict maintained by a majority of White masculine cannon fodder to be sure and specific, is only compounded by what seems to be universal delight on the part of a huge viewing audience—some, I suspect, simultaneously objecting to all that cinematic White masculine cannon fodder, as an example—for movies and television shows featuring casts including women and non-White people, playing characters acting with agency, independence and authority over White people, men in particular, in fantasias presenting themselves as historical dramas, depicting 18th, 19th and 20th century Europe and the USA.
You know, back in the days when White supremacy was, as noted, having its millennia plus extended peak moment. Irony, indeed.
Besides all those above referenced blown minds, there are clearly a lot of folks out there who embrace being pandered to with a divinely evangelical gusto, whether through creeping self-flaggelant guilt at their culturally identified, implied and imposed “privilege,” or a desperate need for ethnic identification in a dramatic oeuvre that has demeaned for so long that a boomerang effect is the only recourse.
As a not particularly nice Jewish boy I can certainly imagine such a sensibility, such a need for affirmation. But face it—I know when I’m being played. My people have spent most of recorded history as the butt of a long cruel joke, so I’m not available to seeing Jews fictionally performing with the social agency granted solely to White Christians in the real world, in any of those ahistoricals. That said, there’s a whole lot of patronizing going on, manipulating an audience apparently just dying to be bullshitted into a comfort zone.
This objection to, you know, objective reality, like the judgment passed on those two books I mention above, isn’t criticism of the material in any traditional sense, of its execution per se, but rather a judgment filtered through an ideological scrim, a gatekeeping filter demanding of the material at hand a responsibility to an often random and to be honest frequently shifting aspect of cultural metrics to which it actually owes, you should pardon the literary expression, jack shit.
Add to this the dismayingly exponential metastasizing number of increasingly infantilized adults, grown men and women, incapable of enjoying entertainment with no one to root for, in which justice doesn’t triumph, in which good doesn’t conquer evil.
These people have been so conditioned to believe in “Truth, Justice and the American Way”—excuse me, “…A Better Tomorrow—” that their idea and identification of excellence is rarely more than a satisfying cheating on reality, as opposed to an observation and understanding of execution.
Meanwhile, in my little chickenshit soon to be forgotten corner of the entertainment industrial complex, there’s an entire group of men, a modern day He Man Woman Haters Club, who have alienated themselves from mainstream comics via their objections to the diversification of characterization in comics, comically complaining about the presentation of queer and trans characters in a medium that has been a hotbed of barely concealed homoeroticism since Superman started wearing his underwear outside his pants. Or rather, tights.
And let’s face it. Wertham was fucked up on a lot of things, but he nailed Batman and Robin.
Not to let anyone off the hook, mind, because much of that comic book character diversification is as baldly patronizing, opportunistic and pandering as a desperate candidate overdoing it on the (fill in the ethnic food of choice) to get the (fill in the ethnic group of choice) vote. And in that regard, at least those voters know bullshit when they see it eating.
Those comic book readers remain so easily flattered by the desperate need on the part of comic book publishers to be perceived as, you should pardon the expression because I gather it’s been devolved by right wing misuse into a pejorative, “woke,” that I almost regret my innate contempt for those bold and buccaneering cynical opportunists building their brands on the backs of this pack of such easily manipulated and needy shmucks.
There’s gold in such fatuous credulity—to be mined on both easily cat’s pawed sides of the identitarian moat. And to be clear, it’s not really any higher moral acuity that makes it impossible for me to bring my game to this crass exploitation of dipshits. Rather, it’s my inability to keep a straight face in the face of such stealing candy from a baby level larceny.
Jack Warner said, famously for me, I can’t presume about you, that writers were “Shmucks with Underwoods.”
(Underwood was a brand of typewriter. A device that preceded your keyboard, your tablet, your phone. I regret that those of you who are perfectly aware of what an Underwood typewriter was have to read this, and the condescension with which this reads, even to me, but hard lessons have been taught and learned about historical incuriosity and its concomitant cultural amnesia. As ever, trust me on this.)
Although I certainly don’t share the long dead Jack Warner’s feelings about writers, I do see how he might have resented the fact that, from many points of view, simply possessing a delivery system was reason enough for that claque to deliver, come what might.
Imagine how that apparently miserable excuse for a human being—who, in his favor, ran a company that made some of the best movies ever for well over a half century, admittedly, often, despite himself—would react as those shmucks, now exponentially multiplied to include a Visigoth horde of the breathlessly and willfully ignorant, now equipped with the ability to not merely deliver but to promulgate, to publish, to produce on a scale that would have dropped him dead in his Polo pony’s tracks.
From Amazon reviews, to Rotten Tomatoes, to the generalized zero sum flattening of thumbs up/thumbs down, we are surfeited daily with objections, all too often ideologically inspired, passing themselves off as informed criticism. Bereft of any interest in complexity, in nuance, too much of modern criticism is little more than a delivery system for an agenda, whether that agenda has fuck all to do with what is being discussed or not.
The old joke, which, in our world of narcissistic sensitivity and uncharitable cruelty has to offend somebody these days, is that opinions are like assholes—everybody’s got one.
And of course, every asshole’s got an opinion.
Even, I daresay, me.
As ever, I remain,
Howard Victor Chaykin…a Prince…but don’t let that fool you.
