This is the year that print film criticism went on life support, online film critics drafted sober eulogies and the rest of the world yawned distractedly while poised over the plug. Into the ill-attended open grave my colleague Lauren Wissot just tossed a meditation on film culture titled, “The Movie-Going Public.”
I dig it because it dares to take filmgoers as seriously as it does cinema itself. Further, it manages, mostly by way of example, to pee all over the very notion of a professional film critic. I use don’t use the term “pee” lightly but with great care, thinking of readers like Anonymous, who responded to Lauren’s post with, “You’re not an elitist. But you are crass, vulgar and unprofessional… Manny Farber is rolling in his grave.” I want Anonymous, if he or she is reading this, to imagine Mr. Farber howling in pain from the beyond at my using such a crude bathroom word as “pee” in reference to the profession he devoted his life to. But another dead 20th Century critic is probably grinning in his grave. James Agee: “I suspect I am, far more than not, in your own situation: deeply interested in moving pictures, considerably experienced from childhood on in watching them and thinking and talking about them, and totally, or almost totally without experience or even much second-hand knowledge of how they are made. It is my business to conduct one end of a conversation, as an amateur critic among amateur critics. And I will be of use and of interest only in so far as my amateur judgment is sound, stimulating,
or illuminating.” (Props to Ryland Walker Knight.)
This here’s a meritocracy, in other words. In Farber’s and Agee’s day, when middle aged white men in bow ties manned the helm at the big city arts pages, Agee’s “amateur critic” demurral was like a feudal lord calling out to the serfs, “I’m with ya, brother!” Nowadays, despite its enduring status as “that most bourgeois profession” (to quote Armond White’s recent review of a David Lean retro, film criticism is now anybody’s game, an unruly mob rather than a collegial/catty private club. Good.
Okay, back to Lauren’s main subject: the audience. Lord, how I miss the Cineplex Odeon Worldwide Theater on Manhattan’s Midtown West. It was a lovely second-run theater that, in the mid-to-late ’90s, showed movies for $3 a few months after their initial release. It was a beautiful experiment because arthouse, foreign, mainstream Ho’wood and indie films all screened there for the ridiculous sum of $3 per flick. Because of this Big Mac price, people would see whatever flick happened to be starting when they wandered in, and on any given afternoon, the place was packed with wanderers of every description: high schoolers, Wall Streeters, working stiffs, B-boys, bluebloods, film geeks, off-duty cops, cabbies, dopefiends.
I remember watching David Lynch’s Lost Highway with just such a mixed crowd, 200 people spellbound for over 120 minutes and later shrugging, cursing, arguing and giddily dream-analyzing the movie in the lobby. (”What the **** did we just watch?”) I remember a similar packed house taking in Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures. What a thrill to watch a group of rowdy homeboys simply silenced by that film’s elegantly tragic, sun-dappled final moments.
This is the moviegoing public. They are not all stupes or feebs and they don’t need any professionals telling them (us) what’s appropriate viewing for their respective castes. We, the crazies who still love to write about film, should focus on talking back to the filmmakers as audience members, not culture cops, in a dialogue as intimate and unashamed as pillow talk. Lay it all on the table. The only people who should be excluded from this discourse have already excluded themselves– the ones who think movies are just something to pass the time, petty distraction, kid’s stuff. The fucking professionals.
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