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May 22, 2007
I was going to comment on Swedish director Lukas Moodysson's Lilya 4-ever (2002), which I watched on DVD before flying to Canberra. This desolate film about sexual slavery and spatial representation (bleak landscapes) explores the white slave trade from Estonia to Sweden, as seen from the perspective of a vulnerable girl forced into prostitution, and then trapped trapped in an economy of sex.
Then I came across Richard Schickel, a full time professional film critic and book reviewer for Time magazine, op-ed on bloggers writing film reviews in Not everybody’s a critic in the Los Angeles Times. I was taken back by what I read, given this background. I was taken back because the man goes bezerk.
Schickel states his dislike of blogger critics openly and forthrightly, and it reads like a declaration of war:
Let me put this bluntly, in language even a busy blogger can understand: Criticism — and its humble cousin, reviewing — is not a democratic activity. It is, or should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken by individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions of a book (or any other cultural object). It is work that requires disciplined taste, historical and theoretical knowledge and a fairly deep sense of the author's (or filmmaker's or painter's) entire body of work, among other qualities.
Opinion — thumbs up, thumbs down — is the least important aspect of reviewing. Very often, in the best reviews, opinion is conveyed without a judgmental word being spoken, because the review's highest business is to initiate intelligent dialogue about the work in question, beginning a discussion that, in some cases, will persist down the years, even down the centuries.
Though Schickel doesn't think it's impossible for bloggers to write intelligent reviews, his comparison of bloggers with George Orwell and Edmund Wilson indicates otherwise. Blogging is a form of speech, not of writing.
Schickel, who represents a position of 'recognition' and 'authority' in an established magazine, holds that the work of reviewers is something more than idle opinion-mongering... something other than flash, egotism and self-importance:
We need to see their credentials. And they need to prove, not merely assert, their right to an opinion. Otherwise it is mere mere yammering and cocktail-party chat. A purely "democratic literary landscape" is truly a wasteland, without standards, without maps, without oases of intelligence or delight.
The inference is that logically reasoned discourse that invites serious engagement is not to be found in the blogosphere, as blogs, which are a method of publicly expressing oneself, are mired in prejudice and stupidity. Since writing critically is an “elite enterprise,” we bloggers need to show our credentials to be taken seriously. Show our credentials to whom, though? Who does the credentialing?
A 'logically reasoned discourse that invites serious engagement' is not be found in Schickel's opinion piece either. Nor do we find this reasoned discourse in newspaper reviews of films-- pure Hollywood product for the most part-- or the film shows on television. That's entertainment. Or in Time magazine, which has gone down market. Doesn't this indicate a modern debasement of everything we find culturally significant by the culture industry, and its mass consumption reviewers whose opinions are as tasteless and insubstantial as fast food?
Schickel 's response is to talk about what reviewing ought to be. That is where Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Edmund Wilson and George Orwell appear. They wrote against deadlines and under economic pressure, without succumbing to the temptation of merely popping off or showing off. That's the ideal.
Where then do we find today's logically reasoned discourse that invites serious engagement, given the digital reinvention of the cinema, numerous alternative delivery systems and conventional film production in the process of becoming a thing of the past, a museum format?
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