Winter In Review: Who Asked You, Anyway?
“In the dark times
Will there also be criticism?”
“Yes, there will also be criticism.
About the liberatory politics of Wicked.”
– @BertoltBrecht on Letterboxd, probably
Criticism is a touchy subject. Most people—except for other critics—don’t expressly ask for it. As a compulsively opinionated individual, I hold this to be an embodied truism. Unfortunately, the score my body keeps weighs heavily toward the visiting team. I’ve been, perhaps rightly, shouted down for arguing a line of influence between the laptop-poetics of early Lil B and the burnt-out digitalism of Kanye’s maximalist turn. Then again, I’ve also lovingly convinced more than one fellow poet that they were, in fact, writing in “The Iowa Writers’ Workshop Style,” and that I didn’t like it. No beer bottles thrown at my head! You never know, do you? One might advise I have a stronger determination of my audience before putting my reputation on the line, but I have a feeling I would still be doing this on a desert island, like Tom Hanks in Castaway, addressing the seabirds and volleyball.
Part of the critic’s anxiety—as well as the anxiety others feel as soon as the critic opens their mouth—must come from its relatively low barrier of entry. I don’t only have in mind publishing outfits like ours, The Cleveland Review of Books, that are dedicated to taking work from first-time critics: it’s also the fact that so many of us now are encouraged to become pocket-critics, armchair experts, purveyors of the comments section, analyzers of the Twitter thread, or persona-builders on apps like Substack and Letterboxd. Everyone has an opinion, nobody’s an expert, but everyone, with or without the credentials to back it up, comes to be judged on the basis of expertise. It’s hard not to think of the late, great Kevin Killian, whose Selected Amazon Reviews included a monumental assortment of the author’s singularly idiosyncratic evaluations of all sorts of commodified crap blended with diversions on sex, lies, the news, and discovery of the body’s orifices, all towed in the wake of the author’s unrelenting personal conviction. It’s also hard to not consider Tara Cheesman’s touchingly utopian dream of Killian, from her review of the book:
I like to imagine him gleefully typing, manipulating the Amazon review forums into something that had little to do with the consumerism they had been created to support: Killian tagging a digital wall to remind everyone KEVIN WAS HERE.
Tara doesn’t mention this in her review, but this book is the consummate bathroom reader. The good, the bad, the utterly boring—Killian plunges into the depths of our shared encyclo-pocalyptic commodity hell with an optimism as sickeningly sweet as it is ardently demure. Yet despite the appreciation we have for Killian-esque hot takes, it seems that, culturally, hot-takes rarely culminate into any sort of organized aesthetic evaluation (see, for instance, the discourse around Sean Baker’s Anora). The multiplicity of opinion, as well as the immediate accessibility of the essays in which they’re housed, overwhelms us. Thus, we aren’t so much consumers of discourse, but stewards. And most often, it isn’t mere anxious detachment with which we react to our collective role, but frustration. Hostility, even. That is, we blame the culture (or cultures) that we, indubitably, comprise.
This reminds me of a phrase I’ve seen repeated ad-nauseum on social media. It’s always in reference to over-prescriptive analysis, and more than a little symptomatic of our continuing belief in a high-low cultural distinction: “At some point you sort of have to wonder what people actually want from movies.” Isn’t that the question? Personally, I want nothing else from a movie than for it to lead to more thinking. Our very own Bri Di Monda’s sprawlingly well-researched review of Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu achieves this continuance of thought. By holding up all the movie’s antecedents—the 1922 original, Interview with the Vampire, Buffy, Twilight—the true, historical, monstrosity of Egger’s Count Orlock is made clear. This director’s choice to de-sexy his antagonist confronts us with a reminder that “vampires were originally conceived as unholy corpses that refused to stay dead. Orlok is not darkly glamorous, and he invites no ambiguous attraction on the part of the viewer.” Maybe all I want from a movie—what any of us wants—is not only something to talk about, but something to talk to. Like the troubled Ellen’s dreams, criticism allows those specters of boredom, pleasure, or alarmed confusion the chance to overtake us, to speak, and with a little devilish training, speak through us.
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I’m teaching an undergraduate class on criticism this semester. By this I mean: I’m smuggling a class on film criticism under the moniker of “Rhetoric 101.” I love movies almost as much as I love books. At least, I’ve been thinking about movies longer. I’m unsure I will ever be able to truly extricate my own literary appreciation of Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” from the mouth in which I originally heard it yawped, that is, Robin Williams’mouth in The Dead Poets Society. I don’t write film criticism, but I’d be hard-pressed to admit a stronger influence on my critical spirit than Roger Ebert. “The Dead Poets Society,” he begins his review of the 1989 film, “is a collection of pious platitudes masquerading as a courageous stand in favor of something: be yourself, I think.” The grump of Champaign, and Saturday morning host to my television-addled adolescence, in fact, never shied from taking courageous critical stands. No graduate degree, not a single second behind a camera (except for a screenplay credit on the horned-up Beyond the Valley of the Dolls): Ebert was the people’s critic.
In order to help my students get into the headspace for criticism, it was necessary to introduce them to Ebert—the name on the back of all those VHS tapes which are, themselves, vestiges of their parents’ era, maybe even their grandparents’—and to disabuse them of the idea that there is any one overarching justification for criticism other than plain and simple love of the game. Every critic has their pet theory in response to “What is criticism for?,” but there’s always a point at which those theories swing back to the critic’s own burden of choice. For any critic—even the most sneeringly objective—exposition, analysis, and, ultimately, critique, all bubble up from their own particular brand of authority. I like how Emily Alexander describes this process, in her gorgeous review of Ayşegül Savaş’s The Anthropologists:
Life itself is flimsy and nebulous regardless of how carefully it may seem to follow a traditional trajectory; it is art that invents solidity, progression, beauty—art shapes, art names. In the world of the novel, Asya is drifting; in the novel I hold in my hands—in its readers, its sculpted arc, the translation of drifting into sentences about drifting—she becomes real.
For the young Terry Eagleton, criticism held the task of unmasking the distance between its object and the same (or relatively similar) determinate conditions that produced the critic writing it. I think this is where the love resides. As for the game? Surely it’s not just the market, but the shared existence we have with these objects, from which we draw the material necessary to speak about “our” world at all. As the therapist of Austin Araujo’s poem “My Condition” reminds us:
When you watch films,
you’ll remember
that all a person is
is an image.
“We have created this humongous archive,” that is, of knowledge, writes Yuri Herrera in conversation with Daisuke Shen, “and we don’t know what to do with it. This is not just a problem of how we deal with technology. It is a political problem.” In a way, what we want—from books, movies, the precariously piled stack of media that holds our knowledge—is to merely ask of it a few questions: Why did you say that? What did you mean? What the hell am I supposed to do with these thoughts? Herrera continues: “It is a problem for how we listen to each other, and when we are not going to listen, we are going to fight.” If listening means sound waves entering the ear canal and playing upon our drum, then criticism might be the way to amplify and extend those vibrations.
It’s the beat of history, perhaps, that Ancci articulates in the work of the Italian poet Antonella Anedda:
Anedda does not tag poetry merely as a salutation of historical and historic events of withering consequences, but rather commits her imaginative faculties to the paradoxical propensity of poetry as the salutation of history rooted in the notion that the best of times can be as productive of brute propensities as the worst.
And it’s the acknowledgement of a shared cultural history that Peter Huhne speaks of in regard to Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings. To Hollinghurt’s characters, and perhaps Hollinghurst himself, art was a form of survival, and a smuggling operation for queerness, “a form of paraphrase that served to contain otherwise unruly sexual energies.”
We have the ability to do so much with criticism, and I’m a little tired of our endless hand-wringing over its moral justifications. At the end of the day, reviewing Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman’s What Are Children For? doesn’t seem to bring its author, Sophia Stewart, one jot closer to any assurance that she’ll ever stop being asked about her own plans for parenthood, just as Jason Rogers’ review of Michel Houellebecq’s Annihilation doesn’t absolve, but intensifies, the often publicly shamed French author’s likeness to his less-than-likable protagonists. And the way Megan Jeanne Gette’s review of Eleni Stecopoulos’s Dreaming in the Fault Zone conforms its own diction to that of its object leaves the reader transmogrified, a little less healthy, and less inclined to judge its evaluatory merit than to proclaim along with it: “In the dream, what is chronic is closer to flattery of the object, poking at a dry well.” As chronic opiners, sycophants to the very morbidity of our culture, we can’t help—in the last instance—but to flatter our objects. Criticism is a way of adorning the grave of what can’t die because always already collectively we live it.
As for my students, well, they’re new to this—hesitant to have an opinion on anything, and pessimistic about the impact of those opinions in this age of techno-wipe: the online tide that, moment to moment, robs us of memory. I have the duty to teach not just the importance of their voices, but that the bounds and tears of our unevenly shared cultural environment are, themselves, shared. For my part, I’ve learned from my students that the best way to figure out what anyone wants from a movie—or, hell, anything—is to keep reading their work, draft by draft, essay to essay. A writer’s byline is an autobiography in media-philia, a cross-section of their bloody, beating smarts. We, the editors of CRB, are happy to facilitate an addition to that byline at any point in a critic’s career, whether you’re Bertolt Brecht or someone who just loves movies.