'Time' Film Critic Has Never Met Any Critics
Richard Schickel, who's been the Time film critic since before most of us here were born, is also kind of a muttonhead! He went postal in Sunday's LA Times on the op-ed pages and denounced the (largely imagined) rise of amateur critics, and worse, the bloggers. Eek!
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.
Schickel isn't really writing about the imagined rise of the blogger-critic; he's talking about the horrors of the uneducated folk writing criticism. He's also about 30 years late.
A poet named Peter Schjeldahl got his start as an art critic writing, largely about emerging artists in the East Village; now he's, unfortunately, saddled with only covering The Big Shows for the New Yorker. In 1968, the New York Times appointed an inexperienced cultural journalist named Renata Adler as a film critic. Today we have Frank Bruni, who came to the New York Times restaurant critic post by way of covering Bush and Rome, after a long-ago stint as a young film critic in (shudder) Detroit.
We could go on. A great number of the critics of our time have no experience in their fields of which to speak apart from an Ivy League degree followed by some newspapering experience and then the years that they have performed their duties as critics for pay. Which is to say; they're all enthusiasts with experience and a copy desk—and are only one step up from bloggers in that they don't have a day job. Except for the ones that actually are forced by their papers to blog. Heh.
And what does Schickel's great education and decades of learning bring to the world of criticism? At Time, he and Richard Corliss put together a list of their top ten movies of 2006. That list put "Letters from Iwo Jima" and "Borat" at the top and rounded the list off with "United 93" and "The Queen." Any domesticated animal could have put together that list, except it wouldn't have included "Cars." Or "United 93."
Anyhoo. Schickel's horror at the "new, more democratic literary landscape where anyone can comment on books" is for starters a bogeyman and is for seconders insane. For one thing, Motoko Rich's piece on the subject didn't mean that "anyone" was going to be made a book critic at a newspaper. For another, it's not the people who like and who actually read books and then blog about books who are killing newspaper book reviews. More likely, they're the only ones still reading them.
