Today The House Next Door publishes its first piece by a guest contributor, Jeremiah Kipp, whose writing on movies has appeared in Slant Magazine, Filmmaker, Fangoria and other publications. Kipp interviewed Charles Taylor, an influential and compulsively readable film critic for Salon, after he was fired from the online magazine last year. He can now be read in the New York Times, the New York Observer and my home, the The Star-Ledger, where he writes a monthly pop culture column called "High and Low." A transcript of their conversation follows.
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Charles Taylor was dismissed from his duties as a Salon critic in February, 2005. At the time, Salon editor Joan Walsh chalked up the decision to simple economics: their publication had just 22 editorial employees and could not justify employing three film critics. This was disappointing news for regular Salon subscribers and a harbinger of declining standards. Although Taylor’s colleagues Stephanie Zacharek and Andrew O'Hehir continue to offer insightful cultural analysis and film criticism, a casual perusal of Salon post-Taylor reveals feature articles that are elaborately disguised press releases pandering to the studios. Gossip, box office reports and hype don’t address whether a film has merit as art or entertainment. The latter was Taylor’s specialty; he called it like he saw it, often employing the sorts of provocative turns of phrase that spark arguments in parking lots.
He trounced Clint Eastwood’s Academy award-winning "Million Dollar Baby": “A compendium of every cliché from every bad boxing melodrama ever made, [it] tries to transcend its cornball overfamiliarity with the qualities that have long characterized Eastwood’s direction—it’s solemn, inflated and dull.” And he stood up for Brian De Palma’s "Mission to Mars" when other critics were lumping it in with sludge like "Red Planet." “ 'Mission to Mars' is not what people expect from a mainstream science-fiction extravaganza,” Taylor wrote. “It’s intimate and tender and hushed, done in long, quiet takes that not only allow the actors to establish a rapport but also allow us to feel as if we’re floating in space with them.” Such vivid commentary affords readers a pathway into movies. He’s gotten to the heart of Robert Altman’s films as eloquently as anyone, and his review of "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" is example of how to write about a work that “permeates you” without falling into adjective-strewn hero worship. “Emerging from [the film], I always feel like the town drunk who attempts a jig on the ice in one scene: drugged, unsure of my footing, as if one step would send the whole enterprise crashing to the ground,” he wrote. “I try to clutch the images to me even as they seem to evaporate like smoke.” 
But as with contrarians like Pauline Kael, sometimes Taylor’s brazen wit felt like a swift kick to the solar plexus. “A critic who can’t recognize the visual rhapsody of ['Mission to Mars'] is about as trustworthy as a blind dance critic,” he wrote. When opinions are stated so forcefully, it’s bound to piss off some readers. His loathing of "The Thin Red Line" exclaimed that through “incompetence or willful perversity [it] dispenses with plot, characterization, dramatic structure and emotional payoffs in favor of the sort of painstakingly composed pictorial diddling that invariably gets critics frothing about the director’s ‘indelible’ images.” Some Terrence Malick fans have never forgiven him, though frankly I don’t think he gives a damn. Like all critics who are worth reading, Taylor does not demand agreement, only engagement.
It’s a shame not to be able to hear such a strong critic week in and week out. But an account of Taylor’s fate is more than just a story about an unlucky guy who got fired, or a readership denied his distinctive voice. It’s a chance to explore why particular decisions got made at major publications, and understand why behind-the-scenes forces (be it the editors or their corporate bosses) are inclined to resist opinions that go against consensus. -- Jeremiah Kipp
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JK: How did Salon begin and when were you brought aboard?
Charles Taylor: My first professional writing job was at the Boston Phoenix. I started there in the fall of 1985. A bunch of people from the Phoenix, Joyce Millman and Scott Rosenberg among them, went to the San Francisco Examiner. When there was a newspaper strike in San Francisco in the mid-1990s, those people and others from the Examiner were involved in putting out an online version of the newspaper and that evolved into the online magazine Salon.
At that time, my wife Stephanie Zacharek and myself were living in Boston. We each had other jobs. Even though we were writing for good places, they were small, didn't pay anything, and our writing wasn't really getting seen. We felt we were batting our heads against the wall, and were thinking about throwing in the towel as writers. That's when Joyce Millman called us and said, "I want you two to write for Salon."
Our attitude walking into this was, "The Web?" But as it turns out, online writing has more of a life than newspapers. You write something online, and three or four years later you get people who have found it and write to you about it. There is a never-ending dialogue, and you get feedback, which you don't in print, or at least you didn't when writers didn't have an e-mail address listed.
We started contributing to Salon regularly. In 1999, we moved to New York. Stephanie was put on staff and I was put on contract.
JK: Can you explain the difference between being on staff and on contract?
CT: In my case, my contract gave me a weekly or bi-monthly set fee. I was expected to do a certain amount of work for that: seven or eight pieces a month. It's like being a regular freelancer. In the spring of 2000, I was let go from the contract because that was when the dot-com bubble burst. There were a lot of layoffs. I was one of them. But Salon said, "We want to keep you on freelance, paying you piece by piece." I did that for a while. I was put on contract again about two years later, I was put on staff in April 1, 2004, and I was fired in February 2005. That's pretty much the chronology.
JK: What would you describe as the tone of Salon?
CT: Then or now?
JK: Let's say then.
CT: Apparently, there's this phrase in consulting circles: "Personality Driven Publication." The personality was David Talbot's. He was the founder and chief editor. I will always be grateful to David Talbot for starting that magazine and giving Stephanie and I a place to write. There was an enormous amount of freedom. The attitude was, "We want people to write about what they're interested in. We don't care about the prevailing whims. We want to know what turns you on, and we want you to deliver on that."
Little by little I was pushed, and not in a bad way, into writing in other areas. I started covering music, then movies. I had these wonderful editors: Dwight Garner, who is now at the New York Times Book Review, and Laura Miller. Every writer should have an editor like her once in their life, or more than once. But she would prod me to write pieces on books I didn't think I'd be interested in, and say, "Do this!" Later, I had Andrew O'Hehir and Suzy Hansen as editors, both of them just great to work for.
On one occasion, Talbot called me up. He knew the whole Bill Clinton impeachment process outraged me. On the Friday before Clinton's grand jury testimony was being broadcast, he said, "I want you to watch this and write about it as if it were a performance. Not as if Clinton is lying, but just tell us how he did." I watched it. It was on from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. I had to get the piece in by six, and I sat down at 2 and had 4,000 words by 6 p.m. From there, they asked me to start doing political stuff, which I did whenever something caught my fancy.
That's a long-winded way of saying they encouraged your interests and tried to bring out things in you that you didn't know were there.
JK: How did Salon change?
CT: It did change. They had to reconfigure themselves to a certain extent to stay afloat, and they decided that it [had to be] a news organization. While Talbot was still at the helm, there was a realization of the intimate connection between the prevailing politics of the day and the social tone of the culture. It was all part of this mix. As he started to hand over the reigns to others at Salon, a news mentality took hold. It was a mentality that deemed culture secondary.
The new Salon became very concerned with what Daniel Okrent of the New York Times once called, in an excellent phrase, "the overwhelming meaninglessness of being first." They wanted to be timely, which I can understand for a publication, but it became very reactive and there became less and less of a chance for writers to reflect on subjects. In terms of movie coverage, Salon fell into line with a certain mindset: if a movie opened, and you didn't have your piece in, it was a dead issue.
JK: How did that problem specifically relate to you?
CT: In the spring of 2004, I was told they wanted me to do less reviews and that they wanted me to write about the zeitgeist. But you cannot predict the zeitgeist. You have to see what happens and how it shakes out. A movie might open, and two weeks later connect with something in the culture, and that's the time to write about it. But they didn't want to wait. They wanted it right away. I think that was one of the ways it changed. Another change, especially in the last year, was they began squeezing criticism out, and expressing their displeasure with some of the criticism there was.
JK: Can you give an example?
CT: Yes, and this has never been stated publicly. When Stephanie was assigned to review "Fahrenheit 9/11," and they realized she was turning in a negative review, they quickly assigned a positive review to balance it. I want to be very clear about this. They got Andrew O'Hehir to do the positive review. Andrew did not write anything he did not believe in, and he would not do that. 
He has a great deal of integrity. He liked the movie and he said that. But Salon used him to get the opinion they wanted because they were unwilling to stick by a critic's negative opinion. I was told at various times that there were people I criticized in pieces who should not be criticized because they were “friends of Salon”, in one case because one person I criticized was the friend of a specific editor. That is part of the context of what happened. It wasn't like I was told, "You can’t say that." But it was being told after the fact that you had done something that displeased Salon, which is just as bad in a way because it makes you wonder when you sit down to write, "Oh, who the hell am I gonna offend now?” It puts the writer in a state of apprehension.
JK: You've had time to get philosophical about this. What are the repercussions of the editor telling the film critic, "Don’t write this?"
CT: It makes the editor a pimp for the publicist. We wouldn't have a problem with the celebrity-driven or publicity-driven culture if we had editors who were either gutsy enough to stand up to it, or if the ones who had guts to stand up to it had support from their bosses.
JK: What were the reasons given when you were fired from Salon?
CT: There are two sets of reasons: the reasons given me, and the public reasons given. The reason given me was the person who fired me was carrying out the wishes of Joan Walsh, who had succeeded David Talbot as editor about a week before. I was told she believed the cultural coverage was too "criticism centered."
JK: I read that and never truly understood what they meant.
CT: They meant there were too many reviews and not enough features or trend pieces. That's what I was told. I believe that is essentially right, if you go past the euphemisms and if you look at the type of features they are running now. They felt I was a critic and wasn't giving them the features or the pieces they wanted. So I was rather surprised to read Joan Walsh's response to Roger Ebert's querying her on why I was fired.
When I was fired, I immediately sent out an e-mail to tell people what happened because rumors inevitably spring up. I didn't want anyone wondering why I was fired. Ebert, who has been very kind to me over the years, immediately wrote a letter to Salon expressing displeasure. Salon never made a public announcement that I was fired. It became comical when Stephanie went to a company meeting in San Francisco the next week and some people were asking her, "Where's Charley?" She was the one who told them I was fired, not management.
I received many kind responses from my colleagues, and one of them was Sheila Benson, who I have never met. But she was incredibly kind. She wrote a letter to Ebert's online column asking why would Salon do this, and Ebert called up Joan Walsh. Joan's response was inventive to say the least. She said it was a question of marshalling resources because Salon had three full-time film critics.
The facts are different. Salon had three film critics when Andrew O'Hehir was the arts editor and he and I and Stephanie did the film coverage. But Andrew was made books editor in the spring of 2004 and stopped doing regular movie reviewing. He now does the "Beyond the Multiplex" column every couple of weeks. [Editor’s note: Salon’s book editor is now Hilary Frey.]
At that same time, the spring of 2004, Stephanie was told there was to be no more than three film reviews a week. I was told I was to do] no more than three film reviews per month, and that number was raised from two at the behest of David Talbot who went to bat for me. So this claim that in February 2005, Salon was operating with three full-time film critics is bullshit. Whether Joan Walsh knows that's bullshit or whether she's convinced herself that it's the truth, I cannot say. But the idea that there were three full-time film critics at Salon is absolutely false.
JK: Does this illustrate a difference between a "news mentality" and a "culture mentality"?
CT: To speak about this generally, in 90% of the cases it's a real problem when a news person is put in charge of cultural coverage. In my experience, news people think that culture is frivolous and so, if they have pieces about how great "America's Next Top Model" is, they think that's what criticism is. The coverage of that show was the only piece of cultural coverage that Joan Walsh mentioned when she wrote a letter to Salon subscribers about they could expect from her. People from a news background often think that critics are no different than journalists—and they are journalists, to a certain extent.
I’ve heard people say that if a critic has a professed dislike for someone's work, someone else should review it so the artist gets a fair hearing. Well, we already have that. It's called publicity. It's not a critic's job to go in concerned with being positive. But news people are trained in that journalist's way of thinking, "You get the facts. You report them. You provide evidence to support the position." Critics take imaginative leaps, they employ] hyperbole and that makes the reportorial mindset very nervous, and they don't get it. It all comes back to that line Truffaut said about how no one at a newspaper has less respect than the movie critic. No one is going to tell the dance critic or classical music critic how to do their jobs. True story: A friend of mine at a major metropolitan daily got called into the editor's office and asked, "How dare you pan "Men in Black II," because my daughter loved it!"
No one is going to say to a reporter who has been on the scene he or she is writing about, "Oh, you don't know what's happening there." Of course, they know what's happening; they've been on the scene. Like a reporter, the critic is the one going out day after day, seeing movies, thinking about how they fit into the culture. Editors, for the most part, sit behind their desk saying they heard buzz on this or that. 
But all that usually means is they heard publicity from somewhere, often from publicists who are calling to pitch them on getting coverage for their movies, or from other editors who've been pitched by publicists, or in magazine pieces which resulted because some editor was successfully pitched to by a publicist. They're not relying on the people who are actually out doing the footwork. That's a real problem. I'm not saying critics don't need editors or guidance, but their instincts have to be respected. They have experience and knowledge about what they're doing, and the ability to say, this is important and this isn't. They have to be able to say to their editor, "No, we don't have to cover "House of Wax" because Paris Hilton is in it," which is why an editor at Salon insisted it be covered.
JK: What is the cultural obligation of a film critic?
CT: The critic should reflect the culture as honestly as he or she can. If you're a regular critic and you've got that weekly outlet, you're essentially writing a diary of the culture, and not in the stupid think pieces sort of way. You're reflecting the tone of what's going on week in and week out. A portrait of the culture you're dealing with can't help but emerge from that. If you're honest about what your response is, you're serving your reader whether they agree with you or not.
JK: You've frequently cited Pauline Kael as a major influence.
CT: I got a paperback copy of "Deeper Into Movies" by Pauline Kael when I was in eighth grade. That was a major influence. I still think she's the best film critic that is ever going to be. She was the best influence and the biggest influence. It was about trusting your instincts, which always the line about her. This is what I loved. This is why all of the "I Was a Former Paulette" articles I've read are all, to a one, simply wrong on the facts. I had countless disagreements with her, even arguments. I was never excommunicated. Some of the critics she liked were people she didn't agree with. She wanted people to be honest. Art should be pleasure, not work. You have to bring your life experience to it, your experience of the other arts to it, you have to be well read, and no one should tell you what you have to like or what you should be interested in. The job of the critic is to help you formulate your own thoughts. Articulate them. Not to tell you what to think, but to get you to think. There was a freedom in her.
JK: Of course, the world is different now than it was during the heyday of Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris.
CT: I came in to this professionally in 1985, at the tail end of the atmosphere people like Kael and Sarris created. When I started writing for the Boston Phoenix, films were still covered at length, thoroughly, not just in capsule reviews. My first editor there was Owen Gleiberman, who remains one of the best editors I ever had. He has a really good ear for how things should sound. 
He had come of age in the film culture with the same antecedents I had. Obviously, the audience that came out of the counter-culture is not there anymore. It is a younger audience that has grown up not knowing movies can be anything but spectacle, and disposable because something is knocking off the Number One spot every week. An old movie to them is "Raiders of the Lost Ark." I'm not trying to make fun of them, but the limits to the kind of movies they know is the inevitable result of that accelerated pace. Audiences are not as adventurous in what they will go see. Foreign film distribution is as bad now as it has probably ever been, if you're living outside of New York and Los Angeles. And sometimes in those cities, great movies play for only a week or so. "Tropical Malady," by one of the most exciting new filmmakers around, plays for two weeks. In Boston, where I came from, a city that had an enormous repertory and art-house scene when I was growing up in the '70s and '80s, there is now one first-run art house in Cambridge. In terms of mainstream movies, there are movies I look at now that would have been huge hits [back in the day] and now they don't do business at all.
"Ray" is a perfect example of a film that maybe not 15 years ago, but 20 to 25 years ago, would have been a big hit, and now is almost considered specialty filmmaking. Movies like "Devil in a Blue Dress," "The Russia House," or "What's Love Got to Do With It," which is a melodramatic star bio, were not hits. You see something now like "A Very Long Engagement" and I remember when it would have been a hit because it's a big romantic mystery. In some ways, this is even more worrying than what's happening at the art houses because it represents the withering of movies as a popular art form. What we think of as art films find a way to get made, they find a way to get shown, they may be playing to a small audience, but it really worries me when we have a mainstream audience that doesn't care for mainstream cinema...That scares the hell out of me.
JK: Do you think this is because the movies are getting geared towards a younger audience?
CT: Yeah, I do. It's not to blame young people, but it’s what they've been targeted with and have grown up watching. I think the place that is grown-up is TV. It's not self-contained anymore. When I think of the television equivalent of the mainstream movies that might once have been hits I think about "Alias," "24" when its good, "Veronica Mars," or "Lost." I see good writing, performances, and good storytelling, week in and week out on those shows. If you're going to watch those over time, you can't have an abbreviated attention span. Now, people are watching them on DVD and digesting them in these huge bites.
JK: Where have you landed now?
CT: I've been doing stuff for The New York Times Book Review, some things for the New York Observer, a monthly pop culture column for the Newark Star-Ledger called "High & Low." My editor there, John Hassell, absolutely understands cultural criticism and has been great to work for.
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Please leave questions or comments for Jeremiah Kipp, Charles Taylor or MZS on the page below. Thanks to the Star-Ledger for Taylor's column photo, by Amanda Brown.
Saturday, February 18, 2006
Against consensus: an interview with Charles Taylor, by Jeremiah Kipp
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56 comments:
Mission to Mars is a maddening film. The only way it's really watchable is to ignore every piece of dialogue and squint your eyes at the climax with the alien that looks like it was left over from Antz. Other than those things, it's quite lovely to watch.
Charles Taylor is one of the most infuriating film critics in this country. He makes me want to throw things at my computer. He's the sort of critic you argue with in your head when you go to the movies. Which is to say he's a great critic.
Good piece but... Mission to Mars, man. I think I watched it on cable because of Taylor liking it. It's 2001 dumbed down with every cliche of modern filmmaking imaginable (and you thought Contact had already covered them all)-- astronauts party! Astronauts have romantic problems! Astronauts solve personal problems in space! The universe exists only to solve astronauts' personal problems! That's enough to make you miss the keen intelligence of a movie like Marooned right there.
Okay, there are some weirdly effective things. The Dr. Pepper globs floating through the leaking spaceship while Ennio Morricone plays the organ like he's Dario Argento doing Dr. Phibes is so perverse it's kinda cool. But still, really, that just means it's the modern equivalent of one of those psychedelic 60s train wrecks like Skidoo or Candy. To aim for 2001 and hit Candy, that's sad.
I was hoping for much of the movie that DePalma was slyly mocking his characters and his genre, and in places he is (if you've ever noticed the Disney logo that appears in the film about halfway through) but in the end, the horrible ending actually feels sincere.
This is a good interview with a smart, well-informed cultural critic, and I thank you for it. But I have to say, I'm one of the people who said "Good riddance!" when Taylor was dumped and his wife was kept. In my dreams, Salon would have kept Taylor on-board to write broader cultural criticism (I sympathize with his plight there, of editors demanding that he be ahead of the curve on an absurd schedule) or politics. As a writer, he's among the best out there. But boy, was I relieved when his film-reviewing pass was revoked.
You're right about Taylor being the kind of critic who want to argue with; and that's not all you want to do to him. He's the kind of critic who makes you want to feel like a worthless piece of pond scum for liking something like Heathers or Million Dollar Baby. In his reviews of films like these – and often even in reviews of other films, in which he threw in a broadside about a film he hates – he'd attack not just those responsible for the film but anyone disgusting enough to see it, enjoy it, buy it on DVD, like we're destroying the art of cinema.
And we're not talking about dumbed-down teen crap, these films Taylor hates; we're talking about critically acclaimed, Oscar-nominated, arthouse favorites that get slammed by him for even existing. I realize that middlebrow tastes can be nearly as infuriating as the mouth-breathing Friday hypefests. I know what it's like to hate tweedy, Charlie Rose–watching types. But I'm sorry, there's no way a $100 million gross for Million Dollar Baby is as bad for the culture as the same gross for Patch Adams. In Taylor's reckoning, it's worse.
I think the problem is that Salon is not being honest with Taylor, and Taylor is not being honest with himself, about why his wife (whose writing, I assume, he still respects) still has a job at Salon and he does not. Plain and simple: She manages to express smart, provocative opinions without making you feel like a retard if you disagree with her. Taylor's former editor, Owen Gleiberman at EW, does the same. Taylor never managed that art; to me, he's as hate-filled toward those who disagree with him as the New York Press's true whack-job Armond White, but at least White's tastes are truly off-the-wall enough to make him a fun read you can enjoy with a grain of salt. Taylor, to me, is a tragedy: a superb writer with a great sense of the Zeitgeist who inspires muderous hatred in the people who read him. And that's why he's not reviewing movies for Salon anymore. Period.
Obviously mine is a loaded opinion, since I think highly enough of Charles Taylor to publish this piece. But I think there is room in criticism for a certain number of elbow-throwing writers who leave bruises with almost every piece. Not everyone who attempts such a thing is as fine a writer as Charles Taylor, or Armond White or, in another time and place, Pauline Kael or John Simon (whose work is often downright offensive in certain respects, but often brilliant; he reminds me of H.L. Mencken in that way). There are a lot of pretend-firebrands out there right now, particularly in the alternative press, and even the best examples of this sort of criticism (Taylor, White, Manohla Dargis, Michael Atkinson) are bound to produce a fair number of columns where, because of the verdict on a particular movie or the righteous or cutting tone of the prose, you wonder if they're just trying to get a rise out of people, being contrarian just to stand apart from the herd, exaggerating for rhetorical effect, or out of habit, etc. But that's the nature of this sort of criticism, and when it's backed up by erudition and writing chops (as I believe it is in the case of all the writers mentioned above) you come back for more. Plus, i find that the people who write this sort of criticism never phone it in. Every word, no matter how calculatedly outrageous it may seem, is written from a sincere place.
More importantly, criticism is a public performance. A critic is not terribly different from an actor, adopting a particular persona in print in order to advance particular ideas. Some critics are polite and others are not, just as certain actors are elegant and charming and classy and others are volatile and kind of scary at times. There is a place for both types, and other types, of actors and critics. If every critic were evenhanded and sensibile and considerate of a wide range of responses, criticism would be boring, and if everyone waded in waving sharp scissors around and screaming, it would be even more boring.
One other point: years ago, in the context of a NYPress piece on Steven Spielberg, I tried to get at the idea that to reject Spielberg out of hand because of his sentimentality, his machine-tooled propulsiveness, his Stanley Kramerish desire to reach as many people as possible, or his endings (which make a lot of people roll their eyes, but which are often misunderstood) is to deprive oneself of a great treasure, a great artist and a great storyteller. Nobody satisfies every itch. Spielberg gives you things Kubrick and Bresson and Wong Kar-Wai don't, and the reverse is also true, and so on, in infinite combinations. I think a well-rounded aesthetic sensibility requires an ability to parse the work of artists and critics and take what we can use and try not to fixate too much on the parts that drive us nuts. The point I made in that other piece is that movies and moviemakers are as idiosyncratic as friends. in the sense that we do not get everything we want or need from just one friend, so we have to mix and match and combine elements in order to be satisfied. At least I hope people do that.
To me, Charles Taylor is as close to a completely satisfying critic as I've ever come across. I've gotten bruises, welts and sprains from reading his stuff and there have been times when i thought he was utterly utterly wrong (and knowing him has allowed me to tell him so). Yet I hear his voice when i sit down to write, and I've actually written a few pieces over the years that were specifically designed to refute something he said.
I love his ability to inspire the sorts of extreme reactions we're already seeing in this comments section. It is entirely possible that he's the sort of critic who is respected by almost everyone but adored by few, and that's not just OK, it's the ideal position for a critic to be in.
Plus, he's right about "Million Dollar Baby" and "Mission to Mars." He's full of shit on "The Thin Red Line," though. But that's a whole other discussion.
You said to ask questions, so here goes. To Charles Taylor, if you're reading this:
Could you explain why you didn't like "Million Dollar Baby" but liked "Ray" and "What's Love Got to Do With It?" They both strike me as middle of the road, middlebrow entertainment, and they don't go out of their way to challenge the audience. They're mainly about wringing people out emotionally.
And how is it that you disliked "The Thin Red Line" in large part because it does not adhere to commercial filmmaking techniques, but you appear to have liked "Mission to Mars" in part because it departs from Hollywood formula?
I am not being difficult. I am just interested in how critics arrive at their opinions.
I have enjoyed CT's writing. It would be pretty hard, and meaningless, to be that articulate without having an edge. They're the same thing. But, of course, as a spaceman myself, ha ha, Mission to Mars is patently ridiculous. So many parts of it strike one as a kind of self-sabotage on the part of the filmmaker. Awful, but I won't waste bandwidth on it. John Carpenter has made some of the weirdest mainstream movies ever. Memorable though. Is that the point? If so, the point stinks a bit.
Pardon me, I know it was Brian de Palma. I looked up the filmography even. Forgot to edit the comment. He's still a weirdo, though.
I think it's possible for a critic to be articulate, and to express his or her point-of-view forcefully and vigorously, without alienating readers and closing off discussion the way White and Taylor occasionally do. To me, one of the great things about film criticism is that dialogue between the critic and the reader, that occurs, for the most part, in the reader's head (though the web is obviously making that dialogue more open and animated). If I feel like I'm being told over and over again to shut up, essentially, because I don't know what I'm talking about, that takes a lot of the pleasure of reading film criticism away from me. I appreciate that Taylor and White occasionally come up with some insight into a film that other critics ignore or miss, so I'll continue to read them, but I've long since ceased to find their insulting tone or their narrowminded points-of-view entertaining.
The thing I always find amazing about a really lacerating critic is how they can come up with their vitriol after, often, only one viewing of a film. Talk about chutzpah! I could never go out on some of the limbs these guys do on a regular basis.
I also thought "Good riddance" when Salon dumped Taylor. I never liked his writing, I never concurred with his analyses, if that is what they were.
There's a major difference between Kael and Simon, on the one hand, and Taylor and Armond on the other. Kael and Simon could be scalding, and often absolutely wrong in their calls on a film. And yet, after a while, I would always go back and read them again. Why? Wit -- they were/are screamingly funny, and that would atone, to a degree, for Kael's unforgivable remarks about Cassavetes or Simon's being oblivious to the charms of Ethan Hawke movies.
With Taylor it was another story. While I don't recall many specifics of his reviews -- I just stayed away from them after a while -- all I remember is the huffy, humorless, self-righteousness emanating from his prose. He was just a drag. Armond makes for grim reading that way, too, though God knows I'm grateful for his pans of Match Point and Squid and the Whale, two overrated movies in dire need of swift kicks to their respective rumps. Most of Armond, however, is just breast-thumping anger, and he too frequently crosses a line where what he's writing isn't criticism anymore. He presses down too hard on some of these helpless, small films that aren't anywhere near as bad as he claims. It's too painful to read Armond on even a semi-regular basis. That said, it's a scary world when a critic can be punished merely for being a critic. We don't need that, any more than we need yet more safe-as-milk bozos employed as reviewers in major outlets.
As for Taylor, all I can say is that at least his writing is superior to Laura Sinagra's, who is probably the most grating, untalented pipsqueak ever to get a gig in print.
Good interview, Jeremiah. I always wondered what happened there.
Matt: The notion that nobody satisfies every itch is a great one. I do think, though, that by consistently taking the contrarian route, some critics - leaving aside Charles Taylor - forget they're just as much a fashion victim as the hipsters they criticize. Being provocative is good, but as soon as critics start proclaiming Absolutes, they're giving me the wrong kind of itch.
Marcus Tullius Cicero once said: I criticize by creation - not by finding fault. Although I realize it is expected of day-to-day criticism, a strong focus on evaluation is often a dead end when it comes to analyzing a film. Not many films satisfy every itch, for that matter, and certainly not for everyone at any time. MISSION TO MARS would be a good example. I have some reservations about it, too, but when a movie is slaughtered this severely it isn't given a chance to speak on its own.
To read some of these comments, you would think that Charles Taylor had burned down houses or run over grandmothers with golf carts. A penetrating critic is often a lacerating critic, and giving offense is part of the strategy to cut through the clutter, much of which is often trivial or genteel or worse, bland. Taylor says and writes exactly what he thinks, without watering things down or trying to cushion the sensibilities of people who can't handle it. If he were only lacerating he would be worthless, but that quality is couple with a sense of film history, and of the history of film criticism, and a genuine desire to move people to excitement or anger and cause them to obsess on things they might otherwise shrug off. It is a sad comment on the degredation of criticism and movie culture that his frankness would be characterized as abuse.
Frankly, I think film criticism has almost nothing to do with film. It's an entertaining genre in itself, with film as the pretext. In that light, an amusing writer has nothing to prove except that he/she has entertained. You don't actually believe there is some objective truth about a movie that is specially accessed only by critics, do you? Apart from 24 frames per second or projector bulb voltages, that is.
Our appreciation (or lack of same) of some movie depends on innumerable objective and subjective factors that are completely individual to the viewer, the time, the place, the circumstance.
The only thing wrong with film criticism is the presumed self-importance of the critics, together with a degree of, yes, parasitism on the efforts of others.
Tim: Ouch. Your last remark cuts very close to the bone.
Movies might exist without criticism (although arguably they might not have evolved as quickly) but it's indisputable that movie criticism would not exist without movies. So yes, there is inherently a degree of parasitism in the profession, as is the case with any form of criticism.
However, if one may put a positive spin on it -- big surprise that I'd want to do such a thing! -- you could also view criticism as an alternative form of expression inspired by and dependent upon the dominant medium of movies (or TV, or books, or pick your field). (I think this is what you're getting at in your first graph.) Pauline Kael was once glowingly described as a practitioner of "word jazz," and some of the best written, most distinctively personal criticism does in fact sync up nicely with the presumptions and practices of jazz. The movie would be the melody and the criticism would be the interpretation or reinterpretation or answer to the melody.
Am I overreaching out of oversensitivity? Probably.
But I do know that I reread particular reviews by Kael and James Agee and John Simon far more often than I watch the movies they were writing about. There are instances where a piece of criticism can be deeper and more entertaining -- more worth a person's time -- than the movie itself.
As for the insularity of the critical world, you're right, and that phenomenon does give certain critical controversies a tempest-in-a-teapot quality. The critical community is not really a community, any more than a group of cats living in the same house could be called a community. But there is an echo chamber effect, particularly in really fierce moviegoing cities, and it does tend to give critics an inflated sense of how influential their voices actuallly are, and a sense that the general public eats, drinks and breathes movies as they do. The vast majority of moviegoers don't read criticism at all, except for the blurbs at the top of newspaper ads, which are not really criticism, of course, but advertising. It's probably a good idea for critics to remember that whenever we are about to climb atop our high horse and dispense wisdom for the ages.
Matt alerted me to henryfive's question [posted above] and I've asked him to post this reply as I had some trouble when I tried to post.
The question boils down to how can I slam "Million Dollar Baby" and defend "Ray" and "What's Love Got To Do With It," with he sees equally as shallow, middlebrow entertainments that don't challenge their audience.
As I think the interview made clear, I don't dislike mainstream movies. Given the fact that most movies are mainstream movies, I think critics have to be able to see what's good in them. Too often we hear the word "formula" used to denote the worst mainstream movies can be. That doesn't seem to be quite right. One viewer's formula is another viewer's trope.
Put it this way: great Hollywood movies often operate via a formula. The audience that first saw "The Lady Eve" knew Henry Fonda was going to wind up with Barbara Stanwyck. The audience that first saw "Rio Bravo" knew John Wayne was going to win. And the reader who picks up a sonnet knows how many lines is going to be in that. It's not formula, it's how you get from A to B that's the test. In fact every innovation, every twist -- Hitchcock killing the star off 45 minutes into "Psycho" -- has no impact without knowledge of formula.
A movie with verve and life can take what are cliches and give them life. For me "Million Dollar Baby" is made with such grim solemnity -- essentially, it's made as an art film, or what's thought of as an art film -- that the cliches stick out. My friend A.O. Scott said in his review he felt as if he were watching a rediscovered film from the golden age of '30s Warner Bros. melodramas. But if Jack or Harry Warner had been presented with MDB, they'd have said, "It's too slow, too depressing, it needs to lose a half-hour, and fire the lighting guy." I'd urge anyone who hasn't to take a look at Robert Wise's film "The Set-Up," a great boxing melodrama, 75 minutes long that makes you feel you've lived with these people.
So my love for "WLGTDWI" and "Ray" aren't in spite of their formula but because they do it well -- and more. The former is anchored by two powerhouse performances by Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne. She's terrific, he's terrifying -- it's one of the only performances I know where you are made to understand the essential weakness of an abuser. Look at the scene where Ike rapes Tina (not an incident you'd expect in a formula movie) shot with a fish tank to put forth the simple visual metaphor that she's drowning.
The reviews of "Ray" that went "another biopic, ho-hum" seem to me a real failure of empathy. The lead character in "Ray" is the music. It's one of the few artist biographies I've ever seen that really understands the art and allows you to -- in this case *hear* -- its development. It is not, "And then he had a hit with 'What'd I Say'." You hear Ray progress from imitations of Nat Cole and Charles Brown to the melding of gospel with blues, and why that scandalized not just white audiences but black ones. And then, when he moves to ABC Records, you hear this omnivirous attempt to incorporate as many kinds of music as he can. It should have been obvious that the movie was saying the man's life was inseparable from the course of the music. By that I mean that someone who we would expect to remain kicked down in the American South of the '40s and '50s -- blind, poor, black -- instead asserted that he was part of America, that he deserved the success it offered. And his music said this wasn't black music or white music -- it was American music and we all had a part in it. That's how he was able to hear country as a form of the blues. "Ray" movie isn't great because it's about a great African-American artist. It's great because it gets all that and does it in a smart, entertaining, tightly directed, beautifully acted pacakge.
And while I don't think they are pond scum, I thought it was blinkered to read critics who were, week after week, writing about the slow death of liberal ideals under Bush treating a movie that was so inclusive of the very people the GOP ignores -- and the black actors Hollywood ignores -- as if it were just some glorified TV movie. And it's why I was so rough on Michael Atkinson for calling Ray Charles's '60s music "deracinated." I continue to think that's racist. Basically he's saying a black person who moves beyond what we think of as "black music" gives up the right to be thought of as black. Listen to the strings, listen to the white backing singers, does the Ray of "I Can't Stop Loving You" sound soulless and bland to anyone? What would Atkinson say of Jessye Norman? That in order to be black she'd have to put aside Verdi and sing "Nobody Knows the Trouble I Seen"?
There are great movies that will never be for wide audiences. But I think we have to believe in the possibility of great movies that everyone can enjoy. And we have to not make the mistake that, because a film is accessible or follows a recognizable dramatic structure, it's cliched, predictable, not adventurous. I'm not convinced movies *have* to challenge an audience to be good or even great. "Top Hat" doesn't challenge an audience. Nor does "Duck Soup" or "Charade" or countless others. At least not in the way "challenge them" is usually meant.
This leads me to "Mission to Mars" which he says I liked because it bucked Hollywood formula. I liked it, in part, because it bucked Hollywood excess. The f/x weren't there solely for show but served the story; the editing didn't make my head feel it was caught in an electric dryer (my biggest single complaint with mainstream movies now is that they're edited so you can't tell what's going on or who's where). Scenes were allowed to develop, I wasn't being rushed hither and thither. I know a lot of people hate this movie -- and I've taken probably more grief for liking it than any other film I praised. But to a one, the responses I got were all on the level of "Dude, this movie sucked! The story was stupid! The dialogue was dumb! The alien looked ridiculous!" (Let's ignore the folks who think science fiction has to science fact.) In other words, each one pointedly ignored the specific things I singled out, the ways in which De Palma found yet another different way to express and explore his long-stated obsessions: His theme of the chivalrous man who is unable to save the woman was given a new, startling twist here. The astronauts were another version of the techno-geek whizzes who have long been his heroes. The film pointedly asks if technology can really facilitate human contact or is it just another barrier? And that, I suggested, was a key question for any filmmaker trying to work at a time when technology rules the movies.
Now, you may think none of these things worked in the film. But the "this movie is so stupid I'm not even going to attempt to address those" response doesn't do anything to refute my arguments.
Lastly, Malick doesn't buck Hollywood formula to me -- he bucks the very notion of dramatic construction, coherence, the ability to distinguish actors from plants. I think, given his propensities, he should probably be making wholly abstract films. Not that everything has to be classically constructed. I don't know how many of you have seen Claire Denis's "The Intruder." As a narrative, it's like a tub of ice cream out of which big scoops have been taken. There's a story there, and you can piece it together, but it's of a piece emotionally and visually-- and because she puts people on the screen, they are at the center of it. I thought "The Pianist" was going to close the books on Malick. I mean, if you watched Adrien Brody's great performance in that film, how could you trust a director who cut him wholly out of a movie? There's a story in Hollywood of how much the actors in "Days of Heaven" loathed Malick when, after working so hard, they went to a screening and found all their work thrown out in favor of his frontier Kodak moments. Nick Nolte told Charlie Rose that during "TTRL" he'd be shooting a scene and look over to get Malick's reaction and "Terry would be shooting leaves." There's certainly a way to do poetic/abstract filmmaking. Look at "Tropical Malady." But, again, that movie is responsive to the people onscreen and it has a loose structure. Any filmmaker can make free when adapting a book -- but the fact is Malick took on one of the two or three greatest American WWII novels and conveyed none of its complexity or structure or characters. The guy is a remarkable photographer -- but I'm not convinced he's a director.
So, if you've read this long, thank you, thanks all for your responses, and to h5, I hope this explains something of where I'm coming from.
Best.
Charley
Thank you, Mr. Taylor, for your considered response. I appreciate it. You make me want to re-watch some of the movies you mentioned, except for "The Thin Red Line." Glad we're on the same page there.
It's always great to read Jeremiah's work. I've been a big fan since I discovered his work in Matinee Magazine.
As a Salon subscriber, I have to admit I've avoided the film section for a couple of years. The work of Charles Taylor and his wife is too similar to Pauline Kael's. Kael was an original. (I prefer Manny Farber, but that's another matter.) Taylor and Zacharek are not. If we are going to demand something fresh from filmmakers, we have to also demand the same of critics. Some of the filmmakers celebrated by Kael and her followers are overrated. Fritz Lang, Carl Dreyer, F. W. Murnau are not talked about as much and I see them as being vastly superior to some, not all, of Kael's favorites. I understand everyone has influences, but the work of Taylor and his wife is soooo predictable because they parrot her opinions. I'm sure some will say that since she is dead, how is that possible? Well, just look at who Taylor and Zacharek always celebrate: DePalma, the average Philip Kaufman, Altman, DePalma, Altman. I know how Taylor and his wife will approach these filmmakers because they're Kael's favorites. Taylor and his wife don't bring anything fresh or new to the table. O'Hehir is okay, but the section devoted to movies was never that great. Now, Matinee Magazine with Joe McGovern, Jason Clark and Jeremiah Kipp, that was excellent!
I've wanted to say this since "Grace Under Pressure" was first published. That was the single best article on the Clinton impeachment fiasco. And nothing in the intervening years has changed my mind. Thank you Mr. Taylor.
And thanks for linking to it. I had it archived on my old laptop which completely broke down and the article was inacessible.
Thanks, MZS and JK, for this piece, which has generated some of the most divided comments yet seen on this blog. As a Taylor fan I disagree with much of what's been written here. Anonymous above, I'd submit that Taylor and Zacharek write with a heavy Kael influence because everyone in the immediat post-Kael generation has to. But SZ and CT they bring their own personalities to the table, and furtherermore on his best days Taylor is to Kael as De Palma is to Hitchcock. (That's praise.)
All in all I am glad to see the practice of criticism being talked about as if it matters which I believe it does. Thanks also to Taylor for venturing to participate in the comments section, which must be like King Kong climbing up the Empire State for another round with those biplanes.
Thanks for the response, Matt. I didn't mean to cut close to the bone, just carrying on about that big fuss some editor (was it in Variety?) made dissing critics. Charles Taylor wrote an impassioned defense of his vocation in Salon, to which I responded in Letters.
By the way, I think your blog is great. I believe it was linked on Movie City News and I've actually bookmarked it. (That's praise.)
It's true, as you say, that criticism is partly, or even mostly a response to something that inspires us, or is a dominant cultural force of the moment. Nothing wrong with that. But I blame guys like Ebert for inventing the grandiose identity of the "film critic." Now you can't toss away a ticket stub without hitting a critic in the head, apparently. But I won't carry on with a dissection of the profession. Anything found there will be found plenty of other places as well.
As to Mission to Mars, one will have to give it credit for provoking discussion this many years after its disgraceful (ha) premier. I would agree that the visuals are very cool. That's not enough, though, imo. It fails for me in the numerous times it took me completely out of the movie. For example, when the meteors hit the ship, all of a sudden you had this moronic drone on the soundtrack, purporting to be music. It lacked any drama whatever, in contrast to what one would think was an inherently dramatic situation. That's what I called (as anonymous, above) a suspected instance of self-sabotage on the part of De Palma.
One would think an important criteria of a good film is the ability to absorb you in the experience. Getting thrown out of it means failure to me.
Tim: Okay, it all clicks into place now. I remember that brouhaha, and Taylor's response to it. Click here to read it.
Morricone's score in the film is quite nice, with the exception of a couple of cues, but the drone is not one of them, for me.
I think the most important calling of any critic is ultimatly honesty, and I think that any honest appraisal of Mission to Mars must include not only the spectacular quality of many of its visuals, but the total boneheadedness of the script and its totally-not-transcendent conclusion, which seems (perhaps perversely) to want to include sci-fi tropes that were cliches at the time of Kubrick's 2001.
In other words: mixed bag.
Although I'm a fan of most Spielberg (and quite a few DePalma) films, I have to agree with the other anonymous poster above that contrarianism and Kael-ism are the largest forces behind a rave for a film like "Mission To Mars."
I'd love to take these Kael-loving critics, put each of them alone in a padded screening room where a film has no credits (so the director isn't known, and neither are the opinions of their colleagues), and have them write their review then and there. Wouldn't be surprised if their opinions were quite a bit different, and some (like White) wouldn't have a career.
He should play up the cultural significance that Converse named a sneaker after him...
For a representative spectrum of "Mission to Mars reviews, click here.
wow, I have never seen your site before but what a great discussion. Congratulations!
Jeff: One of these days I'm going to do a composer's thread, with Morricone coming in for some love but also some chiding. When he's fully engaged, he's a genius, but he also recycles like nobody alive, except maybe James Horner.
you can't be serious. his wife's review of the Michael Moore film is reactionary and just plain stupid -- if I'd been the editor I would have spiked it.
Mr. Mencken: How is Zacherek's "F 9/11" review reactionary? Other than the fact that she didn't like the movie? Surely you don't mean politically reactionary, since Zacharek has made her left-leaning politics crystal clear in other pieces. Are liberals not allowed to dislike Michael Moore and wish he were not representing them? Is this a case of what Zacharek describe when she says that for the director's fans, "Michael Moore is the issues he talks about, so his detractors must be enemies of democratic principles"?
I like and defend that movie, despite having some major misgivings about it. I just don't understand why you would use that specific word to describe Zacharek's review.
Rarely has so much emotion and verbiage been expended on such a disappointing film.
I liked Taylor as a film reviewer. One of the only reasons to hit up Salon. I always wondered what happend to him. He just disappeared from there.
I totally disagree that Taylor is a good critic. IMO he's far and away the worst, smarmiest, and most (unjustifiably) condescending of the many "Paulettes" polluting the print media today.
Maybe SALON was wrong to fire him, and Joan Walsh was indubitably wrong to feed him a bunch of bullshit reasons for her decision, but the other side of the coin is that Charles Taylor had become a redundancy, given that both he and wife Stephanie Zacharek were ardent Pauline Kael-worshippers, and both could be counted on to mindlessly parrot whatever Kael thought about a particular filmmaker (e.g. Kubrick-the-misanthrope sucks, Malick sucks, DePalma is a genius, Demme was a genius till he took a wrong turn with Silence of the Lambs, Tarantino's a bit overrated but at least he's not "pretentious" and "artsy" cuz he openly loves healthy "trash," Last Tango in Paris is, like, the BEST MOVIE EVER, etc.) What publication really needs TWO ersatz Kaels writing the same copy for the same publication?
I have mixed feelings about Michael Moore, but Zacharek's pan was not insightful, merely smarmy and insufferably self-congratulatory (like everything she and hubbie write). It's a little dishonest for these two Paulettes to pretend they were lonely rebels against the crowd, when a perusal of Metacritic reveals that David Gates, Joe Morgenstern, Ella Taylor, Lawrence Toppman, David Edelstein, Michael Sragow, Stanley Kauffmann, Kirk Honeycutt, and Todd McCarthy all had mixed feelings about F 9/11, with their reservations frequently outweighing their plaudits.
A thread entitled "Criticizing the Critics" on a now-defunct web forum had the following bull's-eye exchange about Charles Taylor:
A poster called "Open Book" wrote:
"Charles Taylor from Salon is my least favorite critic, if only because he is so predictable, and so predictably wrong. He automatically hates everything that's just slightly highbrow (basically anything that ever makes Miramax's winter slate), but will find the most absurd thing to like about it. He's the type who would say that everything in Shakespeare in Love sucks, except for Ben Affleck. That's from Salon's review of the movie. Taylor didn't write it, but it sounds so much like him that I had to double-check.
"His favorite pet topic is sex in movies. Taylor automatically likes any movie that's even moderately sleazy because, as he wrote about Gigli it shows a "refreshingly frank sexuality." He especially likes it if the movie is universally reviled. Without having seen The Brown Bunny, I already know what Charles Taylor thinks about it and could write his review for him. Half if it will talk about how daring it is to show a former Oscar nominee giving a rat-faced cretin a blow job, while the other half will proclaim anyone who hates the movie a sexless old fogey who's not half as cool as he is..."
... which led to this reply from poster "Friscalating":
"Thank you, thank you, Open Book. You put all my inchoate Charles Taylor rage into a lovely cohesive post.
"Seriously, if a single capillary in that fool's dick engorges during viewing, he gives the movie a good review.* (I once did a search for all his movie reviews on salon.com. About 95% had some variant of the word "sex" in the first few paragraphs.) And he raves over HK-style movies, notwithstanding the fact that the ones coming out these days are derivative crap. Thanks to him, I wasted $12 on Bulletproof Monk.
*I take that back -- he panned "She Hate Me." Although it took him 3 pages to do so -- 3 pages of blabbing about how a comedy about sexual identity should have been made and how much Spike Lee sucks. And this was his review opener:
For a sex farce to be any good, it has to risk offending somebody. And since there are a lot of people who can't loosen up enough to laugh at the idea that what turns us on may upset our most deeply held notions of who we are, it's often not hard to offend people.
"Dude, shut up."
These two websurfers, whoever they are, totally nail what is wrong with Taylor's incessantly puerile, sex-obsessed, porn-addled, kitsch-loving, pseudo-iconoclastic, Kael-worshipping "criticism". I couldn't put it better myself.
And to Mr. Zoller Seitz, what the hell are you doing defending this dweeb? You know how to write an intelligent review. You qualify as a real critic. This clown doesn't, and is a victim of nothing but his own ridiculous self-importance and puerile tastes.
I am waiting for someone to write in and say, "Oh, yeah, Charles Taylor. He's all right, I guess."
So that's your answer?
Matt, I really do admire your writing (and that of your brilliant if infuriating colleague Armond White), but I'm bewildered at your defense of Taylor.
Don't you find it the least bit ludicrous that Taylor, who spent his entire tenure at Salon sounding the clarion call in favor of "hip," "cool" trash and penning silly rants against "culture snobs" -- blaming the likes of Harold Bloom for the decline of literacy -- now spends his time moaning about being pressured to keep up with the zeitgeist, and lamenting that "the kids these days" have no historical sense, that an old movie to them is Raiders of the Lost Ark? Or that a mainstream biopic like Ray is now considered a niche-market art film?
What the fuck did Taylor THINK would be the logical result of the Paulettes relentless championing of trash and the marginalizing of anything and everything the least bit intellectual and avant-garde as "pretentious" snobbism? Does he really not recognize Kael's role in dumbing down the multiplex?
The irony of ironies is that all of Taylor's complaints about the stifling of dissenting opinion and the strengthening of herd values sound exactly like what mavericks like John Simon and Ray Carney warned about decades ago. Only Taylor is oblivious to the contradiction in his championing of glitzy trash and "pop culture" at the expense of challenging art while simultaneously bemoaning the universal dumbing down of cultural discourse.
Read this (written by a true iconoclast, not a preening poseur), and see what the Taylors and Zachareks of the world never will grasp:
http://www.janmag.com/biography/sontagkael.html
Hey, anonymous: I wasn't trying to duck you, I was just too tired last night to give you the response your question deserved. And now that I've tried to go at it a couple of different ways, I can see that it's better suited to a whole blog entry than another marathon reply in the comments section. So do me a favor: give me a few days to work on this, check back Monday or Tuesday for my blog entry-as-reply, and we'll continue the argument from there. OK?
PS: Thanks for the link to N.P. Thompson, a great critic who is always worth reading. I disagree with a lot of what he says in this book review, though, and I'll try to address some of my objections in my response to you.
Man, I get too bogged down to post for a few days and two of my pet subjects slip by. I'll chip on Altman elsewhere, but I can't let the discussion about the nature/purpose of criticism go by without at least a brief comment (perhaps reserving longer thoughts for Matt's promised future post). Criticism is undoubtedly a parasitic art form, in the sense that if there were no movies, there would be no movie criticism. But it's still an art form, at least if it's done well. It would be patronizing (not to mention self-serving) to say that critics -- and I'lll use the word to refer to anyone who writes about movies, not just those insanely lucky enough to get paid for it -- understand movies better, know more about them, or have better taste than anyone else. But they, or at least the good ones, love and hate movies with higher-than-average intensity, waxing ecstatic about details even their colleagues might miss, and taking umbrage at things others might consider minor. (For example, I don't instinctively react to Michael Atkinson's comment about RAY with Taylor's vituperation, but it certainly gives me something to think about.) A good critic ought to see connections others might miss.
Also, as Matt points out, great critics are, first and foremost, great writers. Even though I salivated over Kael's prose as an adolescent, I still assumed on some unconscious that criticism was a matter of spending hours pondering what you might want to say about a particular movie and then putting it down on paper. It wasn't until I started doing it semi-professionally that I realized opinions would almost always come easy, and it was fitting them into a coherent, readable and hopefully entertaining form that would consume most of my working hours. In my view, it's something most people still don't realize, which is why everybody thinks they want to "watch movies for a living." It's only after you spend half an hour reworking three sentences of plot summary that you realize where the actual work comes in.
Tar and feather me as a Paulette, but I'll be the one to point out that, contrary to anonymous' black-and-white assertion, Kael was as unpredictable on foreign art movies as on (almost) everything else. What else is Last Tango, after all? And she famously championed L'avventura, just to name two. Call her inconsistent, but that's a different thread ...
Odds as to anonymous's true identity:
Christopher Nolan: 8-1
Anthony Minghella: 5-1
Gus Van Sant: 7-2
Clint Eastwood: 3-1
Lars von Trier: even
Matt, thanks for replying. I look forward to your in-depth response.
Let me try & be a bit clearer about what I find so objectionable about Taylor's approach. First off, let me be clear that I don't dislike Kael, it's her imitators who drive me nuts. (Karl Marx may have been a great thinker, but he also created a cult of personality: you can be a Marxist but you can't be a Lockean or a Deweyite in the same way. Well, same difference: you can be a Kaelite, but not a Sarrisite or Simonite or Kauffmannite: their admirers didn't try to ape their heroes the way Kaels' try to copy her.)
Secondly, Taylor has an infuriating habit of telling the truth only to abuse it. For instance he claims most Hollywood movies are formula therefore you should respect formula and not pretend every movie has to depart from conventions or be "challenging" to be worthwhile: "One viewer's formula is another viewer's trope."
Now that may be true -- it probably is true -- but so what? The vast majority of critics (and viewers, of course) ALREADY think that. Thus, Reese Witherspoon has won more awards for Walk the Line, a conventional by-the-books biopic than anything else she's ever done. And -- for a perfect example of this -- compare the response to Todd Haynes and Julianne Moore's first collaboration, Safe, with their second, Far From Heaven. FFH got almost all great reviews & won a lot of awards for Moore and Haynes, whereas Safe got very mixed reviews and took home zip during awards season. Notice that we can set aside any question of favoritism here, since the same writer-director and same lead performer created both movies. But the one that threw "formula" out the window got a muddled response shot through with a small handful of raves, whereas the one that embraced old-Technicolor-Hollywood romance conventions was beloved and showered with prizes. So Taylor's point, while true enough, is simply redundant in today's critical climate. Yet he tended to write in this abrasive style as if what he was saying was some daring transgression, when in actuality, it was in perfect lockstep with his peers.
He is also addicted to double standards. Harold Bloom's disdain for Harry Potter makes him, in Taylor's eyes, a "gasbag" and him and A.S. Byatt unbearable snobs who lack respect for "ordinary people": "Let's save literature from the literati!"
And yet, when HE, Taylor, hates a genuinely populist phenomenon like Star Wars or Titanic, he can't condemn it in harsh enough terms. There is NO DIFFERENCE WHATSOEVER between Taylor's disdainful attitude to the Star Wars and Titanic phenomenon and Harold Bloom's disdain for the Harry Potter phenomenon. You can't have it both ways. What's the difference between Bloom lamenting Stephen King winning the National Book Award for Lifetime Achievement, and Taylor lamenting the public relish for Ridley Scott's King-ish gore-fest Hannibal? There is none. Taylor simply is addicted to double standards, plain and simple. Or as someone else once said a little more eloquently than me: "And why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but the log which is in your eye you do not consider?"
The last few lines of this interview do a good job of making the case against Taylor. If Taylor honestly thinks Lost and Alias are well-written television shows, I'm not at all surprised he's not being paid for cultural criticism anymore.
Those shows have interesting aspects, but when you come down to it, the writing is mostly laughable. I can't imagine how anyone who has actually sat down and done the requisite viewing could fool themselves into thinking otherwise.
Hey, anonymous--
Do me a favor -- since you're posting somewhat regularly now, could you pick a screen name, any screen name, so I can immediately tell you apart from all the other anonymouses who post here?
Just click on the box that says "other," then type in a name. You don't have to fill in the box that says "your web page" if you don't have one, just leave it blank. Then type in the anti-spam security code and you're all set.
PS -- When I do this criticism piece, which might be a lot later than Tuesday at the rate I'm moving this week, it won't be solely devoted to defending Charles Taylor, since (a) he's a big boy and can do that himself if he feels the need, (b) he already explained himself in the interview, and (c) frankly I've kind of moved on. (See the comments section of the "5 for the day: branded" entry to know where my head is at right now.) Instead I'll probably jump off from the discussion on Taylor and get into some other issues related to criticism.
I think that Anonymous has gotten to the heart of the matter re all these uninteresting Paulettes, who have overpopulated our newspapers and magazines for too long. When he or she wrote, "[Taylor] tended to write in this abrasive style as if what he was saying was some daring transgression, when in actuality, it was in perfect lockstep with his peers," that's the most incisive description of what's wrong with the bellicose Taylor in particular and of the others in general.
To my way of thinking (and reading), the Paulettes (or Paulinistas) garnered all the wrong lessons from Kael. The best way to honor her, to honor her legacy, is to be as individual a writer as she was, but NOT in such a derivative style. To being influenced by her, yes, but to take that influence and bring something of your own to it, until whatever that something is subsumes the initial influence.
Instead, film criticism has been degraded by the spectacle of all these white men who want to be Pauline -- Yuck! And then there's the buddy system these watered down whites perpetuate, which is a whole other topic unto itself. It's just about impossible to get an editor to look at your clips, if you aren't a Paulette who has a Manhattan or Brooklyn address, even (maybe especially) as such snotty online pubs as Slate and Salon, where, I might add, the editors don't even both to spell-check their rejection letters.
anon 2 writes, "To my way of thinking (and reading), the Paulettes (or Paulinistas) garnered all the wrong lessons from Kael. The best way to honor her, to honor her legacy, is to be as individual a writer as she was, but NOT in such a derivative style. To being influenced by her, yes, but to take that influence and bring something of your own to it, until whatever that something is subsumes the initial influence."
I agree. That's true not just for criticism but for everything else. However in defense of some of the so-called "Paulettes" -- many of whom wrote about the anxiety of her influence after she died -- Kael was such an overwhelmingly powerful stylistic influence that it's damned near impossible not to slip into her prose rhythms if you have read a lot of her work. Another poster on this thread likened Taylor and Kael to De Palma and Hitchcock. I'm not sure if I'd go that far, but I agree with the general line of comparison. De Palma doesn't just ape Hitchcock, he speaks in Hitchcock's language but adds new words, new phrases, new passages and ultimately new works. (I cannot imagine Hitchcock being capable of some of De Palma's imaginative leaps, particularly CARRIE, THE FURY, CARLITO's WAY and CASUALTIES OF WAR.) The similarity is this: to critique moving images in this country means to some extent writing in the tradition of Kael or else going against it in some way. She's that powerful. Same with Hitchcock: making any kind of suspense narrative without lapsing into his rhythms is really hard, like trying to write a short story without using hte letter "i."
I'm uncomfortable, though, with the phrase "watered down whites". Why bring white people or men into this discussion? I agree they're overrepresented but there are certainly female and nonwhite critics out there who ape Kael's prose style, and who are or have been gainfully employed. Why limit the criticism to one gender or one group? I think it just confuses an otherwise valid point.
Quoth the white man.
Oh, yeah, Charles Taylor. He's all right, I guess.
except i don't think his voice is as sorely missed as compared to, say, your former colleague godfrey cheshire.
taylor's main flaw to me is that he just likes having an opinion, which doesn't necessarily translate to a deep love for movies. his writing is usually pretty strong, but that love just isn't there.
which is part of the reason why i cut back on my regular movie readings to a core group of sarris, rosenbaum, kauffman, and yourself, among the traditional media outlets.
anyway, i know it's ancient history now, but give us the inside dirt to cheshire's axing!
Well, actually, I am told that Godfrey will be spending some time at the house in the very near future. Watch this space for details. And if have any specific questions you'd like to ask him, get them to me via email and I'll forward it to Jeremiah Kipp, who will once again be doing the honors.
Oh, yeah, Charles Taylor. He's all right, I guess.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
I always liked Taylor's cultural and political pieces on Salon. His reviews were less inspiring.
coverage too "criticism-centered," to much reviewing in the review: h'mm, sounds (& results look) familiar. I found this interview via a post on the excellent rockcriticsdaily, where it was not at all out of place, alas.
I'm coming more than a year late to this party. I'll be talking to ghosts here.
I liked CT's Salon pieces--and clearly Salon jumped the shark too long ago to care. What I appreciated about the Taylor reviews was his passion and, yes, at times, bile. Having been on the other end of that bile (he slammed me and another for a piece we'd written about Clinton and Lewinsky), I can't say I enjoyed it. What I did enjoy, however, was that he took what we had written seriously. Who did that before 9/11? Who has done it afterwards?
I'd like to see him have a regular, Slate-level outlet for his talents.
I know this is an old post, but had to throw in my two cents as well - I stopped subscribing to Salon thanks to Joan Walsh. Nearly every editorial decision she ever made was a bad one, imo, and finding out she was behind the disappearance of Charles Taylor just strengthens my viewpoint.
Okay, we finally know what Charley looks like. Now, can we get a pic of Stephanie???
More in the "coming late to the party and talking to ghosts" department....
Taylor is a smart dude with lots of interesting things to say; his stuff is provocative and well-informed. I agree with just about all of what he says in this interview and do think there is (or should be) a place for his work.
But...
His work would be much, much stronger if he were able to tone down the bullying, competitive tone that so any others have noted.
I used to joke that every Taylor review had to lede with five paras about how all the OTHER critics were stupid and wrong (which I think is also true, albeit to a much lesser extent, of Zacharek). I can appreciate the appeal of participating in The Critical Conversation and all that, but isn't it possible to evaluate a film without the requisite critical-acuity dick-measuring?
And far from being open to disagreement, he's always seemed pretty thin-skinned to me, especially for a guy so pull-no-punches authoritative in style himself. I once wrote a letter to the editor parodying a music piece he'd written for Salon. My letter was, to be fair, pretty insulting -- but it insulted the WORK, not the person. I CC'd Taylor on the email, and he replied with one sentence calling me an asshole.
"I CC'd Taylor on the email, and he replied with one sentence calling me an asshole."
Well, it takes one to know one.
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