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Just now I watched the reconvened NFL referees give every last chance of victory to the “Cleveland Browns” expansion team, which nevertheless earnestly lost its fourth straight game of the still-young season to the Cleveland Browns of Baltimore, a/k/a the Ravens, a/k/a Murder, Inc.
Americans everywhere are breathing a resounding sigh of relief at this “Return to Normalcy,” in the immortal words of Warren Gamaliel Harding, assuaging a nationwide uneasiness that set in after the final Hail Mary play of last week’s Seahawks-Packers game in Green Bay, replays of which had very quickly supplanted the Zapruder film in our national imagination and conversation.
Ever so briefly, the NFL referees lockout returned the question of professionalism to the national forum. In large part this is because the NFL’s Rules of Engagement are something that almost every American male—and an ever-growing percentage of females—has a functioning grasp of, and can with some semblance of authority recognize a violation of.* (By contrast, the population that has a workable grasp of due process of law, Congressional points of order, and other such marginalia must constitute a small and eccentric sect, indeed.)
We have become, as a nation, so accustomed to making all of our decisions based on a criterion of low overhead—how to get the barest modicum of competence for the barest minimum of price—that a re-acquaintance with the very concept of an honest day’s work for an honest day’s wage occasioned by l’affaire NFL has been a little bracing, not least for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. A back house across the street from the building I live in collapsed a few months ago, shortly after renovations to ready it for new tenants, who were luckily away. The back house was owned by the same people who own my building, and was undoubtedly “renovated” by the same crew of day laborers who were, when I got wind of the collapse, busily gutting the apartment above me. The anxiety occasioned by the day-to-day racket of sledgehammers on load-bearing walls just overhead is pretty much, in a nutshell, the experience of living in a nation whose crumbling, creaking infrastructure is held together with spit and paste. (Subject for a disaster movie: The day, 5 or 10 or 20 years from now, when the rusted-up fire escapes inevitably start peeling off of New York City’s apartment buildings and pulping pedestrians.)
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But with the qualified NFL refs returning to the gridiron, all is right again with the world, and questions about the value of professionalism can safely be put to rest in the mind of the average American—even as it continues to preoccupy those of us who muck about in the arts. I am indebted to my colleague Nicolas Rapold for drawing my attention to the following excerpt in the press kit for Beasts of the Southern Wild, attributed to director Benh Zeitlin: “Someone’s ability to bake doughnuts or laugh loud is just as good a reason to make them a dolly grip as their ability to push a dolly.” The “bake doughnuts” bit is presumably a reference to bakery owner Dwight Henry, who gives a terrible performance in Zeitlin’s movie as the father of stoic moppet Hushpuppy. Zeitlin must have realized Henry was no great shakes as a performer, as he largely cuts around Henry’s performance. His doughnuts, for all I know, may very well be delicious.
What constitutes a professional in cinema? What constitutes a qualified ref? A popular pastime like football, movies are something that most folks fancy they have some grasp of. Though here the comparison ends, for holding is, eye-of-the-beholder value judgments aside, always holding, whereas no two spectators want or find precisely the same thing in a movie. As the old saw goes, everyone has two jobs: their own, and film critic. (Most film critics also have two: film critic and unpublished novelist.)
The path to a career as an NFL referee is fairly clear-cut: One calls games at the Pops Warner, junior varsity, and college levels; attends officiating camps and clinics; works one’s way through the arena leagues, and so on. The qualifications required in becoming a vocational critic are rather more obscure. Thankfully, no physical requirements have been instated, as they have been for NFL refs, or the column space of America’s Entertainment sections would all at once go blank. My colleague Armond White has suggested that a critic should, among other things, at the very least be over 30, like a Senator—though if criticism is currently experiencing a plague of fresh-out-of-university whippersnappers pushing their elders out of their entrenched positions, this would be literally the only occupation in America in which such a thing was happening. Mr. White’s evangelical zeal for criticism-as-calling is always stirring, though he has a particularly narrow-gate interpretation of those to whom the calling is extended and, like many evangelicals, seems to make the dispensation of salvation his exclusive property.
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Talk of the once much-discussed schism between print (“Professional”) and online (“Amateur”) criticism has died down, along with the rather absurd assumptions perpetuated by the conversation: getting one’s byline on fishwrap does not automatically bestow legitimacy; the online-only scribe is not, by definition, a sausage-fingered fanboy stacking Diet Mountain Dew cases in mom’s basement. There is, of course, the traditional role of educational pedigree to officially confer expertise, though the variance in diploma value between universally-agreed-upon critics-of-quality is so great as to make this a virtual non-issue. One could argue, then, that legitimacy is something to be bestowed by the consensus of one’s established peers, but the very shaky state of establishment film criticism—or even criticism as a practicable vocation—leads to widespread status anxiety that makes any consensus unlikely. As in most walks of life, the very great have self-confidence enough to be gracious, the medium-talents project their own rankling insecurity in accusations of canting hypocrisy, and everyone else is too busy trying to keep their own house in order to give much of a shit.
Who, then, can we authoritatively say is qualified to capture and quantify the transitory act of moviegoing? In the era of scientific review aggregators, shouldn’t some kind of Power Rankings system be in place to contrast the relative merits of, say, Kent Jones and The New York Post’s Kyle Smith? It is toward this end, dear reader, that I will earnestly endeavor in the week to come.
*- Last week, when writing about the ongoing erosion of spatial integrity, it occurred that there might very well be a correlation between the decline of enforced conscription in neighborhood boxing clubs in these United States and a tradition of maintaining a certain degree of fidelity in filming action—for if you have ever practiced maneuvers or taken a punch, you are certainly more likely to call “bullshit” when seeing that same action depicted without at least a measure of clarity on-screen.
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Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.