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The things that wind up hopping the fence between film culture and the world at large can surprise you. Last Tuesday my father sent me a text message asking “What’s your opinion of Armond White?” Up until that fateful day my father would have been hard-pressed to name a single working film critic who didn’t share his last name. And yet somehow, less than 24 hours after a kerfuffle broke out over comments made by Mr. White and his party at the New York Film Critic’s Circle awards dinner, which took place at the swank Edison Ballroom in Midtown Manhattan, the name “Armond White” had been heard as far as Cincinnati, Ohio.
Another example: A few days earlier, while returning from the holidays in Cincinnati, I broke up the drive by stopping off in Pittsburgh to stay with some friends. Over beers and Uno, one of them asked what now-playing movies I would recommend. When I immediately said The Wolf of Wall Street, she just as quickly brought up the “Open Letter to the makers of The Wolf of Wall Street, and the Wolf Himself” by Christina McDowell, a young woman whose father, a conniving businessman himself, had been imprisoned in the 1990s because of testimony provided by Jordan Belfort. This wasn’t the first or last time that someone would mention Ms. McDowell’s piece, which ran in the LA Weekly the day after Christmas, to me; more than any mere critic might’ve managed to do, she’d well and truly gave Wolf a bad smell before many moviegoers had had a chance to sniff out the film for themselves.
As Mrs. Belfort #1 says in The Wolf of Wall Street: “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” Wolf is well on its way to making back its money after three weeks in theaters, and its 71-year-old director has been in the eye of a storm of controversy unheard of since the days of GoodFellas or The Last Temptation of Christ. Scorsese penned an open letter of his own to his 14-year-old daughter, Francesca, which ran in the Italian news magazine L’Espresso. At Flavorwire, one Michelle Dean chastened Scorsese for neglecting to mention a contemporary female director. At present, one of the seventeen tabs open on my browser is an article from Empire magazine by Helen O’Hara called “The Case For The Wolf Of Wall Street, Surprisingly Feminist Film.” (Wolf is opening today in the UK.) I wonder if I’ll actually get around to reading it, or if it will just linger there until it’s guiltily pruned? Moreover I wonder the degree to which “reading” has become a matter of scanning for adoptable attitudes.
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If we are cynical about the open letter exchange, we may interpret Scorsese’s not as heartfelt paternal advice but as an attempted antidote to counter the toxins in McDowell’s. But the septuagenarian, so canny about the American character in many respects, is not Internet-savvy. This is 2013, and one must be scrupulous, or the call-out clarion will be sounded. All the more so because, as McDowell and the LA Weekly proved, Wolf turned out to be total pageview catnip, even in the obscure corners of the Internet that I inhabit. This column’s web metrics spiked when I wrote about the film. I even got a precious taste of Twitter blowback, more or less evenly divided between analphabetic “U ghey dogg?” bros and that breed of butthurt liberal who feigns an interest in art but not-so-secretly wants to be watching doctivist amen corner stuff about Monsanto or whatever. Some of the latter saw fit to inform me that movies such as The Wolf of Wall Street were, in fact, made for a profit. (LA Weekly and other Voice Media Group publications are presumably run as non-profit charities, which begs the question as to why their websites are an advertisement gangbang.)
The Wolf has had his day, and the fugitive spirit of pageviews, never resting in any one place for long, alit. Thus onward to the first “major” film cultural event of 2014, The Trial of Armond White. There was one week between the abovementioned NYFCC dinner and the emergency meeting the following Monday that both heave-ho’d White and handed out a one-year suspension to The Post’s Lou Lumenick, and I was present at both. During this time, one saw in different outlets variations of the point that White, whatever one’s compunctions about him might be, was a necessary corrective for film criticism in the aggregation age. That the repetitive re-wording of this point—usually with some use of the phrase “vital” somewhere in the mix—was in itself a sterling example of how opinion is echo-chambered in the aggregation age was an irony that very few seemed to pick up on.
From the general tenor of the discussion, one might have assumed that White was at risk of being executed, gulaged, or at least forever banned from writing film criticism as a result of the vote. In fact he retains the same soapbox he’s had as lead film critic and—as a number of publications have identified him, though I can find no supporting masthead—editor at CityArts, a vanity publication that I have read with some regularity since White’s former home, The New York Press, ceased publication after a protracted death rattle in 2011. While certain of White’s reviews still bob to the surface of the social media rapids—his contentious write-up of Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, a dissenting opinion though by no means the only dissenting opinion, certainly made the rounds—he’s become an isolated and marginalized figure, in large part by his own design. Anyone who’s read White’s The Resistance: Ten Years of Pop Culture That Shook the World knows that he’s a formidable force when writing at the height of his powers (and with the editorial backing), while the CityArts years have been marked by an epidemic of grammatical errors that tend to undermine their author’s point. For example:
The problem isn’t political (it would be a relief to see a film take a fresh position on American foreign policy that wasn’t premised on fuzzy, idealistic pacifism passing for ‘humanism’); problem [sic] is the sheer ineptitude of Lone Survivor’s director-writer Peter Berg.
…has as little emotional impact [sic] banal television.
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I shouldn’t single out White’s ungainly prose. Post now, edit later—or never—is increasingly the rule rather than the exception; just make sure your “take” gets out there! Even while the spotlight was shining on White, it failed to draw much attention to the Lone Survivor write-up from which the above passages are excerpted, the lone review that ran during the week when his fate hung in the balance. The cultural news cycle marches on, and White’s ouster was soon replaced by the next nontroversy, the public pillorying of critics voicing objections to Lone Survivor, a dramatization of a 2005 firefight in which four outgunned Navy SEALS were pinned down by Taliban fighters in the mountains of Afghanistan’s Kunar province. The identifiable lowlight of this farce was lachrymose, effeminate pud and television personality Glenn Beck singling out LA Weekly writer Amy Nicholson’s pan of the film—a pan containing the line “These four men were heroes”—and siccing his fanbase of thwarted, depressing closeted racists on her.
I should say that I haven’t seen Lone Survivor, though I have in the past looked upon Berg’s shamelessness with a sort of awe. His literally incredible Battleship concerns an extraterrestrial sneak attack that catches the U.S. Pacific Fleet unawares during military exercises off the coast of Hawaii, where a number of grizzled veterans, some of them old enough to remember Pearl Harbor, happen to be visiting. With the fleet effectively put out of commission, the museum piece USS Missouri is the only ship standing between humanity and a full-scale alien invasion. Of course no one knows how to handle such an antique—no-one but that bunch of salty veterans, who roll up their sleeves and get ready to serve their country one… last… time. Battleship also features Col. Gregory D. Gadson, who in 2007 lost both of his legs above the knee to a roadside bomb in Baghdad, in a prominent role. Rihanna’s in there as well. Now, if Berg is willing to shamelessly exploit the feelings of esteem and even awe that a great many people feel for their men and women in uniform in order to add some juice to a movie adapted from a plastic Milton Bradley board game famous for slightly enlivening family road trips, I can only imagine what he does with a Based on a True Story piece.
Outrage upon outrage, stupidity upon stupidity! Amid such a never-ceasing din, it can seem increasingly impossible to make one’s own voice count for anything, and the effect of this can be maddening. The veteran journo feels lost in the hurly-burly, downgraded to irrelevance. To borrow a line from one of 2013’s innumerable economic horror stories, Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine: “there’s only so many traumas a person can withstand until they take to the streets and start screaming.” Or at least start heckling.
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Allen predictably didn’t emerge to receive his Cecil B. DeMille award at the 71st annual Golden Globes. The director of 43 feature films, at least a dozen of which are quite good, is something of a notorious recluse. Not so Allen’s ex-wife and onetime muse, Mia, and his estranged 26-year-old son Ronan Farrow, who used the opportunity to give renewed attention to sister Dylan Farrow’s allegations that Allen molested her when she was seven years old, voiced in a 1992 Vanity Fair article. This follows hot on the heels of Jim DeRogatis reopening his case files on R. Kelly in the VMG papers, to the tune of several bajillion pageviews. The two items are, twined together, a thinkpiece match made in heaven.
If Allen and Kelly are guilty of their crimes yet walking free, these are failures of the justice system–failures which the kangaroo court of the Internet has elected itself to correct. It’s that time of the year for sharpening our How, If At All, Can We Separate the Artist From Their Work? pitches—or, if brow-furrowed concern isn’t your preferred mode, maybe you can get some heat by going gonzo? VMG Sound of the City blog recently took time off from Catching a Predator to run a piece by the unpleasantly-named Luke Winkie called “Can You Masturbate While Listening to Arcade Fire’s Reflektor?” under the very banner where only a year ago Luke O’Neil advised aspiring music writers to “Quit Now.”
In late December, 2013, another gauntlet-flinging piece by O’Neil, “The Year We Broke the Internet,” ran in Esquire Magazine and garnered excellent traffic. In it, O’Neil makes some salient if by no means strikingly original observations about the state of journalism as we sink chin-deep in Web 2.0, though he loses me when he starts in on his familiar pity party schtick. From “Quit Now”: “I’d have quit the whole charade myself a long time ago, but I’m literally unqualified for any other job in the world, so I’m pretty much stuck, frozen, as an inevitably downsized castoff in a dead industry.” From “Broke the Internet”: “In order to make a living, those of us who had the bad sense to shackle ourselves to a career in media before that world ended have to churn out more content faster than ever to make up for the drastically reduced pay scale.”
From the looks of things, O’Neil is a 30ish Caucasian male like myself, very likely not coming from a background any further down on the economic ladder than myself. This means that he’s not really “stuck” in any vocation, and can knock off any time that he wants and start selling used cars or doing some other job that’s a lot less sexy than participating in the (admittedly broken) cultural economy. Rather than bemoaning one’s role in a polluted ecosystem while cashing paychecks earned for polluting that ecosystem, what remains if for writers to develop their bylines according to their consciences, to readers to vote with their clicks, and for everyone to wait and see who loses their shit next, to a chorus of “Tsk tsks.”
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Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to Sight & Sound magazine and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. Follow Nick on Twitter @NickPinkerton.