The Restless Mind

Roger Ebert joins the growing rank of journalists bemoaning the death of the newspaper industry, curiously linking it to the glut of celebrity culture. The internets and movies? I had to comment.

Roger, you’re mixing the death of a business model (a temporary situation) with the age-old complaint that there aren’t enough critical thinkers among us. Both are true. Together, however, they are false; there is no relationship.

The sacking of film critics or the rise of 500-word limits are just further symptoms of the death of regional monopolies and the struggle newspapers face to remain relevant (or noticed) as information and conversation shift to the grid. Now, while IT IS sad to see a fairly nuanced form factor like newspapers (and all their editorial grit) disappear, what is bothersome to you is that the new landscape has not yet sorted itself out. It’s unreliable and mixes high and low, good and bad—with abundance and without relevance.  But this isn’t a failure of content. It’s simply a lack of “post filters:” tools to sort through the abundance of commentary and thought and surface those that are good. (And by “good” I mean the material you cherish: thoughtful, articulate, intelligent.)

Behold, in the last couple of days I visited:
-The Playlist, where I read a smart and sassy review of Criterion’s new release of Bottle Rocket
-John August’s blog, to research dialogue technique
-The BFI blog, to watch shorts on British shorts
-Art of the Title Sequence, where I re-watched the opening to Panic Room
-Criterion’s new Online Cinemateque, where I was able to reflect on Steve Buscemi’s favorite films (Why Billy Liar as #1?)

At what point during the golden era of film criticism could I do this? If I didn’t live in New York or LA, how could I possibly find or encounter such thought, resources, or connections? And how could any of this be considered thin or hawkish?

None of it, of course. But that brings me to the second point: your attempt to connect celebrity culture with higher minded film critique. While it’s true that CelebCult is rampant, it’s more a manifestation of a culture bent on consumption—literally eating its Gods in this instance—than the decline of critical thought, filmic or otherwise. Establishing the link between great film thinkers and the gossip of Katie and Suri’s matching eyewear is an unnecessary parlor trick. You might as well bemoan the fact that your salary—and thus your high minded prose—has been paid for by the local restaurants and “SWF seeks same” advertising in the classifieds of the Times. One simply isn’t connected to the other.

What IS connected is the death of the newspaper format, and by proximity and reliance, the death (or at least hobbling) of film criticism as a PROFESSION. However, film criticism as an exercise, passion, or activity is thriving. Professors, critics, students, filmmakers—all of them can now participate in the act and, as a collective, create a wider, deeper, and intensely more rewarding discussion about the form than a cabal of big-city scribes.

What I find ironic about your lament is that you and Gene Siskel were the ones to harness an underused film critique medium—television—to reach a much broader audience and get them to think and care more about film history, culture, and production. (Even going so far as to brand your thumbs in an effort to condense deep thinking into a singular, iconic act.) At the time, your counterparts ridiculed you. They did not believe that 3.5 minutes of banter could capture the work of Scorsese or Coppola. But you proved them wrong, citing that in television (with soap operas and late-night infomercials as your neighbors) you could inflect, insinuate, demonstrate, and project the spirit of the work in ways that were simply not possible in print. (It worked for me. I remember flicking to PBS in 1982 and catching the last minute of your review of Jonathan Demme’s Who Am I This Time? Before that review—before the clip of Susan Sarandon and Christopher Walken in a heated argument—I had never cared for or considered “film criticism.”)

I would hope, despite your sadness for the loss of newspapers as a format and revenue stream, you recognize the even greater opportunity for film criticism to grow even further beyond previous boundaries and for new voices to emerge. I’m sure you do, and the grind of CelebCult has simply stunned you with flashbulbs and momentarily blurred your vision.

Roger’s response:
Many comments here reassure me that other channels exist, that all things must pass, that I must be reconciled. I am not. I usually don’t even describe myself as a journalist but as a newspaperman. Tell me about the internet. I love it, but as Kipling told us,  A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.

Update: Mark at Headmine picks up the discussion and makes an elegant observation:

At the speed of light, perception is truth. When we are bombarded with information from every direction simultaneously, critical thinking is pushed aside out of necessity by faster, more holistic forms of awareness. Emotion and image take center stage.

This is as true in politics and physics as it is on the red carpet or the front page of a newspaper. It’s pointless for Ebert to go to battle over shrinking word limits in newspaper columns when we are twittering our lives away 140 characters at a time. The way we communicate is changing.