Pondering Criticism’s Place In The Post-Human Content Ecosystem

Quentin Tarantino, A.O. Scott, and my thoughts on the future of the job I did for 15 years.

We all love making fun of movie posters, but I have to think you subscribed expecting some essays. Today is proof you weren’t wrong!

Photo by Andrea De Santis on Unsplash

When the New York Times’ A.O. Scott pivoted from film criticism to book criticism after 20 years back in March, a few people asked me if I’d read his explanation for why. Of particular interest, I imagine, was the section on modern fandom:

I’m not a fan of modern fandom. This isn’t only because I’ve been swarmed on Twitter by angry devotees of Marvel and DC and (more recently) “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” It’s more that the behavior of these social media hordes represents an anti-democratic, anti-intellectual mind-set that is harmful to the cause of art and antithetical to the spirit of movies. Fan culture is rooted in conformity, obedience, group identity and mob behavior, and its rise mirrors and models the spread of intolerant, authoritarian, aggressive tendencies in our politics and our communal life.

I can’t disagree with Scott’s thoughts on modern fandom, which has undoubtedly made expressing opinions about movies much less fun. Though I might quibble over whether the spread of conformist-group identity is a condition of authoritarianism, like Scott says, or more commercialism — i.e., the result of internalizing decades of advertising, which sorts people into monolithic “types” in order to sell them stuff. (It’s much easier to sell to a “type” than it is to a multi-faceted human who contains multitudes.)

Obviously the piece made me reflect on my own job at the time, first acknowledging my growing dissatisfaction with it, and later, after I’d lost it, wondering if that was what I really wanted to continue doing. Is feeling like you’re good at something enough to keep you doing it?

It felt and still feels strange to admit my exhaustion with fighting about movies, considering I got into this business largely because I liked arguing about movies. That was something my friends and I did for fun, and to do it for a living once felt like a dream come true.

Yet, as Scott correctly observes, modern fandom, the current commercial ecosystem, whatever you want to call it — is all tied up with identity. People can have opinions and discuss them with each other, perhaps furthering their own understanding in the process. Fans can only stake claim to territory and fight to the metaphorical death defending it. Which makes disliking certain movies tantamount to telling someone that their identity is wrong. And whereas I love arguing about movies, I never wanted to be in the business of validating someone’s entire persona. That’s between you and God.

Yet what struck me about Scott’s signoff wasn’t the bit about toxic fandom, which is true, if a little remedial. I was more fixated by how much he belonged to such a rare and protected class. That he could actually get paid a full-time wage to write criticism (and I mean actual criticism, not the glorified copywriting that usually passes for it these days) makes him one of — what, fewer than ten people in the country? That he could decide to switch to book criticism and still keep his salary is a privilege maybe unique unto him.

In the piece, he talks about getting hired at the New York Times as a 29-year-old book critic with no prior experience as a film critic — another thing I can’t imagine happening to anyone else or again. And that was the takeaway that lingered: What chance would a younger version of me (or even a younger version of A.O.) have starting out today?

Fifteen years ago, there were a lot of hungry writers like me and hungry readers out there (probably like you) who wanted to read them. I don’t believe that that basic formula has changed. It’s only the structures designed to facilitate it that have.

When I started, new sites were springing up every day, and along with them loyal readers, and eventually weird sorts of communities. In 2007 I was your typical bored office drone, killing time with something that was then new: I read blogs. Old media was dreadfully dull back then, not to mention barely online in many cases. Blogs filled the void, giving us all something to read in between TPS reports and mental health breaks on the toilet (you’d actually copy and paste to a Notes app, print it out, and read the internet on actual paper back then sometimes, I swear to God). If the old J-school mantra was write it like you’re explaining it to your mother, blogs (at their best) were composed sort of how you’d talk to a friend. Gawker founder Nick Denton once described his guiding principle as “the stories journalists tell each other are more interesting than the ones they tell readers.”

When a blog I read back then announced an open position at their newly formed movie and television vertical, I pounced on it — writing my best funny takes on a few pop-culture stories and sending them in. The next week I got an email telling me that, out of thousands of submissions, they’d chosen to hire me! I was thrilled —  earning at first $8 per post, and, after a couple months, $18 per post. It was all gravy at that point anyway, since I hadn’t yet been fired for slacking off from my official job, as a copywriter for an early social media site.

During that time, I had also become a religious reader of the Fat Penguin network, which consisted of a celebrity blog, WWTDD (What Would Tyler Durden Do), a sports site, WithLeather, an NFL blog, Kissing Suzy Kolber*, and a sort of Fark-esque link aggregator called GorillaMask. One day, some legacy media or otherwise boringly mainstream publication (I can’t remember which one) had published a fawning profile of the UFC’s Ken Shamrock. It seemed like the perfect fodder for WithLeather’s “Journo Porn,” a recurring segment having fun with puff-piece writers who seemed to get so lost in their own purple prose that it felt like they were writing romance novels. I sent the tip to WithLeather’s editor, Matt Ufford, and introduced myself. Matt in turn introduced me to Ryan Perry, who ran Fat Penguin. Both apparently liked what I had been doing at my first posting gig, and eventually Ryan offered me a deal to oversee a new film vertical for Fat Penguin. An actual contract! Full-time employment! Those were heady days.

[*Suzy Kolber herself actually got laid off in the time it took me to write this, which definitely feels like a sign of something.]

Thus FilmDrunk was born. If I remember correctly, Ryan chose the name from a longer list of stupider potentials I had come up with, including “Theater of Pain.” (A title has to be both slightly clever and easy to say and spell, that latter hurdle being why this newsletter isn’t titled “Screenebriated.”)

My main skill had always been the ability to crank out Weekend Update-style commentary about nearly anything, which I suppose made me an ideal fit for the blog world, within which the guiding principles were “more” and “with personality.” Maybe guys like Nick Denton had some higher calling to make a bunch of money or destroy old media, but for people like me and Matt and Brendon at WWTDD and Drew Magary and the guys at KSK, blogs were just a convenient way to express ourselves using a new format. Every artform ever was born out of the basic desire to entertain one’s self, and that’s what we did. 

I had been accepted to the MFA program in non-fiction at Columbia (which necessitated moving to New York, where I actually befriended Matt in real life) the same week that Ryan offered me the contract. I had been completely adrift when I applied, living a constant quarter-life crisis where at one point I was so lost that I actually interviewed for a sales job. If I had gotten the kind of creative validation that FilmDrunk represented a few months earlier, I might never have finished the application. Getting accepted to a writing program was a whole other level of validation, that I was so thirsty for at the time that following through was basically a foregone conclusion (the loans I’m still paying off be damned). Maybe that helped give me the confidence to believe I could also write earnest reviews and not just funny blogs. Ryan, to his eternal discredit, actually let me talk him into it. The fool!

So that was how I became a film critic, sorta. I lived out my own late aughts version of the old Hunter S. Thompson quote about not having any success until he stopped trying to write like the New York Times (I actually can’t find the quote now, maybe I Mandela Effect’ed it as a form of self-justification). As the site we built grew, Matt and I eventually moved in together in a railroad apartment in Brooklyn, where DMing each other memes from 15 feet away was a standard form communication. He’d hear me laugh at something, DM a simple “?,” I’d pass along whatever dumb thing had made me chuckle, and vice versa. PR reps would invite us to bizarre parties, and sometimes our bosses would take us out to dinner (which usually included their impromptu TED talks about the future of the internet, which neither of us could ever parse). Strange times, but it seemed stable enough then. And it had only been the freedom to be unserious, cynical, absurd, inventive, opinionated — so many of the things you weren’t allowed to be in legacy media — that got me anywhere at all.

The paradigm had shifted, and for a while it felt like it might be permanent. That writing with a personal perspective and the ability to do it in a variety of ways (short form, long form, parody, original reporting, commentary, genre-busting fiction, weird Photoshops) was a bankable skill. 

In the early 2010s, there was a venture capital-driven wave of consolidation that diminished the number of these websites, even as most of us writers stayed (and even started getting benefits). Gradually, people learned how to game the system of web traffic underpinning it all, even as the system itself was constantly changing. By 2020 most of that venture capital had long since run out (the old game of outside suits paying themselves big bucks, saddling companies with debt, and then escaping through the back window while those companies imploded). All the traffic numbers had become so hopelessly manipulated that no one knew their actual worth. These days it’s generally accepted that video views are less tied to reality than men’s heights on a dating app. It feels like there are about eight websites, with four to six of them in danger of failing at any given moment.

I’m not sure at what point having a unique and opinionated voice started to seem like it might actually be a liability, but it was well before I got laid off. I remember a sort of come-to-Jesus meeting back in 2015 between myself and various brass at Uproxx (which had a different parent company then than they do now). They’d set up the call to chastise me for something, but they were so vague about it that I couldn’t quite tell what I was being chastised for. The general thrust was that I was… too funny? Too critical? Too funny when being critical? I began to see the paradox in which I was living: that a professional opinion-haver can still get in trouble for having opinions.

The concrete result of the call was that I was no longer able to bring on contributors like I had been (a bummer both for me and some of the brilliant, hilarious writers I had brought on). Later I heard through the grapevine that the actual reason for the call had been that some of the sales people were furious about my (mildly!) negative review of Pixar’s Inside Out. They had screamed for my head, so the story went, but the editorial side had held firm (firm enough not to fire me, anyway) and the talking-to and shadow demotion was the compromise. To this day, I don’t know if this is what actually happened behind the scenes but it certainly would’ve explained a lot of things.

At that point, could I have rage-quit and made a big stink about it and turned it into a scandal? Sure, but it would’ve been a weird hill to die on. In fact, before explaining in my review why I didn’t think the movie worked, I thought it was worth acknowledging the sheer absurdity of childless critics writing pedantic screeds about children’s entertainment. 

I intended for it to be self-deprecating. I was feeling like an absurd man-child with his lil’ notebook with which to pick apart a Pixar movie, and so I said so. I always felt like the one innovation I could bring to criticism was this, a deeper level of honesty about the process. It always bugged me when I felt like the previous generation of critics tried to disguise how a movie actually made them feel; when it made them swoon, when it bored them to tears, when they missed a bit because they had to pee, whatever. Critics of a previous generation so often seemed like they were obscuring those feelings behind dense verbiage, viewing movies from an emotional remove, which is frankly anti-art. I wanted to defy that arch barrier that separated so many critics from the art they criticized, and if that risked making me seem less “serious,” so be it.

I still believe that, though I now have to acknowledge the power of outside structures to recontextualize everything you write. My Inside Out review, which began with me acknowledging the cosmic meaninglessness of my opinion about Inside Out, got me more angry comments than maybe any other. Partly from people offended that I would dare to call it “a kids’ movie.” This was an argument that I initially got drawn into. (I’m sorry, that’s what the fuck it is. It’s a movie aimed at kids. That doesn’t make it bad, or not art, or suggest that grown people can’t enjoy it, or that art aimed at kids can’t be art.) But if I had taken a step back and not accepted the angry comments at face value, I would’ve understood what the fuss was really about. People were furious that I had “ruined” Inside Out’s 100% recommended rate on Rotten Tomatoes (which I had no idea I was even doing until after the review was already written). 

This was a review I’d pre-conceded was cosmically unimportant in the very first paragraphs, but none of those caveats mattered. In changing some arbitrary button on a website, assigning it a binary I didn’t especially even believe in, I probably ruined someone’s entire marketing campaign. I made the number change! That was all that mattered. In this I sympathize with A.O. Scott entirely. Having to constantly battle over the part of the job you’re most ambivalent about (assigning a review a binary, which no critic with more than half a brain actually enjoys), it’s easy to think “Why bother?”

Ryan Broderick raised a good point about the effect review aggregators and content bundling had on turning these healthy disagreements into unhealthy battles:

As the internet moved from search to social in the early 2010s, platforms started to bundle up content and suddenly sites like Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, and Cinemascore began turning reviews into large aggregate “scores”. And then, over time, those scores were inserted into other platforms. So nowadays, if you google a TV show, the first thing you get are a variety of different metrics.

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment scores overtook criticism as the dominant way we process culture, but I actually think the Gamergate movement was the canary in the coal mine for what would happen after they did. Gamergaters were — and still are — obsessed with reviews, but largely because of those reviews’ perceived impact on Metacritic scores, which they believed determine a game’s financial success. Which was sort of true considering critic scores follow a project around the internet literally forever.

But this same sentiment is now everywhere. Every fandom has some online leaderboard they obsess over and if their favorite artist or franchise gets a bad score on it, they react extremely violently.

It’s amazing how quickly online disagreements about even the most asinine things nowadays devolve into games of “let’s all try to get each other fired,” which feels like the exact point when an argument stops being fun. Broderick seems to have correctly identified the driver of this behavior: we tried to automate a process that cannot, should not, will not be automated.

When I eventually did get laid off, it wasn’t because of some angry “fan” snitch-tagging me to  the bosses on Twitter, as far as I know. My numbers were still good, but probably someone at Warner Music, who own Uproxx, figured they could hire someone cheaper, as periodically happens in media. Fifteen or 16 years at the same company is a good run. An insane run, honestly.  

One area in which I’m nearly positive they thought I fell short was in pull quotes. I did get pull quoted from time to time, but the enthusiasm with which management always crowed about seeing “Uproxx” in any trailer, poster, or marketing material betrayed how much they considered that an integral part of the job. I was never against getting quoted, and in my naive younger days, I figured that if I just kept writing better and better reviews, that more and more people enjoyed, I would eventually start seeing my own quotes out there too (and I did, occasionally). What I gradually came to understand was that writing to entertain readers and writing to get pull-quoted are essentially two different pursuits.  

What makes an effective pull-quote is not a distinctive writing voice. I used to be confused why studios and marketers would use the blandest, most-acknowledged shills in their ads, people like Pete Hammond. Why not use someone with authority, someone whose endorsement might actually mean something?

As it turns out, a specific human with particular tastes probably isn’t that valuable to a movie marketer. Bland interchangeability to them conveys consensus. “Everyone says this is good! Just listen to this stand-in for ‘everyone!’”

As Quentin Tarantino told La Liberation recently, he doesn’t believe there are any distinctive critics anymore.

Today, I don't know anyone. Is it my fault? Theirs? What remains are website names: CinemaBlend, Deadline. I am told: “There are still good critics.” And I always answer: who? I say this without sarcasm. I'm told, "Manohla Dargis [of the New York Times], she's excellent." But when I ask what are the three movies she loved and the three she hated in the last few years, no one can answer me. Because they don't care! OK, if The New York Times is at my disposal then I’ll open it, read it, but that's it. I used to know a critic’s style of writing, their tastes, intimately! The sad reality is that today, the voice of Manohla Dargis – and it's nothing against her – doesn't matter enough for me to read her opinion on “Notes on a Scandal” or the fourth Transformers.

Have critics lost their personalities, or have critics with personality simply lost their pull (and/or their jobs)? Both, I would argue, along with the decline of movies as a medium considered central to culture, with all three being closely intertwined. It’s harder to be opinionated about movies when being opinionated is no longer considered valuable (and I mean being specifically, personally opinionated, not opposing a depiction for supposedly righteous reasons; those are practically the only takes the mainstream allows anymore). And there are also fewer movies that people care enough to see, let alone discuss. And when that discussion turns moralistic, it loses much of its reason for being in the first place (as something fun to argue about, not important). The ebbing tide lowers all boats.

Even Armond White, famous (rightly) for his bespoke tastes, arcane vernacular, and general irascibility, now writes for the National Review, where his impossibly unique takes are heavily massaged until they begin to resemble boilerplate conservatism. As hilarious as it is to imagine your average conservative chud trying to parse Armond White, the actual reviews lose a lot of the punch and the kaleidoscopic eccentricity that had made him such a must-read. This is exactly the phenomenon Tarantino describes. Armond White has become less Armond White and a little more National Review, simply in order to survive. He’s become a little less memorable in the process. Apply that phenomenon across an entire industry and you can practically see the humanity slowly leaching out.

I always thought that the most important relationship for a publication to maintain was with its readers. Seeing your publication’s pull quote on a poster increases your value to advertisers. Maintaining relationships with “brands” means they might share your posts and drive site traffic (which in turn raises the amount of money you earn for those ads), not to mention give you access to their talent. All of that makes the salespeople happy. But without readers you have no product for them to sell. Search terms and Facebook shares drive so much traffic now that management has begun to assume that the writer-reader relationship is not only less important, but doesn’t matter; humanity regarded as an inefficiency to be stamped out. 

How else to explain this past week’s io9 flap, which started when an AI allegedly unilaterally posted, as Variety called it, “a Star Wars article full of errors”? Even that verbiage feels generous, considering the article in question was entitled “A Chronological List of Star Wars Movies & TV Shows.” That an AI couldn’t handle that task is indeed hilarious, but consider what it means when it becomes a business priority to list Star Wars movies in chronological order. “Editorial bots writing posts meant to be consumed by ad bots,” as David Roth described it.

I’m not the world’s foremost techno-optimist, but I have to believe that this push to remove all inefficiency from things that exist to be inefficient will eventually be revealed as the short-term thinking it is. Substack is my small attempt to place a short bet against the idea that the writer-reader relationship doesn’t matter anymore. 

The weird, funny, haphazard, terminally unserious internet that created and nurtured me is dead. But it seems clear that the corporatized, automated, astroturfed, private equity internet that killed it is too dull and too useless to anyone to survive in its place. Every day seems to bring a new sign that it’s breathing its last. Whatever comes next can’t come fast enough.